MiteShares – Mark 12:38-44

With Christmas looming, many of us are already thinking about what we’ll buy for friends and family. And when you don’t know what to get Uncle Frank or the cousin you see every 10 years, one of the best options is the ubiquitous gift card. Drop one of those in a Christmas card, and you’re done. It’s an easy way to keep our obligation of giving.

The town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, using the gift-card concept without the plastic, has developed its own kind of currency. The “BerkShare” (a wordplay on the Berkshires region) looks a lot like Monopoly money. For every 95 cents, local residents get one dollar’s worth of BerkShares they can use to buy goods and services from one of 400 participating businesses in the area. BerkShares aren’t legal tender anywhere outside Great Barrington.

“Local currency helps to keep the money flowing between friends and neighbors, local businesses, which helps everybody to have a better life,” says Asa Hardcastle, president of BerkShares Inc. 

Matt Rubiner, owner of Rubiner’s Cheesemongers & Grocers, agrees. “Philosophically, it’s very much along the lines of the foundations that we set up our store under: supporting local, sustainable producers, keeping the community local wherever possible. So when the BerkShares came along, that was right up our alley. We really embraced it,” Rubiner said.

Even the design and printing of the BerkShare currency is a local operation. BerkShares feature pictures of local artists, heroes and historical figures and come with individual serial numbers that make them tough to counterfeit. 

“I think it’s nice to have a constant little reminder that we’re a community and we’re in it together,” says local resident Heather Fisch. “It’s kind of like a Great Barrington pride moment. I’m a citizen of Great Barrington. Here’s my BerkShare.”

The folks in Great Barrington aren’t alone in their currency creation. From Detroit to North Carolina to upstate New York, at least 12 other communities are trying to encourage people to buy and spend locally by printing up their own greenbacks (or pink-backs, or mauve-backs or whatever color their Monopoly-inspired money is).

It turns out that a similar kind of currency kaleidoscope characterized the economy of first-century Israel, the scene of this week’s text. A closer look at Mark 12 gives us a glimpse into the different coinage that circulated around the temple. In verses 13-17, we read the famous “render unto Caesar” passage, in which Jesus has the Herodians and Pharisees produce coins from their pockets with the likeness of the Roman Emperor Tiberius stamped on them. 

Denarius The coin in question, a silver denarius, was worth about a day’s wage, so it was no small change. Imperial coinage was circulated throughout the empire both to standardize trade between Rome and its various conquered territories and to promote the current emperor’s reputation and divinity. Around the likeness of Tiberius on the coin was the inscription “Augustus Tiberius, Son of the Divine Augustus,” while the flip side displayed the likeness of a female figure representing “peace” (but often associated with Tiberius’ mother, Livia). To righteous Jews, such inscriptions were idolatrous, which makes it interesting (and religiously scandalous) that one of the Jewish leaders confronting Jesus had one in the first place.

Mite To avoid those idolatrous images, most first-century Jews continued to use the local Jewish currency, some of which had been in circulation since the Hasmonean dynasty 100 years earlier. The most basic coin of this period was the bronze or copper lepton (plural lepta), which avoided violating the second commandment by inscribing natural or man-made symbols instead of human or animal likenesses. At the time of Jesus, a very common lepton in circulation was the one minted by Alexander Jannaeus (who ruled from about 103 to 76 B.C.). It often featured an eight-rayed star or sunburst on one side and an anchor on the other. It was likely this coin that the money changers exchanged for Roman currency in the temple (Mark 11:15).

The lepton’s monetary value was pretty small at the time — so small, in fact, that it may be one of the least-valued coins ever struck. Take a look at one and you notice right away that it looks like the image was just stamped haphazardly in a tiny dribble of molten copper or bronze — kind of like what happens when a kid stamps something in a piece of Play-Doh and leaves the edges untrimmed. The coins aren’t rounded or finished and weigh next to nothing, making a U.S. penny feel like a British pound coin by comparison. Truth be told, a lepton looks like the kind of currency anyone could make. 

It was very likely two of these tiny lepta, or “mites,” that the widow dropped into the temple treasury in this week’s text. Compared to the wealth of Roman coins that the religious leaders and other rich people seemed to be carrying around the temple, those two rough-stamped coins were about as valuable as Monopoly money. And yet, this isn’t a story about the value of coins but rather about the value of loyalty, commitment and sacrifice.

