FINDINGS II
Proper
27 -B - November 8, 2009
Mark 12: 38-44
(I Kings
17: 8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9: 24-28)
 By Harry T. Cook
11/02/09
RUBRIC
I would be invited to teach neither in a Shiite masjid nor
in a Lubavitcher synagogue, much less in any evangelical church. My teaching, considered
heretical by many Christians, would be an outrage in those venues. The temple,
in which Jesus is depicted by Mark as "teaching" (δίδαχη), was a symbol of all
that Jesus as portrayed by Mark was in protest. The text must mean that he was
holding forth somewhere in the vast outermost court, the total circumference of
the outer wall being nearly a mile. One thinks perhaps he had attracted a few
like himself, dissenters from the temple's business as usual.
In fact, he warned those whom he was teaching to "beware" of
(βλέπετε -- keep your eye on) the scribes, the other teachers, with whom he had a lot of problems including
presumably what they were teaching, but he saved his comments for their public
behavior. To an objective observer it could have sounded like jealousy. The
scribes got the nice vestments and the best seats in the house all the while
robbing widows -- read here "powerless women." No doubt on whose side Mark's
Jesus was.
The challenge to the readers of According to Mark in any age
is to take sides with the poor, the dispossessed and those looked down upon by
the religious pooh-bahs. Has anything much changed where the latter are
concerned? The clergy get the splendid vestments and the seats up front and
most of the air time in public worship. Beware of them.
WORKSHOP
This passage is comprised of two distinct sections (in academe
they are called "pericopes") in so far as we can tell, with the common thread
being the image of the widow. First there are the scribes who allegedly "devour
widows' houses" (probably "appropriate" is the concept we would understand).
Second is the poor widow herself who puts into the temple treasury (receptacles
resembling large trumpet bells) two small coins λεπτα δυό, her rich gift out of
her poverty -- in tragic comparison with what the scribes were supposedly doing
with regard to what must have been her very humble dwelling along with those of
other widows -- women with no right of inheritance and powerless before the
world.
What of the much-maligned scribe -- the Greek word we would
see almost as "grammarian" but meaning something like "stenographer") -- he who
is consistently ridiculed as a tool throughout the gospels? By the early part
of the first century C.E., the scribe had become a combination
bureaucrat-academician in the tradition of the post-exilic elder Ezra. Scribes
tended to be laser-beam focused on Torah, the source of their power and
privilege. In Mark's eyes, the interpretation the scribes apply to Torah was
cramped and narrow. He also saw them as liturgical bloviators (12:40b).
Whether or not any of this way true generally of the scribes
rather than of some of them (the "few-rotten-apples-in-every-barrel" theory) is
hard to know at this remove. What is certain, however, is that Mark's narrative
is part of his continuing assault on the religious establishment as he knew it
just as the middle third of the first century C.E. turned into the last third.
The implication is that Jesus as Mark imagined him took the same dim view as
he. That would have put Jesus on a collision course with the establishment,
just as Mark, followed in due course by Matthew, Luke and John, would go on to
narrate.
There is a remote connection between the Mark reading and
the portion of I Kings that is appointed in this proper. The latter concerns
the widow of Zarephath who is spared starvation by a jar of meal and a cruse of
oil that seem never to run out. The visiting prophet did not devour the widow's
house, but shared it and her food with her -- perhaps an almost egalitarian act
that could be contrasted with the scribes' elitist behavior.
The Hebrews reading depicts the Christ figure as a sacrifice
himself in contrast with the sacrifice of bullocks and turtle doves going on in
the deeper recesses of the temple, in the outer precincts of which Mark's Jesus
is said to have taught those who would listen.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
Many years ago I was faced with a major life decision. I had
to decide whether or not the only kind of congregation worth my time and energy
was a large and prominent one. I would not say I was required to spend a great
deal of time researching the decision, because it soon became apparent that
those who were chosen as clergy leaders of large congregations had generally
restrained whatever avant-garde impulses they might have had so as to appear to
be of one mind with the majorities in those congregations, which invariably slouched
toward the conservative end of the spectrum. Once incumbent, those leaders
tended to stay within the bounds of the middle course to avoid offending
overmuch the factions at either end.
That amounted to what I took to be the very thing St. John
the Divine was fretting about when he wrote the words, "Because you are
lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth"
(Revelation 3:16). Not disposed by nature to be lukewarm, I had to take what
seemed to me to be the intellectually honest path. I had tried for a time to
walk about the temple porticos in rich vesture and to preach the middle way,
but in the end I could not do it.
As a consequence, I got fired from a very nice "temple" in
which for a season I enjoyed one of the best seats in the house. Even as the
embers of the 1967 riot were still smoldering, the rector of the parish in
which I was the curate entered homiletically upon the discussion of what was at
the time an issue writ large in Detroit and environs: open housing, i.e. can "the
colored" buy homes and live in theretofore all-white neighborhoods? The obvious
answer to me was, "Yes, of course." To him the answer was, "By no means!" To
the expression of that opinion he took a devious route by announcing to the
congregation that its members need not worry about open housing "here on Earth,
because there is open housing in heaven." It was my turn to give the sermon the
next Sunday, and I set out to destroy his flimsy rationale.
Not entirely without couth, I tried to sugar-coat the pill,
but the patient was not spared the dose. Thus within 30 minutes after I had
left the pulpit I was discharged with the result that my "teaching" was ever
thereafter done, perforce, in the far outer courts of the church, that is, largely
away from those whose money and power could make a difference. However, one of
those "outer-court" venues turned out to be a weekly column in the large
morning daily newspaper of my city in which for a number of years I wrote rather
passionately about ethics and public policy to a vaster "congregation" than ever
I could have imagined. And I was able to do so without walking around in long
robes devouring widows' houses.
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