MARK S PASSION STORY WEEK TWO Mark 12: James C. Christenson ( ), The Widow s Mite, 1988, Print on Paper, Limited edition

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1 MARK S PASSION STORY WEEK TWO Mark 12:13-44 James C. Christenson ( ), The Widow s Mite, 1988, Print on Paper, Limited edition 14

2 Day One: Challenged about Caesar s money (Mark 12:13-17) (13) And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and Herodians so that they could ambush him in his speech. (14) So they approached, saying, Teacher, we know that you are a person of integrity and that you don t care what others think of you and give no special regard to anyone, but with integrity teach the path of God. So is it permitted to give tribute money to the emperor or not? Should we pay or not? (15) Knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, Why are you testing me? Bring me a denarius so I can see it. (16) So they brought one. He says: Whose image and inscription is this? They say: The emperor s. (17) So Jesus says, Give the emperor s things to the emperor, and give God s things to God. And they were amazed by him. This week s passages take us through a series of controversy scenes in Jerusalem. Here, they the chief priests, elders, and scribes (remember them? the group who demanded to know who gave Jesus the authority to rampage around the Temple and who then were the objects of a parable predicting God s judgment on them) now send another group to try to catch Jesus in unguarded speech. The point of the question is whether Jesus will side with the peasants and others who hated paying tribute to pay for the Roman occupation force, or whether he will side with groups that would rather keep the status quo. Much evidence about the Pharisees suggests that they would have been pro-peasant and might have argued that paying a foreign occupying army somehow ran counter to God s laws. We don t know exactly who the Herodians were; the best guess is that they were minions who worked for Herod Antipas, who ruled Galilee on behalf of the Romans. Not only did they benefit from helping to collect the tribute for the Romans, but they also would have known the extent of Roman power and how much the peasants would suffer if the Romans ever decided to punish them for not paying the tribute. That, in fact, is what happened in CE. Various groups of Galileans and Judeans revolted against Roman rule and Roman taxation, and because they moved quickly and the Roman procurator at the time was incompetent, the rebels seized the Temple. Once the Romans got organized, they fell on Palestine like locusts, and in the end, tens of thousands of Jews were dead, the city had been burned and the Temple destroyed. I think Mark wrote before the war ended, but anyone could have seen how it would turn out. Mark s early readers like us, as we have learned of the destruction and horror befalling cities such as Aleppo would know that the question wasn t an idle one. Jesus exposes their hypocrisy by asking for a denarius, which had the emperor s face on it and wasn t supposed to be brought into the Temple. They have one, so they are already compromising. 15

3 Give to Caesar... give to God is open to many interpretations. Jesus may be acknowledging that we should meet our this-worldly obligations, even if we hate doing so. He may be paving the way for later Christian teachers to say Pay your taxes and pay your tithes both. But perhaps Jesus, who said you must lose your life (8:34-35) and abandon your household (10:29-30) in order to follow him, is being ironic: if you give your all to God, what is left for Caesar? Tribute coin with the head of the Emperor Tiberius Reflections Verse 13 tells us this question is an ambush, and verse 15 tells us these speakers are hypocritical. So we re not supposed to think they fully believe their description of Jesus in verse 14. But maybe there s some ironic truth for the reader. How well do you think verse 14 describes Jesus? How does it invite reflection on integrity? How much do you think integrity depends on not having excessive concern for what others think of you? How do you hear Jesus statement, Give to Caesar... give to God? Do you think Jesus is saying, You should meet your civic obligations unless there s a conflict with your loyalty to God? Do you think he s saying something like, Pay your taxes and give yourself and your substance to God both. Or do you think that Jesus is coaxing us to recognize that ultimately everything belongs to God, so the pressure is on the listener to explain whether anything is left for Caesar? How does Jesus statement invite, not just an intellectual weighing of the various meanings, but reflection on our priorities, loyalties, and obligations? 16

