Mark 11

Mark 11:1-25

XXII “And on the morrow, when they were come out from Bethany, He hungered. And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came, if haply He might find anything thereon: and when He came to it, He found nothing but leaves; for it was not the season of figs. And He answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit from thee henceforward forever. And His disciples heard it. . . . And as they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away from the roots.”- Mark 11:12-14, Mark 11:20. Mark 11:1-25. THIS is admittedly a strange story, strange that is, in the sense of being unusual. Any one reading this Gospel for the first time, who was really and intelligently interested in it as a record of the life and work of Jesus, would inevitably be arrested and surprised. Moreover there are elements in it which have persistently caused difficulties to expositors, and that quite naturally. Cursing and destruction were not the usual methods of Jesus. Let it be at once said that therein is one of the chief values of the story. When Isaiah was denouncing the politicians of his day for their secret intrigues, and foretelling the Divine judgment which must fall upon the nation, amongst other things he said: “Jehovah will rise up as in Mount Perazim, He will be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon; that He may do His work, His strange work, and bring to pass His act, His strange act.” When in the Divine economy judgment becomes punishment, chastisement, and necessarily so; it is nevertheless God’s strange work, His strange act. So this action of Jesus was undoubtedly strange; yet it is clearly central to this particular paragraph.

Before proceeding to a consideration of the story in its relation to the larger whole of the paragraph; and so to its true value and teaching; there are one or two things to observe about the story in itself.

This is the only account of an exercise of power, on the part of our Lord, which was wholly destructive. There is the story of His destruction of the swine, but that act was linked to the deliverance of a man. Here however is a story, and the only one, of our Lord definitely destroying.

There is no more warrant for criticizing our Lord for destroying a tree for the purpose of teaching, than there is for objecting to a Christmas tree for our children, or the plucking of the petals from a flower in a lesson on botany.

But further, there is no ground for supposing that our Lord did this. I recognize the difficulty of the passage, and suggest that sometimes the simplest and most obvious meaning is the true. Upon this fig tree there ought to have been no leaves. There was such a thing as “the first ripe fig before the summer”; but whenever that appeared, it appeared before the time of leaves. I turn over the page in the Gospel, and find that our Lord Himself used the figure later: “Now from the fig tree learn her parable: when her branch is now become tender, and putteth forth its leaves, ye know that the summer is nigh” (Mark 13:28). This happened undoubtedly in the earliest spring time; before the summer was nigh, before the time of leaves.

But seeing that there were leaves, there should have been that first ripe fruit. The Lord came and found that there was no fruit. The tree was precocious, and its precocity in leaves demonstrated the fact that there was no possibility of fruit. It was a tree that had failed in itself, and so became a perfectly just illustration of that which our Lord desired at the moment to teach. Beyond that I shall not go, as to the controversial aspects of the story.

First, it is well that we should remember the time in the ministry of our Lord at which this occurred. Here begins the story of the last week in His earthly life. In this paragraph we have in view three days of that last week. On the first day He entered into the city in triumph, looked at the Temple, and retired at eventide to Bethany. On the second day He journeyed in the morning back again to the city with His own disciples, and on that journey destroyed the fig tree; then having entered into the city and Temple, He cleansed the Temple, and at eventide left the city. On the third day He returned to Jerusalem, and on the way the disciples saw the fig tree withered from the roots, and our present study halts with our Lord’s instruction to them in the presence of the withered tree.

Let us bear in mind that this last visit to Jerusalem was official, solemn, condemnatory. Necessarily when we come to this passion week in the life of our Lord, we are almost overwhelmed by such thoughts as those which are suggested by the words of John, “He came unto His own, and they that were His own received Him not.” We think of it as the hour of His rejection, as the hour in which the men of His own nation and people finally said, “We will not have this Man to reign over us.” All that is true; but it is equally true that this was not merely the hour when His nation rejected Him; it was the hour when He finally rejected that nation. With great solemnity and gravity of manner and method, He arraigned the rulers before Him, compelling them to find verdicts concerning themselves, and pass sentences upon themselves; until in solemn denunciation He actually came to the hour in which He said,-and mark the words now most carefully:-“The Kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” It was the last, solemn, and awful word of Jesus. We shall come next to the account of how He dealt with the rulers ; but hi this story we are in the presence of preliminary things.

