Mark 13:1-8, from Proper 28(33).

Scaring people can be a pretty effective means of getting them to do what you want them to do. Want them to elect you? Vilify your opponent as a threat to safety and prosperity. Want them to despise a certain group of people? Cast the group as murderers, or job stealers, or bearers of disease, or spreaders of sedition or heresy. Want them to go to war for you? Tell them they are under attack, even if they aren’t.

This week’s passage gets used to scare people pretty often. Convert, the usual sermon goes, or toe the line, unless you want to risk enduring all this bad stuff Jesus is describing here.

But Jesus doesn’t come off in the Gospels as a guy who relied much on scare tactics. He could have, to be sure. Calling down a bolt of lightning to toast a Pharisee probably would have brouht a quick end to their sniping at him. But the closest he got to anything like that was probably his cursing of the fig tree.

So what do you figure was the purpose of all the scary end-of-times talk in this week’s passage?

Maybe Jesus was genuinely trying to answer his anxious disciples’ questions. He had said the temple would be destroyed. They wanted to know when, and how they could tell it was about to happen. He did his best to tell them, although he ended up leaving the “when” question unanswered. Nobody but the Father knows, he said.

Maybe Mark’s readers, for whom the temple’s destruction was recent history rather than distant prophecy, needed to hear that as chaotic as things seemed, it was part of the plan, and God was still in control.

Maybe we’re listening to the very human response of a man looking, in his divinity, at the whole arc of history, the cruelty inflicted by people on people throughout the two millennia between his time and ours, and beyond. Imagine seeing it all, there on the Mount of Olives: swords and arrows evolving into crossbows, then muskets and cannon, Minie balls and Gatling guns, trenches, mustard gas, armored tanks, concentration camps, firebombing, amphibious assaults, mushroom clouds, world war, cold war, race war, guerilla war, civil war, religious war – all of it, all in one, terrifying, appalling vision.

Maybe whether it’s one of these things or all three, the thing to listen for is verse 31: “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” I think hat’s what Jesus most wanted to convey. It can get bad, but stay faithful, watchful and hopeful, because God is on his way.

Next week: Proper 29(34)

Mark 12:38-44, from Proper 27(32).

Remember how Jesus commanded his disciples to emulate the poor widow whose contribution of two small copper coins – “mites,” in the King James Version – exceeded the handfuls of money thrown into the temple treasury by wealthier donors because, unlike them, she had given all she had?

Of course you do. Except you don’t. Because Jesus never said that, and I sincerely doubt he even meant that.

You’re welcome to disagree, of course. But be careful what you wish for. Jesus tells his disciples that the widow has put in “everything – all she has to live on.” In Greek, the word is bios meaning “life.” The widow has given her life, in its entirety. Jesus, who said this knowing he had come to Jerusalem to give his bios, his entire life, probably wasn’t exaggerating. To put it plainly, there’s a good chance that by the time Jesus was dead, so was the widow – starved and forgotten in some side street or hovel.

You might reasonably argue that, in a theological sense, Christianity requires no less of us. It requires us to die to ourselves so that Jesus can raise us to new life in him. But does Christianity also require us to surrender so much that it truly, literally kills us? Sometimes, yes, but it’s not a general directive. If it were, the faith either would have died out a long time ago or would be professed by millions and millions of hypocrites and slackers. If that’s what the faith involves, even the apostles lived much to long to be considered saints.

So what was running through Jesus’ head, then, as he watched the widow throw her life into the temple treasury and head off to die? The verses before and after perhaps offer a clue. In 38-40, he is denouncing the scribes, who, in addition to making a show of their status and piety, “devour widows’ houses” in their greed. And immediately after, in Mark 13:1-2, Jesus walks out of the temple and, when one of his disciples expresses awe at the building’s structure, snaps, “Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

I don’t know about you, but I think Jesus sounds a little angry. And maybe what he’s angry about is a temple full of people so self absorbed and self righteous that they would fail not only to help but even to notice a poor widow quietly dying before their eyes, a woman earnestly but pathetically wasting the meager last two mites of her life on propping up a system that exploited her in order to benefit them. If God is, as the Psalmist sang, “the father or orphans and protector of widows,” shouldn’t his temple be their refuge instead of their trap, and his people their rescuers instead of their robbers? Maybe he felt no stone deserved to be left upon another.

Thus the poor widow turns out to be a simultaneously mighty one, a powerful indictment of the indifference God’s people – his people then, but also his people now, including you and me – show toward the poor, the ragged, the sick, the alone, the forgotten. And while caring for them doesn’t have to kill us, just about all of us could stand to become at least a bit less comfortable in order to help them.

“But she, out of her poverty, has put in everything – all she had to live on,” Jesus said. I think the unasked question is, “And why did you let her?”

Next week: Proper 28(33)

 

Mark 12:28-34, from Proper 26(31). Also: John 11:32-44, from the All Saints Day readings

Christians have two Gospel readings this week, one about love-infused life, and a second about life-infused death.

Together, they illustrate how the Gospel challenges – and, more than challenges, refutes – the way we all-too-easily slip into thinking about both life and death.

A lot of fast-forwarding has happened between the last Gospel reading and Mark 12:28. Having healed blind Bartimaeus outside Jericho, Jesus has ridden triumphantly into Jerusalem, tossed the money-changers out of the temple, and has argued with, and made enemies of, just about every upstanding member of Jerusalem’s religious elite: the chief priests, the teachers of the law, the elders, the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees. Mark 12:28-34 signals the end of this phase of the story. A teacher of the law who is impressed with Jesus (in Matthew’s version, the teacher seems to have darker motivations) asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest one. Jesus responds by picking the top two. First, he quotes from the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength (Deut. 6:4-5).” Then he quotes from Lev. 19:18: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” These two, Jesus says, are equally important and at the top of the list.

In John 11:32-44, meanwhile, Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead, not so much as a favor to Lazarus (“You, my friend, get to die twice. You’re welcome!”) than as a declaration that he is the resurrection and the life. Not will be the resurrection and the life at some future point in time, as Martha makes him out to be, but is the resurrection and the life, here and now, which is about the only conclusion one can reach while watching him summon, right out of a tomb, a man who has been stone-cold dead for three days.

These two stories are simply impossible to square with life and death as we typically understand both. The perspective that drives our day-to-day choices 99 percent of the time – mine, at least, because perhaps a saint like you runs on a different mindset – holds that everyone dies eventually, some sooner than others, so the smart money is on grabbing as much life as one can, and for as long as one can, perhaps even if others come up short as a result. We say we are Christians, but we work, vote, deal with others, speak and act like people who think loving one’s neighbor is oneself is stupidly impractical compared to hoarding, and death is the dreaded, tragic end of everything.

But the Gospel declares both of these assertions wrong. We Christians should have no dread of death, because we should be dead already. We should be dead to ourselves, but raised by him to walk in true life – life that loves others with the abandon that comes only from having infinitely more life than one could possibly spend on oneself.

Next week: Proper 27(32)