February 26, 2008

• Never thought of it this way before...

  Abusing the Poor -JMac

  Luke 21:1-4

  “And He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury.  And He saw a certain poor widow putting in two small copper coins.  And he said, ‘Truly I say to you, 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.’”

  Jesus saw a widow whose involvement in religion cost her everything.  What she did displeased Him immensely.  How would you feel if you saw a poor widow who only had two coins left to buy food for her next meal give those two coins to a religious system you would say, “Something is wrong.” What a sad, victimized lady who in desperation, hoped her two coins would buy some blessing or salvation.  God doesn’t want a widow to give up her last two cents, you couldn’t find that in the Bible any place.   She was manipulated by a religious system that was corrupt.  God’s Law was never given to impoverish people, but to help them. 

  Mark 12:41 says, “He saw... how people were putting money into the treasury.”  Jesus had said in Matthew 6 that you were to do your giving in secret.  But the religious system had developed a very public way to do it.  Pharisees came along and had trumpets blown announcing their arrival to give, according to Matthew 6.  The treasury was the Court of the Women.  Jesus there because it was where everyone could come.  He calls it the treasury because there was a section of it that the leaders had designed as the place you give your money.  They had set up 13 shofar-trumpet shape into which people publicly dropped their money. The treasury is actually the word gazophulakion from two Greek words, gaza meaning treasury, phulake meaning prison.  Once you dropped them in, they were held in there.  False religion is always about the money.

  There are warnings all throughout Scripture to care for the poor, care for the widows, and do not abuse them.  The real tragedy that struck our Lord was the abuse of widows taking place in the name of God in the temple.  They had turned it into a den of robbers and they were robbing those who had the least.  Jesus isn’t commending her, she’s a victim.  If you saw a widow give her last two cents to some religious organization in the hope that she could purchase salvation or purchase blessing, or buy healing, or buy prosperity, you wouldn’t praise her, you’d want to stop her and you’d want to shut down that false religious system.

  This continued to go on through history.  For Martin Luther it was a Catholic Church abusing the poor that made him want to change the whole system.  They were building cathedrals from the money of the poor people to whom they were selling indulgences to build St.  Peter’s, promising the people that for money their sins would be forgiven.  When it became so abusive, Luther reacted, the people reacted and you had a Protestant Reformation.

  In a perhaps more familiar role for some of us, the largest segment of givers to the Charismatic prosperity gospel preachers are single women, desperate for healing, desperate for money.  Sometimes they’re promised money, health and the new one is a spouse...a man.  That’s right, if they send in their money.  So I say, woe to you who sell your miracle water and your miracle cloths that promise to heal the desperate if they send you their money.  Woe to you wealthy self-indulgent preachers who become rich on the backs of the lonely poor, disillusioned diseased and desperate who are told to give you their money as an act of faith so that God is obligated to make them healthy and wealthy.  Listen to James 1:27, “This is pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God to visit orphans and widows in their distress.”  True religion does not abuse the poor.  It ministers generously, graciously to their needs.

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