First there was our Lord’s definite provocation of demonstration. That also was an unusual method. How often we read that He hid Himself, or escaped from the multitudes. Multitudes thronged and pressed Him wherever He went, attracted by His teaching and the wonders He wrought. He was never hostile to these crowds; and yet He was always turning from them, escaping or sifting them, making it still more difficult, as it would seem, for them to come to Him. He had never definitely provoked anything in the nature of demonstration, but there can be no escape from the conviction that this was exactly what He did at this time.

Crowds were there; He might have passed, as He had passed upon other occasions, almost unnoticed into Jerusalem; quietly and meekly walking in the midst of His own. Here He made definite arrangements, the actual carrying out of which must inevitably draw attention to Him, and centre it upon Hun. So we see Him, in what we sometimes speak of, and in some senses correctly, as the triumphal entry, drawing attention to Himself, compelling the whole city to know the hour of His arrival

Then we have this symbolic miracle, wrought in the presence of His own in the hours of the early morning, when by a word He destroyed the fruitless tree; and immediately following it, the instruction to His disciples, when on the following morning Peter drew His attention to the withered tree, and our Lord replied, “Have faith in God,” and proceeded with His teaching.

The whole movement here is national; and to the paragraph, this destruction of the fig tree is central and symbolic, as I have no doubt our Lord intended it to be.

“Without giving attention to the details of these stories, that are all so familiar, let us glance at the contextual revelations of the whole scene, in the centre of which this miracle of destruction occurs; in order that we may gather for ourselves the central teaching of this act of Jesus.

We see Him first coming into the city as King. This again is something 1 new, almost unusual in this Gospel. He has been presented to us here as the Servant of God, stripped of His royalties, divested of His dignities, the whole truth concerning His mission crystallized into that wonderful declaration which we have considered, “The Son of man came not to be served, but to serve.” Here we are introduced to this same Person, still the Servant of God, but the Servant of God in such a way as to draw attention to Himself as King, and acting with a definite authority. As the crowds declared, He came in the name of the Lord, the Representative of Jehovah, the Representative of the God of this people. He came now in national aspect, doing that which He had done individually in the case of the young ruler, putting Himself in the place of God toward these men and toward this nation, drawing attention to Himself by the method of His advent, until there came from those Galilean crowds that quotation of their own ancient psalm, in which they declared the supreme truth, “Hosanna; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.”

Here He was seen, the Servant of Jehovah, coming to establish His Kingdom; the Kingdom described by Himself when He said He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister; the Kingdom of service, in which positions of greatness were those won by lowliness of service rendered; the Kingdom which was to be founded upon that to which He did in mystery refer, the giving of His own life as a ransom.

So we see Him coming nigh, coming in the majesty of meekness, stripped of all those things which men usually associate with royalty; riding upon an ass. We are often told that this was a royal thing to do; but let it be remembered that there was a clear distinction between animals upon which kings rode, even in the East, and the animal usually described as “a beast of burden” upon which our Lord rode as He came into the city. I suggest one method by which the meekness, the lowliness, the poverty, the absurdity, of this entrance may be understood. In imagination think, not as a Hebrew, but as a Roman; and think of the triumphal entry of a Roman emperor into his city; and then look at this pageant of poverty, lacking all the things usually associated with royalty and greatness. A procession of poverty, the scattering of the clothes the people wore, the broken branches of the trees, and the shouting of the Galilean mob! So He rode in the dignity of a great meekness, divested of all the things that humanity had for so long associated with Kingship, and still associates with Kingship. It was a pageant of poverty.

He came for investigation. In that first day toward eventide, entering into the Temple, Mark records that “He . . . looked round about upon all things.” It was the look of investigation, the look of inquisition, the look of One Who had the right so to look, the look of the supreme and final authority; it was also the look of the heart of an infinite compassion, the look of the eyes bedewed with tears. “He. . . , looked round about upon all things.”

What were the conditions that He found? I take His own word spoken on the next day; the Temple “a den of robbers”; its intention violated, and its shelter sought by vice masking under the garb of religion; the precincts of the Temple invaded by money-changers who, contemporary writers tell us, were so nefarious in their practices, that their witness was refused in the courts of law; and all in the name of religion ; the Gentile courts desecrated by the presence there of animals for sacrifice; these things apparently in the interest of religion, the making of religion easy; which is always a perilous thing, contrary to Divine intention, and an evidence of a degenerate people.

