November 12, 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
I Kings 17:8-16 The Wonderful Widow of Zarephath:
Her Magic Cruet and her Marvelous Measure of Meal
Psalm 146 Lauda, anima mea
Hebrews 9:24-28 Christ will appear a second time
Mark 12:38-44 Beware avaricious clergy; emulate the poor widow.
Bishop Chandler Sterling, sometime apostle to Montana, told me once that when he did a parish visitation he always checked to find the most recently published book in the priest's library, to find out what year the rector died. Many things have been found out about everything since my own days in seminary. One of them is that archaeologists in Rome have learned about the Christian community centers that existed there in the first two centuries of the church's life, before the church moved into basilicas. The Romantic idea that the church met in underground catacombs is largely fiction; Christians began to meet and continued to do so for several hundred years, in the homes of wealthy widows. They may have been the widows of Christian martyrs, or of men fallen out of favor with the tyrranical government of Empire. Central America is full of such widows, though most of them are poor. Some are rich: Corazon Aquino, in the Phillipines,was one of those widows of imperial murder, and the people made her President. Nicaraguans did the same for Violeta Chamorro, after the dictator Somoza murdered her newspaper editor husband Pedro Joaquin
As Christian missionaries like Peter or even Paul arrived in Rome on visits, they would stay in the homes of these widows. Tese houses became meeting places for Christian worship, and eventually were expanded and had become impressive places, though from the outside no one would know that they were illegal "safe houses" for the Christian revolution. A woman Episcopal priest owned such a grand house in Guatemala City when I lived there, in 1989 and it was a secret underground school called the Oscar Romero Institute. In the apostles'time they were called "tituli" and were usually named for women saints, such as Mary and Cecilia. Women owned them, women named them. Eventually they became the "cardinal" (that is, the "hinge") churches of the city of Rome, and the deacons appointed to serve in them were called the cardinal deacons. And so on--there's a lot more to the story, some of it lamentable, which you already know. Eventually, even a Rat Zinger could be a cardinal, though off the hinges.
It illustrates how important widows were in the young church. The Acts of the Apostles tells us they were the reason that the order of deacons was invented in the first place--someone was needed to look after the poor widows. They weren't all rich with big houses. Every revolutionary movement has widows, the widows of the disppeared, husbands murdered by the counter-revolutions paid for by your tax dollars, or the secret sales of armaments, in almost every country south of the U.S. Widows are one of the classes of people created by the class struggle, by the oppression of social change. Here in Nicaragua the widows and other women are one of the vanguard groups of social change. The murder of husbands, sons, and brothers politicized them.
In the time of Elijah there were widows. Jesus chose to preach about one such in his very first sermon at Nazareth, when he offended his neighbors by saying that "There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there came a great famine in the land and Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow." This would be as if a rabbi in Jerusalem today stood up in Ariel Sharon's hearing and said that God had visited a widow in Hebron, whose husband had been murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces, rather than visit any of the needy widows of Israeli troops. You may remember that the synagogue tried to throw Jesus off a cliff on that occasion.
Our first reading was the text that Jesus was referring to --and it was in the context of a struggle, a religious war, that the visit was made to Zarephath. It's a town on the coast, the Philistine coast--that's the origin of the word Palestine. The people on the coast were worshippers of the god Baal--prosperity religion, just like our affluent suburbs, and upwardly mobile Black preachers in the ghetto. Fertility gods were worshipped by such people; a goddess named Astarte was one of them. They promised prosperity to their followers, and rain for their crops whenever they needed it. But Elijah says Oh No That Won't Do. He asked the true God of heaven to demonstrate that heaven could not be thus manipulated by the worshippers of good luck. So God shut up the heavens for three and a half years, and here was no rain at all, and no rosperity and no food. And Elijah himself got hungry, and God said Go. Go over to the widow of the Philistine, that Palestinian widow, the Muslim. She'll feed you. He goes, and not to rip her off of her last meal, as it seems to her at first, but to help her survive by helping him survive. The Revolution is to be built by the contribution of yet another widow. The gifts of little people, peasants, workers, unemployed, outcast--she not even a believer--are to be used by the true God to preserve the prophetic voice in Israel. So her last little tortilla is shared, her little flask of oil keeps filling itself up and never runs out, and there is enough food. "And she, and he, and her household ate for many days."
