Tipping of the Scales

Solzhenytzen Martyrona's House

Today we have heard the story of the poor woman, the widow who puts two copper coins into the treasury of the Temple.  Those two coins were more than all the righteous scribes with their flowing robes, who gave from their wealth.  She gave from her poverty.

The story suggests that the kingdom of God is a tipping of the scales; many whom we think of no regard will be lifted up.  The last will be first, and the first will be last.

So let’s not trust in appearances.

You might know, too, of the poor man Lazarus, who lay covered with sores at the rich man’s gate.  As one ancient writer said, “Those sores which no man deigned to wash and dress, the beasts tenderly lick.”  Yes, the beasts alone show kindness to a poor man.  The rich man was clothed in fine linen and in purple—that royal colour which came from scraping sea shells.  But his clothes could not save him.

In death, the poor man becomes rich; and the rich man becomes poor.  God weighs their hearts, and their positions are reversed.

The ancient writer I mentioned was John Chrysostom; and he goes on to say:  “Things are changed, and it is now made known to all who was [really] rich and who was poor. For as in the theatres, when evening comes, the spectators leave, and going out, they lay aside their clothes, and they who seemed kings and generals are seen as they really are, the sons of gardeners and fig-sellers. So also when death is come, and the spectacle is over, and all the masks of poverty and riches are put off, by their works alone are men judged, which are truly rich, which poor, which are worthy of honor, which of dishonor.”

 

2.

The last will be first, the first will be last.

The early Church tried to live this reversal, this redistribution, founding classless communities.  They “devoted themselves to sharing, or to community life”—“to the breaking of bread and to prayers.”  We read that “All who believed were together and had everything in common; they would sell their possessions and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”  (Acts 2).

Perhaps this strikes us as something awkward, something jarring in a society that has, in so many ways, has renounced the aspiration to commonwealth—to a common inheritance which everyone builds up.  It’s liberal capitalism for better or worse, it seems; we cannot hope for more.  Perhaps the vision of human flourishing and community life, which the prophets announce, seems a mere dream.

Yet ever more the neglect of our common life shows itself in dysfunctionality.  There is a crisis of absence, one from another.  There is a decline of oral culture, of imaginative resource.  Aren’t we, for instance, suffering from a strange historical amnesia when religion is reduced to fundamentalism, and the great Christian tradition of mercy and help of the poor goes unnoticed?  There is a crisis of rest: a culture of total work, the exaltation of shopping and, in many places, the loss of a common day of rest.  Surely Judaism itself teaches us that leisure is the basis of culture: yet we have not heard.  So if the Church has a politics, it has to be a politics of human flourishing which strives for more—for more than the status quo, more than material fulfilment, but for a rehabilitation of heart, of soul.

 

3.

When I was thinking about these things, I remembered Solzhenityn’s warning to the west.  In the 1970s he spoke in the United States as an exile from the Soviet Union: yet he saw a common disease plaguing east and west alike—a common cult of materialism.  He said “…we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.  In the East, it is destroyed by the dealing and machinations of the ruling party.  In the West, commercial interests suffocate it.  This is the real crisis.  The split in the world is less terrible – the split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.”

Something else he wrote, too, has stayed with me.  It is a short story, Matryona’s House—spoken in the voice of a teacher who has been staying with an elderly poor woman in the Russian countryside, Matryona.  She hasn’t received a wage in years, or even a pension; she lives purely on what we might call the economy of gift—purely on giving and receiving goodwill.  Maybe we could liken her to the poor widow who gives her two copper coins. One day Matryona dies suddenly.  We read:

“only then…did I see an image of Matryona which I had never perceived before, even while living under her roof.  It was true—every other cottage had its pig, yet she had had none.  …

She was a poor housekeeper.  In other words she refused to strain herself to buy gadgets and possessions and then to guard them and care for them more than for her own life.

She never cared for smart clothes, the garments that embellish the ugly and disguise the wicked.

Misunderstood and rejected by her husband, a stranger to her own family despite her happy, amiable temperament, comical, so foolish that she worked for others for no reward, this woman, who had buried all her six children, had stored up no earthly goods.  Nothing but a dirty white goat, a lame cat and a row of fig-plants.

None of us who lived close to her perceived that she was that one righteous person withour whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand.

Nor even the world.”

Amen