He found the spiritual and moral rulers antagonistic to Him, His ideals refused, His interference resented; and preeminently and supremely, the death of faith, the true principle of national life. That is what I think He meant when He said to His disciples, “Have faith in God.” He was not giving them the secret for destroying fig trees; but the secret for so living that they should not be destroyed as the fig tree had been destroyed. When the Son of man came to Jerusalem for His final investigation, He found faith missing, He found leaves without fruit.

Now in that atmosphere we turn to this central act of judgment, and without any further dealing with the details, we enquire the meaning of this act, and what our Lord intended to teach His disciples, and His Church for all time.

He meant first to teach that the fruitless must inevitably be destroyed; that life is God-given, and always for the purpose of fruit-bearing. For simplest illustration I turn back to the commencement of my Bible, and find that He made trees, each bearing seed after its kind, for the production of fruit. It is but a figure, a symbol, but it runs down through all Biblical teaching, and especially with regard to this ancient people Israel. The national life was a God-given and God-sustained life, but its purpose was the bearing of fruit. We read that great wail of the psalmist concerning the vine that was planted and broken down, because it failed to bear fruit (Psalms 80). We hear in that lament sung by Isaiah in the fifth chapter the plaintive cry of Jehovah because His people had failed: “He looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes;” and of this, the prophet gave his own interpretation and explanation: “He looked for justice, but behold, oppression; for righteousness, but, behold a cry.” Because the nation created and sustained by God, had failed to produce the fruit which was the natural outcome of the life which He had thus created and sustained, the decree went forth: “I will tell you what I will do to My vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; I will break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down.”

All these things of the past were brought home to this little group of disciples by our Lord in the cursing of the fig tree. If for any reason fruit is not forthcoming, the instrument provided for the bearing of fruit must be destroyed. The tree was the symbol, but the nation was in His mind. He came after the long centuries, to His own, but His own received Him not; and therefore by their refusal to receive Him, and His Kingdom; by the absence of fruit, the necessity was created for the destruction of the instrument. With the morning the disciples saw-mark the significant words, and how the simple and sacred symbol applies,-the tree withered from the roots.

When attention was drawn to this, our Lord gave His disciples the interpretation. The central value of that interpretation is that faith is the principle of fruitfulness. They wondered at His power to destroy, or so it would seem from the simple reading of the story. “Rabbi, behold, the fig tree which Thou cursedst is withered away!” He immediately replied, “Have faith in God.” He gave them the secret of making destruction unnecessary; and therefore the secret of removing obstacles to the Kingdom, as He continued, if you have faith, then you shall say to a mountain, Be removed, and cast into the sea. In the life of the nation, when faith perishes, the principle of life perishes, and the possibility of fruitfulness passes away. Even so, for these men-to whom He was about to commit the great responsibilities of the Kingdom of God, taking them from the ancient people, if they were not also to perish, here was the supreme and abiding necessity, “Have faith in God.” Fruit was not found in the nation, because life had departed; and life had departed, because faith in God had departed.

He then charged them to pray; for prayer is the expression of faith. He showed them also that the prayer which is the expression of faith, must be the expression of life, mastered by compassion, forgiving, as well as seeking for forgiveness. Prayer love-purified, is the true exercise of faith. So He brought these men-representatives of those who were to follow them, the whole Church of God, to which this great responsibility of the Kingdom of God was to be committed-face to face with this central secret of life. Faith in God is the secret of the life of fruitfulness.

The teaching of this story is for all time, and the application is not merely to the Church. It is specifically a national teaching. It may be well for us as members of the Church of God, and of this nation, to face the simple and yet searching lesson which this act of Jesus reveals. The life which we live as a nation is a life which God has given. All that we are as a nation in all its essential greatness, we owe to Him. By His compassions we have come to be what we are; by His deliverances we have lived iii peace and in liberty; by His illumination we have proceeded from strength to strength of understanding and of experience.

It would be a work of supererogation to trace the history of this country, but the whole secret may be summarized in a verse from the ancient psalms, “The opening of Thy Word giveth light.” Changing the form of rendering in harmony with the real significance of the passage: The going forth, or the letting loose of Thy word giveth light. If in one rapid act, the history of England, and of her most illustrious daughter, the United States of America, be reviewed, it will be seen that anything that has been noble and upward has been the result of the illumination of the people by the going forth of the Word of God. From the moment when our literature was born in the paraphrases of Caedmon, on down through every century, as the light Divine was given, so the people have risen. Oh! how slowly; because how disobediently we have received the Word.