God uses such "outsiders" to preserve the Word of God when it is lost even in the midst of God's own people. (Look at Malcolm X!) Just as God used the widows of Central America to preserve in the Western hemisphere the dedication to liberation that has been lost in the United States. Thanks to the U.S., there are hungry widows now in Palestine and Iraq, in Belgrade and Bogota. The U.S. insists it has a humanitarian mission in Colombia.
(Meanwhile, 37 human rights and other non- governmental organizations there have stated that they will not accept any funds from "Plan Colombia," the program that our massive aid package-- $1.3 billion, with $860 million for Colombia, is lavishing on the creation of more widows there.)
Jesus looked at a widow in the Temple one day, and pointed her out to his students. They were sitting in that part of the Temple called "The Court of the Women"--probably because Jesus HAD women disciples with him, and the presence of women meant they couldn't go on into the Court of Israel. So they were sitting where they could see the thirteen trumpet shaped boxes that received the gifts of the laity. And he saw that there were wealthy people, who gave generously, dropped in large sums. Nowadays, they either print the amounts in the annual report or let word get around surreptiously. Jesus doesn't denounce their gifts or their giving. He notices, indeed they all notice that "many rich people put in large sums." There's a natural tendency to want to see how much money the rich people put into the offering plate in church, isn't there? We provide envelopes, for secrecy, but let them write their names on them so they get the credit. And then, along comes a woman with two copper coins, and Mark tells us they were leptons, about a quarter inch in diameter, in circulation in Palestine, but not in Rome. So Mark tells his Roman readers they were worth a quadran, so they'd understand the value. Two little pennies worth a cordoba, maybe. A dime? Not much. But she had two of them; she could have kept one, and fulfilled more than her obligation, which was fifty per cent, according to Luke's gospel. The idea of tithing is not in the New Testament at all. You're getting off cheap with that. Half of our goods is what Luke asks as starters, and not for the parish, but for the poor. But here, in Mark, time and gain, it's one hundred per cent. Remember the rich young man who wanted to enter into discipleship?
The poor widow puts in everything. And Jesus puts her gift in perspective, along with the gifts of the rich. "My view is that the widow has put in more than all those who are giving to the cause, for they all give out of abundance, but she, out of poverty has put in everything she has, her whole livelihood."
The value of any gift cannot be set by its inherent cash value, but by what it represents for the giver. What ha it cost the giver, in terms of the giver's net worth. Is it a small percentage of abundance, a "drop in the bucket" as we say, or is it the bucket? What commitment has gone into it?
Thus the widow gives to Elijah. Her death was immanent, and that of her son. This was her last meal, and she decided to share it with the man of God. And so in a real way she was giving her life in the measure of meal and the cruse of oil. So was the poor widow in the Temple, who cast in all that she had. And Jesus commended her, and did not ridicule her, as improvident, as one of our fund raisers might do. Elijah demanded sharing even of the poor. And God expects shring, even of the poor. No one of us is allowed to get off the hook by saying "There are people who have more than I do who should be carrying the load." The fact is they rarely will. Some do, of course--that's where the "tituli" churches of early Rome come from.
That is how Christianity got on the move in the Empire, and there are still wealthy patrons of the Kingdom movement, of the revolutionary reign of God. Quaker and Mennonie Chocolate millionares. But God sends to get the help of the poor, most of all, whose investment in the future of God's people is a total commitment. It's interesting that Jesus does not praise the widow who helped Elijah; in fact, he says that it was she who got the blessing, by having Elijah sent to her. "There were many poor widows in Israel in the days of the prophet Elijah, but he did not go to any of them, but to the widow of Zarephath." She got to make an investment in the future, to share in the meals of many days; she got to pour from the miraculous cruse of oil until the famine ceased.
The epistle lsson today talks about sacrifice, and how Christ has not become the kind of priest who has to make "a multiplication of masses" to God on our behalf, but that he himself has become for us the One Scrifice; he himself, one priest, has become One sacrifice. And that the next time he comes, as he will, it will not be to deal with the matter of our failings, our sins, our imperfections, but will appear to finish our liberation, to complete the revolution for us who look for it. OUr own total commitment is what is needed now, not dribbles and drabbles. Not tithes or tips, but solidarity. Try joining the Socialist Worker's party and see if you get away with the amount you pledged to St John's by the Gas Station.
Always do the generous thing, and never stifle a generous impulse, one of the saints told me. You will never regret it. Love is always in the Red, politically and financially. When he lay in his last illness in a Paris hotel, Oscar Wilde, who I think wrote his autobiography more in his fairy tale, "The Selfish Giant," than in "De Profundis," gave us all an exit line: "I am dying as I have lived, beyond my means."
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