4 Day Two: Challenged about the Resurrection (Mark 12:18-27) (18) Then some Sadducees came to him, those who say there is no resurrection, asking him, (19) Teacher, Moses wrote for us that If a brother dies and leaves a wife but no child, his brother must marry the widow and produce descendants for his brother. (20) There were seven brothers. The first married a woman and died without leaving descendants; (21) so the second married her and died without descendants, and the third the same, until the seventh left no children. Last of all the woman also died. (23) In the resurrection, whose wife will she be? For all seven married the same woman. (24) Jesus said, You are deceived, aren t you, since you don t understand the scriptures or God s power? (25) Whenever the dead are raised, they neither marry nor give in marriage, but exist as the angels in heaven do. (26) And concerning how the dead are raised: haven t you ever read in the scriptures the part where Moses at the burning bush, how God says to him, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? (27) God is God of the living, not the dead; you are greatly deceived. The Sadducees are the next to try to trip up Jesus. They held to the older Jewish belief that there is no life beyond death, unlike the Pharisees, the Essenes, the disciples of John the Baptist, and (we think) most other Jews in the first century, who believed that the dead would someday be raised and judged or rewarded by God. For their trick question, they draw on Deuteronomy 25:5-10, which requires a surviving brother to marry his brother s widow (if he has died without an heir) and produce heirs to his brother s name and property. The Sadducees hypothetical woman marries seven brothers, producing no offspring; if she and all her husbands were to be raised, to whom would she belong? The Sadducees don t believe the terms of their own question if there is no resurrection, then a question about how the Age to Come works is meaningless. But Jesus rebukes both their misreading of scripture and their distorted view of God s power. Like most Jews of his time, Jesus does believe in the Age to Come, but doesn t see it as a continuation of this life s social arrangements. In the Age to Come, he says, since there would be no deaths and therefore no births either, there would also be no need for marriage. Whatever the afterlife is like, it will resemble angelic existence. God is God of the living might mean that Jesus considered that the righteous dead (like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) were already alive with God, not waiting for Resurrection Day. This view existed in first-century Judaism, but was more unusual than the more standard view that the dead sleep until God raises them. Ultimately, perhaps for Jesus, God is God of the living meant that past, present, and future are all the same to God, who is unbounded by time. 17

5 Reflections About a century after Mark was written, early Christians had different interpretations of what it meant for Jesus to say the after-life existence would be angel-like with no marrying or giving in marriage. Some thought Jesus saying showed that gender distinctions would be unimportant, so the idea that men had authority or ownership over women in marriage ( whose wife will she be? ) was only a temporary social condition, not an ultimate reality. How does that idea strike you? Some ancient interpreters thought gender differences would be erased in the afterlife, while others held that gender differences were fundamental to being human and so would continue in the afterlife. How do those options seem to you? Some second-century readers thought since they were destined for an angelic afterlife without sex and marriage, then it would be a high calling to give up sex and marriage in the here and now. What do you think? Overall, in what ways do you think Jesus no-marriage-in-the-age-to-come saying has implications for how we think about gender, marriage, sexuality or just being human in this life? A Roman family s funeral monument. Husband and wife are united by their ceremonial hand-holding, while a child holding a dove (perhaps to show his pure soul) appears behind them. Around 100 AD, Rome, Palazzo Massimo, from via Ostiense, Basilica of Saint Paul (1898)Photo D. Lipsett. 18

6 Day Three: The Greatest Commandment (Mark 12:28-34) One of the scribes approached, having heard them arguing and seeing that he answered them well, asked, Which commandment is the most important? (29) Jesus answered, The first is, Hear, O Israel, Our Lord God, the Lord is one, (30) and you must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind, and your whole strength. (31) The second is this: You must love your neighbor as yourself. No commandment is greater than these. (31) And the scribe said to him, Well said, Teacher! You have spoken truly by saying that God is one and that there is no other, (33) and that to love him from one s whole heart, understanding, and strength and to love one s neighbor as oneself is better than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. (34) When Jesus saw that he answered thoughtfully, he said to him, You are not far from God s kingdom. Afterwards, nobody dared question him. The Jewish scholar Geza Vermes used to ask people at cocktail parties whether they d prefer to be lost at sea with either Jesus or Rabbi Hillel (a great and transformative Jewish teacher of the first century). He collected witty responses, like Some of us believe that if one were with Jesus, one could not be lost. The scribe s question to Jesus was like that a question to give a teacher an opportunity to show his skill at scriptural reasoning. Jesus picks the confession of faith known as the Shema, after the first word-- Hear in Hebrew. Devout Jews said (and still say) the Hear, O Israel confession daily. Who could argue that the most foundational command of all is to be devoted to God with one s whole self? Then Jesus gives a bonus answer: second to devotion to God is devotion to one s neighbor. Everything else is secondary to these, he says. The scribe agrees, and states the position that Judaism came to after the Temple was destroyed. If one is devoted to God through prayer and obedience to the commandments, and if one is devoted to others through charitable acts, then one doesn t need animal sacrifices or burnt offerings. By deeming Torah study, prayer, and charity as equivalent to or even greater than ritual acts that could only be done in the Temple, Judaism learned to do without its central institution after its destruction in 70 CE. Mark s scribe who is not far from God s kingdom may be, for Mark s early readers, an invitation to treat Jewish neighbors as allies rather than enemies, since both groups could agree on what is foundational to a life devoted to God. 19

