Reflection:
Wealth was given by the poor, not just to them. Within Luke’s writings themselves, the main witness is the widow who gave her last coins in the Jerusalem Temple. This widow was affirmed by Jesus as a model of devotion to God (Lk.21:1-4). The use of wealth, for Jesus, is not a private matter. Jesus says, ‘This poor widow put in more than all of them, for they all out of their surplus put into the offering, but she out of her poverty put in all that she had to live on.’ The episode contrasts the piety of the widow and the stubbornness of Israel’s leaders: Those who want to hold on to the last vestiges of national Israel (land, wealth, Jerusalem, etc.) are impious and ungodly.
At least one scholar, Joel Green, attempts a different analysis. Jesus condemned the Temple, he suggests, because it robbed widows like this of their life savings; it was a means by which the Sadducean Temple authorities ‘devoured widows’ houses.’ Green is no doubt correct about the Temple system in general. However, he tries unconvincingly to play down Jesus’ affirmation of the widow for her devotion to God. He argues that Jesus does not actually praise her; he merely sympathizes with her tragic lot as a victim of the systemic oppression of the Temple law and leadership. However, the most natural way to take Jesus’ words is as an affirmation of the widow for her sacrificial generosity. He contrasts her with people who were less generous relative to what they had. As Mark’s parallel makes even more forcefully through the repetition, ‘all she owned, all she had to live on’ (Mk.12:44), Jesus holds her up favorably to everyone else in the Temple precinct because she gave out of her poverty rather than her surplus. Her victimization, if any, is not mentioned. Moreover, it is uncertain – and unlikely – whether this Passover offering was mandatory by accumulated Israelite tradition (it certainly was not mandatory by Mosaic Law), a question that, if further research answers in the negative, would fatally undermine Green’s interpretation, since her offering would not have been required at all. The correct attitude, corresponding to Jesus’ teaching and exemplified by this widow, is to give up all one has for God.
The fact that this episode appears in Mark and Luke (but not in Matthew, where a Jewish context would be quite natural) is even more significant. Mark and Luke wanted the widow to be recalled in Gentile churches so that her portrait would inspire great generosity towards God among the rich and poor alike. All Jesus’ disciples are called to give to him all we own, all we have to live on. Apparently, Green carries an a priori commitment to a simple redistribution of wealth. In reality, the poor are more generous than the rich as a proportion of their income and total resources. Yet Green opposes any praise of a poor person actually giving wealth away because his theory could not assimilate that strange outlying data point. To me, Green’s rejection of Jesus’ praise for the widow sounds like an attempt to validate his own prior commitment, admirable though it is. Hence, as I have argued above, the words that best summarize Jesus’ teaching on material wealth are ‘disinheritance’ and ‘universal giving’ and then only secondarily ‘redistribution of wealth.’
Centuries ago, preacher John Chrysostom said, ‘The sins of the rich, such as greed and selfishness, are obvious for all to see. The sins of the poor are less conspicuous, yet equally corrosive of the soul. Some poor people are tempted to envy the rich; indeed this is a form of vicarious greed, because the poor person wanting great wealth is in spirit no different from the rich person amassing great wealth. Many poor people are gripped by fear: their hearts are caught in a chain of anxiety, worrying whether they will have food on their plates tomorrow or clothes on their backs. Some poor people are constantly formulating in their minds devious plans to cheat the rich to obtain their wealth; this is not different in spirit from the rich making plans to exploit the poor by paying low wages. The art of being poor is to trust God for everything, to demand nothing – and to be grateful for all that is given.’ (John Chrysostom, On Living Simply, meditation 7)
