NOTES for Mar 12:35-44

The greatest and final stumbling block for the Pharisees was the simplicity of Jesus' origin. How could they acknowledge Him as the Christ, that is, the Messiah? Everyone knows that the Messiah is a descendant of David and therefore of royal lineage. But the Pharisees saw before them only the son of a carpenter. Jesus pushes the question of the Messiah's human origin into the background: the main thing is not so much His belonging to the royal house as the fact that He abides at the right hand of the Father and is the Son of God, the Lord of the world. The following words are a warning against hypocritical piety, when the outward does not correspond to the inward. At the same time Christ does not condemn the outward as such (compare Matt. 23:2-3). The main danger is when the outward becomes merely show. After what Christ said about the scribes, we can appreciate the significance of the widow's mite. Was she not one of those widows whom the scribes, devoted to hypocritically long prayer, were exploiting? On the other hand, Christ had just, in answer to the scribe's question, expressed the essence of the law in the twofold commandment of love. The scribe who questioned Him agreed with Him and, to confirm his agreement, also quoted the law. And yet love for God, inseparable from love for neighbor, was shown not by the scribe but by the poor widow: if we take into account that the subsistence minimum at that time was equal to one denarius, and a quadrans was 1/64 of a denarius, it turns out that the widow had almost nothing for her own sustenance, and this nothing, her last tiny bit, she gave to the temple, offering it as a sacrifice to God. In this episode the full significance of small deeds is revealed to us, deeds measured not by outward calculations but by the degree of self-giving to God in faith and love for Him.

The Savior's words about the teachers of the Torah ("scribes"), who love honor and attention while remaining, in essence, useless idlers, are often understood in a concrete historical sense, applying them precisely and only to the people to whom they were addressed. That approach is, of course, correct: if Jesus rebuked someone, He always did it quite specifically, addressing the people around Him. On the other hand, when Jesus rebuked someone, He usually had in mind a definite spiritual problem, one that is always larger than its historical context. In this case the problem was that, alongside genuine teachers, who as always were few, in the Synagogue of that time, as indeed in every other time, there were many who merely considered themselves teachers, or even were such in people's eyes, but not in God's. The main problem here came down to the eternal dilemma of spiritual life, and of life in general: to be, or to seem?

At the same time, "to seem" does not necessarily mean open hypocrisy or cynicism. Everything here is far more subtle, so subtle that even a person initially set on seeking and finding authentic spiritual life can sometimes be deceived. One of the main problems for such a person becomes the inability to be his true self, most often arising from fear. This is not ordinary fright, when a person is scared by something new, unusual, or unacceptable in someone's eyes, but that deep fear in which a person begins to fear for the self he wants to see himself as, fearing so much that for the sake of his own image he is ready even to sacrifice his real self.

Here, of course, man's fallen nature plays an enormous role. Seeing it as it really is is, at the very least, truly unpleasant, and the picture of himself that a person draws for himself becomes both the project he hopes to realize and his justification in his own eyes. Fallen man can hide behind this attractive picture of himself even from God: at the time of the fall in the Garden of Eden, man explained to God his wish to hide from Him by his nakedness, as if hinting that he only needed to put himself in order so as to appear before God in all his beauty.

Such a position is spiritually dangerous in any situation, but especially in the situation of a spiritual teacher or mentor: here it is especially important to be, not to seem. To be, however, is very difficult and by no means always advantageous, while seeming is simpler and more convenient. And one can always justify oneself by saying that, after all, we are all human, and therefore all imperfect, while I, supposedly, am doing what I can and trying for the sake of those whom God has entrusted to my care.

A person usually carefully hides from himself the fact that, in essence, there is no real care here, the care God wants, but only a profanation that destroys the spiritual life of those whom He has entrusted to the care of such a "teacher." Jesus, on the contrary, points to the main problem and danger of such "teaching," which may even please the students, but which spiritually destroys them. After all, He came to save people, not to watch them perish.

This line taken by Jesus of the psalm seems foggy and incomprehensible. Quite as today, moment of evangelization, it arouses apparently so many questions as at that time. This can be the reason why the Lord quotes it here, wishing to end Pharisees’ disputes and provocative inquiries. For they could not have the answer to this question; except a bewildered silence.

The answer is masked as usual in God Himself, because the psalmist speaks effectively about Him. Pharisees were not able to know the duality of Jesus nature. They didn’t have to give Him only scholastic enigmas, but had to really meet Him in order to know or see the duality. It would have then be opened to them that Jesus Christ was absolutely a person, a descendant of David and the same time the genuine Master of the glorious king.

The memory that God sees us can give a person an amazing strength for life. That is exactly what matters in the episode at the temple treasury that Mark the Evangelist tells us about today. There are moments in our lives when no one appears to see us, and the things we do are done alone before God. In such moments it is important to remember that Jesus sees you. Still more important is how He looks at us.