7 Reflections Do you think this scene could function as an invitation to inter-faith understanding and respect between Jews and Christians? With other faith traditions? If so, how? True religion, says the letter of James, is to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world (James 1:27). Micah says that the sum of God s requirements is to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8). How are these declarations like and unlike Jesus response to this inquiring scribe? How would you describe the core of what God requires of us? And how might that summary help you to decide what needs to increase and what needs to decrease in your life this Lent? 20

8 Day Four: Jesus offers a riddle (Mark 12:35-37) (35) Still teaching in the temple, Jesus responded, saying, How can the scribes say that the Messiah is David s son? (36) David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said, The Lord said to my lord, Sit on my right until I put your enemies under your feet. (37) David himself calls him Lord, so how can he be his son? And the large crowd heard him gladly. To end the exchange of challenges, Jesus offers a riddle of sorts. The puzzle depends on sorting out the relations between David and two beings who merit the title kurios or Lord. The Lord is God, clearly. Jesus reads my lord to mean the Messiah the one anointed to have a special place beside God and special authority over God s enemies. Several assumptions are at play here: 1. Many assumed the Messiah would be a descendant ( son ) of David, based on promises like that in 2 Samuel 7:12-13: When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. (2Sa 7:12-13 NRS) 2. David is assumed to be the author of most of the Psalms, and therefore the speaker. Some Psalms were seen to predict the future. The Lord said to my lord comes from Psalm 110:1, and Jesus is interpreting it here to mean God said to the Messiah. 3. It would be socially inappropriate for a King who was the great-great-grandwhatever of the Messiah to call that youngster lord. We don t have any evidence that ancient Jews worried about Psalm 110 that they saw any problem in thinking of the Messiah as both son of David and as superior to David. In fact, were David raised from the dead to meet his descendant the Messiah, and were the Messiah installed as king over Israel in accord with the promise, David would properly call him lord, deferring to the current monarch. But the crowds respond favorably to Jesus problem solving. Their presence in the temple is keeping Jesus at liberty since the temple leaders don t want to risk starting a riot by arresting Jesus without obvious cause. The crowds are fickle, however, and Mark does not confuse their positive response with real faith. Soon enough, they will listen to the temple leaders and call for Barabbas to be released and Jesus to be crucified. Clearly, Mark doesn t think Son of David is an adequate or sufficient way to think about the Messiah. But one final note about this passage: In Mark, Jesus never claims to be a descendant of David, and there is no family tree as there is in Matthew and Luke. Bartimaeus, the blind man whom Jesus heals in 10:46-52, twice calls Jesus son of David, but no angel or demon ever does. Perhaps Mark, alone in the New Testament, 21

9 thought that Jesus was Messiah without being a descendant of David, and this passage preserves the scriptural justification for that view. Reflections If a very early Christian only had the Gospel of Mark s account of Jesus, he or she might have concluded Mark did not think of Jesus as the Son of David. Do you? Are images of a Davidic king or descendant of David part of how you think of Jesus identity or mission? When one reads Mark s Gospel from the beginning (highly recommended, though not our approach in this study), one notices repeated questions about Jesus identity and manner of speaking and acting: "Why does this fellow speak in this way? (Mark 2:7 NRSV); "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" (4:41); "Where did this man get all this? (6:2); "Who do people say that I am?" (8:27); "But who do you say that I am?" (8:29). How does this scene add to Mark s motif of people trying to figure out who Jesus is? Describing the crowd response in verse 37, the NRSV translates: And the large crowd was listening to him with delight, The King James Version reads, And the common people heard him gladly. At this point in Mark s story, how do you react to the contrast between the elite groups (Pharisees, Herodians, Sadducees, high priests, scribes) and their subversive questions and the crowd s pleasure in Jesus skill in scriptural interpretation and debate? Have you seen signals yet in the story that delight or glad hearing isn t the same as faith or discipleship? 22