BerkShares are about a community taking care of its own, keeping the wealth within the community for the benefit of the whole. In Mark 12:38-40, Jesus condemns the community leaders of first-century Israel for doing exactly the opposite. The “long robes” of the scribes and their VIP seating arrangements at local parties are indications that they’re more concerned with themselves than their community. 

Moreover, they “devour widows’ houses,” which was a way of saying they preyed on perhaps the weakest and most vulnerable segment of society. Widows who lacked male relatives had no status and no prospects for income, except for, as was often the case, prostitution. Some commentators have suggested that the scribes may have acted as guardians for some of these widows, but they did so by exploiting for themselves the property that the women’s husbands may have left them. So much for following the Torah law against abusing widows (Exodus 22:22-24). 

So when Jesus makes his remark about this poor widow dropping her two tiny coins in the temple treasury, “all she had to live on” (Mark 12:44), the context suggests he’s continuing his condemnation of the religious leaders and the system of economic exploitation that would cause her to donate her last two pennies. While we’ve often preached this text as a stewardship sermon, imagining Jesus smiling at the woman’s generous sacrifice, it seems more likely that he was probably shaking his head sadly as he said it. 

At the same time, though, the text gives no indication that the widow is being forced to give up those lepta. In fact, we don’t know anything about her motivation other than she just dropped them in. Jesus recognized that her offering, even though it was less than a pittance monetarily, was far more valuable than the sum total of all the other coins offered up that day. The text forces us to ask: What would cause a person to voluntarily give away her last two pennies, especially to a community and a political-economic system that continues to exploit her?

Perhaps it’s because the widow still believed. Maybe she still believed that regardless of all that had happened to her, everything she was and everything she had still belonged to God. Despite the corruption and exploitation going on in God’s name there in the temple, somehow God was still going to set things right. So the widow continued to invest in her community, a community of faith, by giving her last two coins for the good of the whole. 

Call them her MiteShares. 

The widow’s might is demonstrated in the strength of her faith. She isn’t just dabbling in spare change. She is, to borrow a poker term, “all in” with God, unlike the scribes and others. For example, the rich young man whom Jesus encountered earlier couldn’t give up the belief that his possessions were his to keep (Mark 10:17-31). 

 The widow teaches us that generosity isn’t conditional. As God shares with us, we share with God and for God. God commanded the Israelites to tithe 10% of the produce of the harvest back to God, but that was to be a starting point, not the ultimate goal. The whole point of this story is that this poor widow is more generous than all the other self-righteous religious people because she didn’t place limits on her gift. She was giving sacrificially, out of her poverty, rather than what was left over. She was fully invested in God’ work, and fully invested in her community of faith.

 Can we be so invested? Are we willing to give sacrificially to God’s work? Are we all in?

That’s the question that we live with every Sunday at church. When the offering plate comes by, we can think about scarcity, or we can think about our abundance. Do we give God our leftovers, or do we organize our financial and spiritual lives around his abundance?

 John Wesley had some rules for the Methodists about money (he had rules for a lot of things), but if you look at his summary you begin to realize that these rules reflect the same kind of attitude that gets this poor widow mentioned in the Gospels. Here’s what he says:

“These, then, are the simple rules for the Christian use of money. Gain all you can, without bringing harm to yourself or neighbour. Save all you can by avoiding waste and unnecessary luxuries. Finally, give all you can. Do not limit yourself to a proportion. Do not give God a tenth or even half what he already owns, but give all that is his by using your wealth to preserve yourself and family, the Church of God and the rest of humanity. In this way you will be able to give a good account of your stewardship when the Lord comes with all his saints.”

 The widow’s accounting got noticed by Jesus. How about ours?

This week you received a letter from us with an estimate of giving card inside. That card should not represent to you an obligation to give to the church, but an opportunity. I’ve been here for just a few months and I can tell you that I see God doing great things here every day. We all have an opportunity to invest, sacrificially and joyfully, in what God is up to. Here’s a chance for us to drop in our best and not just spare change. We have a chance to pool resources as a community of faith to make a difference in the lives of people.

Think about what it says on our own currency: E Pluribus Unum – “out of many, one.” And “In God We Trust.” The Roman emperors minted their money to make sure that everyone worshipped their divinity. Our money tells us that God is the one in whom we should put our trust.

 Our money believes it. Do we?

 

Scroll to Top