Precarious Loss

Reflections on the Lectionary for November 10th

The lesson of the widow’s mite and the healing of two blind men, Ferapontov Monastery, Russia. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikimedia.

To lose a partner to death is nearly always a tragedy. The grief can be overwhelming, and on top of that, losing a spouse is disruptive and disorienting. Though we can all imagine circumstances in which someone’s death might come as welcome news to a partner—in cases of abuse, for example—in most times and places losing a spouse is at the very least life-altering and probably also achingly sad. These kinds of losses shake people to their core, and many have a difficult time recovering from it.

Biblical texts recognize that, and they often use people whose spouses have died—especially widows—as exemplars of loss and perseverance and as protagonists in stories about scrappy hope and the sorrow of human existence. Widowers—men who have lost their wives—are rarer in the Bible, though mortality in childbirth must have been high compared to modern standards, and widowerhood must have been common. There are a few biblical examples of widowers, like Lot and Judah and Abraham, but their stories tend to work differently than stories of widows, and widowers don’t get described with the vocabulary of desperation and morality. Why? I think it comes down to patriarchy.

The ancient worlds out of which the Bible was written were patriarchal. In this regard those worlds resemble our own world, where men are systematically afforded more privileges and opportunities than women, despite our modern claims and aspirations to equality. But ancient patriarchy was different than ours, and patriarchy had material consequences for the real lives of ancient women. Conditions could and did vary across contexts and across time, but generally speaking women living in “biblical times” could not have expected to control themselves. They could not have made decisions about their own bodies, their reproductivity, their relationships, or their livelihoods. They were often under the control of their fathers until marriage, at which point they moved under the control of their husbands—and the choice to do so was not always theirs. Women’s livelihoods and means of sustenance were tied to men, which made the condition of widowhood a terrifying one. The options for a widowed woman shrunk dramatically, and having been separated from the economic power of a man, her station in the world was likely to plummet.

The lectionary for November 10^th offers us stories of five widows in three different passages. In the tale of Naomi and Ruth, a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law (with a second daughter-in-law behind the scenes), we see the desperate aftermath of two husbands’ (and sons’) deaths. In 1 Kings, the narrative drops us into the fallout from a husband’s death; the widow of Zarephath is living with her son and is down to her last measure of grain, and she expects them both to die soon from hunger. And the Gospel of Mark offers a teaching of Jesus criticizing scribes for their treatment of widows, followed by a scene of a widow making an offering to the temple treasury, which becomes the pretext for another of Jesus’ teachings.

The relationship between the Naomi and Ruth is usually described in terms of loyalty and love, but I think it’s equally likely that they simply calculated that they were better off together than they were alone—that they needed each other—and that together they could exert more control over their own selves than they could alone. Naomi suggested to her two widowed daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, that they return to their birth families and hope for the best: “Go back each of you to your mother’s house; may the Lord deal kindly with you.” Orpah did so, but Ruth stayed with Naomi, each woman calculating for herself which pathway was best. But Ruth and Naomi, having returned to Naomi’s hometown of Bethlehem, still faced the dislocation and dispossession brought on by widowhood. That circumstance is where this week’s lectionary picks up.

There are a couple of things missing from this lectionary section from Ruth (3:1-5, 4:13-17) that we should add back in, to get a fuller picture. (In what follows, I am indebted to Kathleen Farmer’s notes on Ruth in the New Interpreter’s Study Bible). The first is that throughout Ruth and especially in the section that the lectionary skips (which is the scene on the threshing room floor), the concepts of redemption and a redeemer dominate the story. Forms of those words appear over twenty times in the text of Ruth, and they are especially concentrated in verses 9-13, where they are used six times. The lectionary skips this section, and so it skips some of the explanation and rationale for the plot—people only following the lectionary and not reading the full text won’t get a full sense of the situation. This is related to the second thing missing, which is related to translation; the NRSV translates those redemption and redeemer words inconsistently, which makes it easy to lose those themes when you’re reading in English. The upshot is that we who are reading this story in English have a hard time following the meaning, both because of the translation and because the lectionary skips important parts, and consequently we tend to read this as a story about loyalty rather than what it might really be: a story about obligation and the social fabric.