Yet let us remember that everything in our national life that is really great, that has in it the true element of beauty and nobility, is the result of God’s compassion and God’s deliverance and God’s illumination. Our national life, British and American, is verily a Divine creation, and has been sustained by God as surely as was that of Israel of old.

Are we producing fruit after our kind, fruit that is true to the life which God Himself has created and sustained? Surely it is good for us to-day; that in the darkness we may have faith, that under the clouds we may consider, that in the midst of perplexities we may turn ourselves back again to the history of our life and its true significance, and ask ourselves quite solemnly, Does the Son of man, as He comes to us to-day, find fruit?

I thank God that there are other teachings in this same symbolical realm in the New Testament. There is the parable of the barren fig tree, with its last terrible note: If it bear no fruit cut it down. But between the sentence of the proprietor, and that consent of the intercessor, came intercession and work: “Let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it.” In the intimate teaching by our Lord of His disciples, speaking within the Church, He referred to pruning and purging in order to the bearing of fruit. In the light of this other teaching upon this solemn act of Jesus, I declare that unless we are responsive to the life which He has created; unless we are responsive to His chastisements, learning to submit ourselves to them unreservedly, we also as nations shall wither from the roots.

Mark 11:27-33

XXIII “This poor widow cast in more than all they that are casting into the treasury”- Mark 12:43 b).

Mark 11:27-33 - Mark 12:1-44. THE paragraph from which the text is taken gives a condensed account of the events following upon the discovery by the disciples that the fig tree which Jesus had cursed, had withered away from the roots. Matthew gives the story of these events with more fullness. We shall now only glance at them in their relation to the incident in the treasury, which Matthew omits. That story gains much from the fact that it constitutes a picture of light and beauty, in the midst of a time of great darkness in the ministry of our Lord. In this hour, when the Son of man was the object of intense hostility, and when He was exercising His authority in the solemn and awful work of denouncing and rejecting a fruitless nation, there appeared one poor lonely widow woman, in whom faith in God was active and powerful. She stands in striking contrast to the men who were seeking to destroy the Son of man.

Let us first glance at this dark background of hostility, then observe the nameless woman; and finally consider our Lord’s attitude toward her. The lines of consideration are: first, the Son of man and His foes; secondly, the woman worshipper; and finally, the Son of man and His friend, that one woman.

Throughout the whole of this survey, the Son of man is seen acting in judgment. The word judgment is full, gracious, significant. Judgment becomes condemnation and punishment, or commendation and reward, according to the attitude of the human soul in the presence of its inexorable exercise. Here, from beginning to end, from the moment when Jesus was challenged, first as to His authority, to this last scene in the temple, our Lord is seen as the Son of man, sitting in judgment, and exercising the right thereof.

First then, let us look at Him in the midst of His foes. The stories in this paragraph are all well known. We will mass them for the sake of the impression of the Lord which they convey in these last days of His earthly ministry. Four questions were asked of Jesus on this day when He went back into the city and to the temple, after the disciples had discovered the fig tree was withered away from the roots. There was first the question of unbelief: “By what authority doest Thou these things? or Who gave Thee this authority?” There was then a question of sinister intent, formed, fashioned, and framed in order to bring Him within the grasp of His foes: “Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?” There was then a question of flippant rationalism; the cynical and brutal question of the Sadducees, who, supposing a case, enquired who should be the wife of a man in the resurrection. Finally there was a question of pure casuistry, the question of a lawyer, about the relative values of laws. Throughout the whole scene Jesus is seen, not caught, trapped, or beaten; but sitting in judgment, and with quiet, calm dignity silencing His opponents; until at last it is finally declared, “No man after that durst ask Him any question.” The whole scene ended with our Lord’s asking a question, and uttering a denunciation of hypocrisy.

The first was the question of unbelief asked by the men who were in authority in the temple. They recognized the things He had done, but raised the question of His right to do them. They knew He had wrought things that were superlatively wonderful. Probably it is true that their enquiry related to the cleansing of the temple on the previous day. While they were compelled to admit that His action was something out of the common, for which they could not account, that some mysterious power had been at work under His control, which made money-changers flee, cleansing the temple for a brief hour from all its defilement; they nevertheless raised the question of His authority. Our Lord’s method with them was twofold.