10 Day Five: Denouncing Rapacious Scribes (Mark 12:38-40) (38) And in his teaching, Jesus said, Beware those scribes 1 who like walking around in robes and greetings in the marketplace (39) and prime seats in the synagogues and the best dining spots at dinner parties, (40) who eat up the houses of widows and for show make long prayers. These will receive a greater condemnation. In contrast to the scribe who asked Jesus about the greatest commandment and who was praised by him for answering wisely, other scribes get blasted for their conduct. A Jewish scribe was an educated person, literate and well-versed in Torah, and we presume they served as advisors and secretaries to the chief priests and the elders. Wearing robes marked them out as people who did not work with their hands. Because they were close to those who held power in Jerusalem, people greeted them respectfully in the marketplace (you never know when you ll need to ask a favor of person of influence). Jesus says they get prime synagogue seats; first-century synagogues had stadium seating, so the best seats would be on the bottom row closest to the speaker. First-century dining rooms had couches arranged in a U-shape. The best dining spots were the ones closest to the host, who usually reclined on the middle couch. As in our world, so in theirs: those close to power, who can influence those who hold power, are often buttered up, feted, or even outright bribed to make things go a certain way. Jesus has no use for scribes who acted that way, who loved the fame and prestige and who used it to enrich themselves. Eat up the houses of widows is vague; if it s literal, then these scribes are perhaps appointed as guardians of estates from which they embezzle, but it may simply be a figure of speech for getting rich at the expense of the poor. Keep that phrase, eat up the houses of widows in mind as we turn to the next brief story. A religious institution putting undue pressure on a widow to give away all she had to live on... is that eating up her house? 1 NT scholar Joel Marcus argues persuasively that Mark s grammar means that the condemnation is of scribes who do the things listed, not all scribes indiscriminately; this also fits the context better, since Jesus has just praised a scribe for answering wisely. Marcus, Mark 8-16 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press),

11 Reflections How does this story invite reflection on the following quotations? Leadership is a privilege to better the lives of others. It is not an opportunity to satisfy personal greed. Mwai Kibaki (Kenyan statesman, born 1931) You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow s garments in pledge (Deuteronomy 24:17 NRSV) You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in their lawsuits (Exodus 23:6). Now as an elder myself and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be revealed, I exhort the elders among you 2 to tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it-- not for sordid gain but eagerly. 3 Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock. (1Peter 5:1-3) 24

12 Day Six: Giving her whole life (Mark 12:41-44) (41) As he sat opposite the temple treasury room, he watched how the crowd pitched brass into the collection box, and many rich folks pitched in a lot. (42) One poor widow who came pitched in two leptas (totaling one quadrans). (43) Calling his disciples, he said to them, Truly I tell you, this poor widow pitched in more than all the others put into the collection box. (44) For all of them donated from their abundance, but she from her poverty gave all she had, her whole life. The widow s contribution was two of the smallest coins in circulation, each worth 1/128 th of a denarius, which was considered the normal daily wage for a day-laborer. A mite is the common way this tiny coin is named in English Bibles. The story assumes that Jesus, as a prophet, knows who is rich and knows that this woman is giving all she has. Because Mark describes discipleship as letting go of one s whole life, this widow is another example of an unnamed character who exemplifies the values Jesus promotes and does so better than any of the named characters. Without undercutting Jesus praise of the widow s generosity, we have to wonder if Jesus is at the same time condemning a system that would encourage her to give all she had. The offerings given at the temple went for its upkeep, to pay for the twice-daily sacrifices on behalf of the nation, to feed the priests who were working there, to pay for repairs, etc. Religious institutions have bills too, and Jews around the world were expected to contribute an annual amount towards the temple s budget. But this story is sandwiched between the condemnation of some scribes who devour widow s houses and the beginning of the long sermon in Mark 13, where Jesus states that the temple will be taken apart stone by stone. It s enough, I think, to make us wonder, enough to make us examine how we raise funds and how we spend what we collect from widows. Reflections What more complex insight or challenge does Mark invite by pairing a critique of religious leaders who exploit widows by taking their property (12:40) with honor for a widow who gives sacrificially (12:44)? 25

13 Compare this story with an earlier passage in Mark, where Jesus shocks a rich young man who is seeking eternal life with an extreme demand: Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." (Mark 10:21 NRSV). In this story, the widow isn t giving to the poor; she is poor. How do you reflect on the two stories together? A well-loved nineteenth century hymn by Frances R. Havergal voices a longing to be fully devoted to God. How might these two verses from the hymn enrich reflection on the Gospel? Take my life and let it be Consecrated, Lord, to Thee. Take my moments and my days, Let them flow in endless praise.... Take my silver and my gold, Not a mite would I withhold. Take my intellect and use Every pow r as Thou shalt choose. 26