The “redeemer” role might sound salvation-related to us, but in this ancient context it was really a social and economic role. It had to do with restoration and making whole, and Naomi suggests to Ruth that they prevail upon Boaz to fill the role of redeemer (what the NRSV sometimes translates as “act as next-of-kin”). That is, having found themselves in a condition of poverty and precarity because of their husbands’ deaths, Naomi and Ruth go in search of the safety net provided by their culture and their society. There is no male heir to claim (“redeem”) Ruth’s dead husband’s property, but Boaz is in a position to do so, and to protect both Ruth and Naomi from the conditions of widowhood. The two women intend to coerce Boaz into taking them both under his wing, which is indeed what ends up happening. The story of Naomi and Ruth, then, becomes a story of people who have fallen through the cracks of their world, and their insistence that they be provided with the protection they deserve. The redemption here is redemption from insecurity, poverty, and the threat of violence. The redeemer is almost more of a restorer; Boaz is simply restoring what ought to have already and always belonged to Naomi and Ruth.

Naomi and Ruth were in a desperate situation, but the widow of Zarephath in 1 Kings 17:8-16 was even worse off. The widow (who goes unnamed) and her son had been set adrift in the world by the death of the husband and father, and they were on the knife’s edge of starvation. It’s worth noticing that the first thing this widow did in the story was offer hospitality. In 17:10-11, Elijah asked the widow for some water, and despite her desperation, she hurried off to get him something to drink. But Elijah, bolstered by God’s predictions that the widow could feed him, asked for more: “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” At this point, the narrator reveals that the woman, who had been gathering sticks when she met Elijah, was gathering them to cook a final meal for herself and her son before they died. No one had redeemed this widow from her plight, and both she and her son had been consigned to death.

Here's my wrestling with this story. There is no doubt that the widow and her son are left in a better position after their encounter with Elijah (and with God) than they were before. Their jar of meal and jug of oil did not empty out. This was a divine reward, it seems, for offering sustenance to Elijah. They were able to sustain themselves until the rains came and food became more plentiful. That strikes me as an unqualified good. But I wish that this story also included some gesture toward justice; I wish that the circumstances of the woman and her son were recognized as a societal failure and treated as such, and that some remedy was proposed. Divine intervention to prevent starvation is always welcome, and I am certain that the widow of Zarephath was joyful for the replenishment of her meal and oil. But what about the other widows who didn’t have a prophet sent to them, and what about their sons? Sometimes the stories that disturb me most in the Bible are the ones that simply take their background as a stage and play out some story on it, without intervening in the way the stage itself is constructed. The New Testament passages about slavery, for example, are disturbing because they presume slavery and move on from there, working with slavery and around slavery, but taking it for granted. The story of the Great Flood presumes widespread divine retribution; the Book of Revelation presumes the same thing, and neither really wrestles with the implications of it. Many biblical texts presume sexual violence as something that will inevitably happen and weave their plots through it, rather than arguing against it. There are many stories in the Bible that do attempt to change the world in which the stories play out, but I’m not always sure what to do with a story like this one, where a miraculous tale takes place against a background of persistent suffering.

Something similar happens in Mark 12:38-44, where Jesus remarks upon a widow’s offering, against the background of her poverty and suffering, as a way to call attention to her generosity and to the selfishness of the scribes. But there is more going in that passage that’s worth paying attention to. It’s always interesting to see how stories differ across gospels, and this passage from Mark is especially remarkable in the way that it gets altered by Matthew and Luke (presuming, as many do, that Mark was written first and that the other two synoptic gospels were working from a copy of Mark in creating their own gospels). Matthew and Luke’s uses of Mark’s text can tell us about the different gospel writers’ emphases and the ways they construe different stories to mean different things.

