Weekly Recap

In today’s passage, we see Jesus using his remaining few days before the Crucifixion to teach his disciples important lessons.  In last week’s passage, he warned them against following the Pharisees who knew their theology, but did not have a life-giving relationship with God, revealing it is possible to know all the facts of the Bible and not know the God of the Bible.  In Mark 12:41-44, Jesus points to a positive example - a poor widow who gave generously out of her poverty, another reminder of the upside down nature of God’s kingdom. 

 Before getting into these verses, Pastor Chris pointed out that there are three things this passage is not about.  It is not about the evils of wealth.  The issue is not about people having money but about money having them.  There are unique challenges with having a lot of money, but it is the love of money, not money itself that is called the root of all evil.  Making an idol of money can cause people to wander from their faith, believing their money makes them self sufficient.  Conversely, this passage is not about the “goodness” of poverty.  The poor widow’s virtue is not that she is poor, but the personal cost of her gift.  She sacrificed out of the little she had.  It is also not about the requirement of giving all of one’s money to the church.  We are called to be generous with our resources toward God’s work, but Jesus is not saying that we must empty our bank accounts.

So what should we learn from this passage of Scripture?  First, we should never underestimate the power of “small”.  What seems small in the eyes of people can be big in God’s eyes.  Nothing is small when offered sacrificially to and for God.  In Luke 17:5-6,  when the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith, he told them not to overlook the faith they did have.  Even a faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains because it is not about the size of our faith but the size of the object of our faith.  The hardest tasks for us are nothing to God.

Secondly, following Jesus is a call to absolute surrender.  In verse 43, Jesus gets excited about the widow’s sacrificial giving because she is all in.  Throughout his time with the disciples, he has been hammering this theme home to them, telling them to take up their crosses, to deny themselves and follow him, and to lose their lives to find them.  This widow was a visible personification of what Jesus meant, whereas the religious leader who made a loud clang as he threw in his money to the Shofar box in the temple treasury, personifies how not to live.  The rich young ruler’s money kept him from absolute surrender to God because his stuff had become his god.  

Christians hate to talk about money and Hell, but Jesus spent more time talking about these issues than anyone else in the Bible.  For many of us, the last thing to be redeemed is our bank accounts.  We need to apply the New Testament model of Christ centered giving to our lives.  It needs to be sacrificial or costly; in other words, something we feel.  Our hearts need to be reminded that money is not our savior.  It also needs to be Gospel motivated - as a response of gratitude to God for his grace, and it should be joyful, not begrudging or under compulsion.  We don’t give to earn God’s favor but to please him - to do what he loves.

Thirdly, the widow’s sacrifice is a foreshadowing of the greatest sacrifice.  She is a type or picture of what Jesus was about to do.  While she gave all the money she had, Jesus willingly laid down his life and took the punishment for our sin on the cross.  He did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.  Though he was rich, for our sakes he became poor.  How can we not give our all to the one who did this for us?