The crowd passes by the treasury at the doors of the Temple. There is noise, the cries of sacrificial animals, the blare of trumpets... And Jesus sits and looks at people, at what they do when they think no one sees them. It is already a miracle of God's mercy that He is interested in looking at us. As the psalmist says: "What is man, that You are mindful of him?" And an even greater mercy is that He looks without any wish to rebuke or accuse, without any intent to sort the worthy from the unworthy.

And the main thing we see in this episode about the widow's mite is that He does not compare us with one another. He compares what each of us brings into the House of God with our own possibilities, not with other people.

The widow's mite is one of the strongest images in the Gospel. It is the fulfillment of the law in any circumstances. The widow who gives all her money, everything with which food could be bought, is not inwardly counting on a reward from God. Her relationship with God does not depend on her well-being or prosperity. This freedom in relation to God is part of humility. It is a relationship of freedom and of standing before God, who cares for everyone. We do not know how to notice how much God does for us and how He does it. His care and love are unnoticed. But they are always with us. The temptations we encounter are only exercises for our heart and spirit. They are exercises in humility and faithfulness to the Christian path and to the sufferings of Christ. But nothing will happen to us if our faithfulness to Christ is strengthened every day by prayer and by the heart's striving to do works pleasing to God.

At first glance it may appear that the episode with the poor widow who donated to the Temple the last thing she had has no direct relation to Jesus' words about the Pharisees, words sharp enough to make anyone stop and think. But on closer examination everything is not so simple. What does a person's readiness to give God the last thing mean? A practical acknowledgment of the fact that God is more important to that person than anything else? Yes, of course, that too. But also something else: readiness to give everything also presupposes complete trust in the One to whom you give everything. Acting this way, a person says to God, as it were: here is everything I have; I give it to You. I do not know what will happen next, and I place myself in Your hands. I trust You and am sure that You will not abandon me. A Pharisee who "devours widows' houses" could hardly address God in this way. And the point is not that this Pharisee was breaking the law. Nor even that, while being right according to the law, he could be wrong from the point of view of the mercy he could have shown but did not show. Something else is frightening here: the passion for acquisition, for that accumulation of property which, if it becomes an end in itself, clearly testifies to practical distrust of God, even if outwardly the person remains very religious, as all the Pharisees were. After all, it is not religion that opens the road into the Kingdom, but the Savior. And only trust in Him and in God can help one walk there, not religiosity in itself.

In His conversation with the scribe, Christ asks him about what he knows by the nature of his work. Answering Christ, the scribe speaks of love for God and neighbor, saying that these are more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. And Christ says to him: you are not far from the Kingdom of God. In the Apostle Peter (1 Pet 4:1-11) we find a call to serve, that is, to fulfill one's duty and responsibilities according to the strength God gives. In his work, in his studies, the scribe still saw what mattered most. He saw the essence and meaning of faith. Christ constantly calls us to seek the meaning of every step we take and every thought we have: the meaning of what, here and today, we can do for the glory of God and out of love for Him. Serving one another is the most important thing that should become the meaning of our life after love for God. There are different ways to serve. One can work in a factory or raise children. A scholar and a cleaner glorify God equally by their labor if, in that labor, they find time and place for God. The apostle calls us to serve one another with the gift each has received. The gift we have received is the possibility of meeting God at every moment of life; it is the gift of His love. By our life we can confirm His presence in this world, His love for people. And every day we must ask God to give us strength to serve one another. Through constant prayer and communion with Him we will gain the joy of His presence and of recognizing Him in every manifestation of life.

Speaking about the two commandments the Lord gave us in today's reading, one wants to pay attention to Christ's words about their likeness. At first they seem understandable: indeed, in both cases the matter is love. But let us think about this again. Love for God and love for a human being - how different these things are! We express love for God in prayer. We express love for a human being in labor. Every layperson (in the sense of someone who is not a monastic) who lives a life of prayer knows well that prayer takes time away from labor, and labor takes time away from prayer (especially if the labor is intellectual). That means these are two different principles standing in opposition to each other. Why, then, does the Lord speak of likeness? What does He put into these words?

Looked at from this side, these words cease to be a simple statement that in both cases the matter is love. In general, we must always be extremely careful when something in the word of God seems simple to us. Most often this is an apparent simplicity connected with the fact that we have not penetrated the text deeply enough. After all, the Lord had little time, and He understood this, so He could not waste it on obvious things. What, then, is the meaning here?

Perhaps what is being affirmed here is the ideal of likeness reaching the point of indistinguishability between labor and prayer. This is precisely what we must strive for: that prayer would be labor for us, hard labor, and that labor would be prayer for us. But of course this in no way means (as one often has to hear from secular, unchurched people who are accustomed to working much and intensely) that labor is prayer, a word by which they try to justify themselves before the Most High, dimly perceived by a soul that has not learned to love God.

It is precisely when we live in the tension between these two poles, labor and prayer, unconfused yet inseparable, so inseparable that they manifest a unity, that we fulfill God's commandment.