In the case of this passage, Mark tells it in two parts. First in 12:38-40, we have a teaching from Jesus in which he criticizes scribes because of their pretensions to status and wealth. “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets,” Jesus says, for “they devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.” Then, in 12:41-44, Jesus takes part in a little vignette that underscores his point. Sitting near the temple treasury, Jesus and his disciples watch people making their offerings. A lot of wealthy people were giving large sums of money, and right on cue, as if to underscore Jesus’ earlier point, a widow came and gave two small coins that were not worth very much. But Jesus praised her generosity, and pointed out that her small contribution was worth more than all the large sums donated by others. Like the widow of Zarephath, this widow “put in everything that she had, all she had to live on,” and “out of her poverty” she gave more than she could afford.

In Mark’s telling, then, the greed of the scribes and wealthy folks is contrasted with the humble generosity of the widow, and all of it is focused on the physical site of the temple. Not coincidentally, in the Gospel of Mark this scene at the temple treasury is the last thing we hear before the apocalyptic chapter 13, the one where Jesus predicts the temple’s destruction and all the suffering that comes with it. The implication, in Mark, is that economics has something to do with the downfall of the temple and Jerusalem around it. In a long tradition of Hebrew prophecy, Jesus is calling attention to economic inequality and foretelling the destruction that it will bring. Unlike the prophets, though, Jesus does not call the people or the city to repentance or change; he simply points out their mendacity and predicts their destruction.

Interestingly, when Matthew develops this story, it becomes much more focused on “the scribes and the Pharisees” generally, on their supposed hypocrisy and false piety, but it loses something of its economic bite. Matthew does not even include the story of the widow with her two coins. Luke, in contrast, includes both the story of the widow’s gift and Jesus’ criticisms of the scribes. But in Luke’s version of Jesus’ prediction of the temple’s destruction, he drops breadcrumbs that help readers understand the impending violence as an outcome of geopolitics. So each gospel gives a slightly different rationale for Jesus’ prediction of destruction and war: Luke points to civil authority and ambition, Matthew points to religious corruption, and Mark points to economic inequality and the greed of the elite. There will be more to say about Mark 13 next week, when it shows up in the lectionary, but for now, it’s worth noting how the story of the widow’s contribution fits neatly into Mark’s version of the story, tangentially into Luke’s version, and not at all into Matthew’s.

Together, despite their differences, these three stories of widows share a few things in common. In all three stories, the widow or widows are clinging to the bottom rung of the social and economic ladder, in danger of falling off. In all three stories, the widows gain divine favor—the widow of Mark by her contribution to the temple, the widow of Zarephath by feeding Elijah, and Naomi and Ruth by their efforts which led to the birth of the ancestor of King David and (for Christians) Jesus. In all three stories, the widows serve as a contrast against which the rest of society can be judged or evaluated.

My only wish is that these biblical texts would take it one step further, and comment on the conditions of widowhood in the first place, and demand justice for the widows whose suffering animates the stories in the first place. Certainly the Bible does this in many places; widows are part of a consistent trio of kinds of people to whom Israelites are commanded to show hospitality, alongside orphans and immigrants/foreigners. (A version of this happens in Psalm 146, in verse 9, which is also in the lectionary this week). But in these stories this week, widows’ situations are the stage upon which drama plays out, not the focus of the drama itself. Widows’ suffering is a plot engine, but it’s not necessarily an engine for reconsidering the structure of society.

As we read these stories in our own time and place, and as we interpret these texts against the background of our own reconsideration of the structure of society in the wake of an election, perhaps it is a good time for us to ask how we can use these stories to interrogate the inequalities and injustices in our own world. It might be a good time to ask how we can find stories like these—stories of people who have fallen to the bottom rung of the ladder, who are suffering and on the verge of ruin—and intervene in their suffering by working to make the world a little more just. It’s a good thing to recognize the plight of marginalized people, and it’s a good thing to imagine the ways divine favor might flow to them. But, to my mind, it’s all the better to also take the next step—to find out how and why people end up on those margins, to ask who is served by that marginality, and to build a more inclusive and just world where something like the death of a partner (or the loss of a job, or a diagnosis, or an accident, or political turmoil, or a thousand other things) isn’t the end of someone’s thriving and flourishing life.