He first revealed their unfitness to receive an answer, by showing that they had already been dishonest in the case of the ministry of His forerunner; and then He answered the very question He had declined to answer; answered it inferentially, as He gave them the parable of the vineyard, and of the sending of messengers by the proprietor, until at last the son was sent. At the close of the parable they discovered that He was speaking of them, and describing their national condition; and therefore that involved in His answer was an answer to their enquiry; His authority was that He was the Son of God.

Then perchance, in some pause, there came to Him that iniquitous and unholy coalition of opposing political parties in Jerusalem, of Pharisees and Herodians; the Herodians claiming that the Jewish nation at that time must be subservient to Rome, for Herod was a vassal of Rome; the Pharisees protesting against the yoke of Rome being laid upon the shoulders of God’s ancient people. These two parties were always at war, always at strife. They now formed a coalition, and asked a question with sinister intent; so that if He should say it was lawful to pay tribute to Caesar, He would abrogate His own claim of Messiahship which He had made so patent by the provocation of demonstration on His arrival in the city but yesterday; or if perchance He should say it was not lawful to give tribute to Caesar, then He could be arrested for treason against the State. Mark the subtlety of the question, and the supremacy and finality of the answer as a philosophy of life: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” It was a condemnation of both the parties that stood confronting Him; first of the men who were against the domination of Rome, but who were not rendering to God the things that were God’s, the men who were tithing mint and anise and cummin, and neglecting the weightier things of man’s soul; the condemnation also of the Herodians who claimed that it was lawful to give tribute to Caesar, and in their deepest hearts were with Herod prepared to rebel against Caesar, if they might but have escaped from his tyranny. They were both silenced.

Then, perhaps again after some interval, there came the Sadducees with the question of their flippant rationalism. The grotesqueness of their illustration constitutes its brutality. To read these stories with all naturalness is to be impressed by the unholy levity that linked the great questions of immortality, the .resurrection, and the spiritual life, to such an illustration as they supposed. Our Lord answered first by sweeping away the possibility they suggested, as He declared that in heaven they neither marry, nor are given in marriage. Then immediately passing behind the illustration to the Sadducean philosophy that caused it, which denied the immortality of man the fact of resurrection, the existence of the spirit, and the very being of angels; He reminded them that in their own scriptures God declared Himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and settled the question when He said that God " is not the God of the dead, but of the living”; and thus in one word, assured men that they limit their vision if they forget that those “loved long since, and lost a while,” are still living. The Sadducees had no more to say.

Then one man amid the crowd, having observed that Jesus had well answered these questioners, came to Him with his own peculiar question: Which is the greatest of the commandments? He did not ask Him to put commandment into comparison with commandment, but to reveal the principle of real greatness in law, It was an honest question, a sincere question. Our Lord immediately replied with nothing of sternness in His answer, with nothing of rebuke. Selecting, not from the Decalogue, but from other of the ancient laws of the Hebrew people, He showed the central principle of law, the true inspiration of the law, and of obedience to it: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. . . Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” The man was arrested and amazed. He admitted that the answer was final. Then from amid all the hostility, there came from the lips of Jesus the tender words, “Thou art not far from the Kingdom of God.” The questions of His foes were over.

Then our Lord propounded one question, and we have no account of any answer made to Him. It was a question that suggested thought on their part concerning Himself in view of His Messianic claims. How is it, He asked, that David speaking by the Spirit, described his son as his Lord? There the question remains Christ’s one arresting question waiting for the answer of all such as are perplexed in the presence of His personality, and demanding at least either that we declare that David was mistaken, and that Jesus was of our kith and kin alone; or that we recognize that David, as Jesus said, was inspired; and that while according to the flesh He was of the seed of David, according to the deeper mystery of His Being, He was the Son of the Eternal God. With the question He left them, warning those who listened, against the hypocrisy of the scribes.

That is a hurried survey, but it will bring us into the atmosphere of this last scene in the life of Jesus, in which He was present in the temple. How often He had been there. Remember the scenes that we have surveyed in our study of His life; those recent happenings, that marvellous hour when He cleansed the temple; the electric atmosphere of hostility, the awful impulses of hatred that were brooding, waiting to arrest and slay Him.

Now observe the last thing that Jesus did. Passing from those inner courts of the temple He came to the outer court, known as the court of the women, where the great chests stood to receive the offerings for the priests and the poor. There He sat down, lingering in temple precincts, gazing with longing and love-lit eyes upon the desolate wilderness in the midst of which He found Himself, looking for some flower, some fruit, something that would satisfy His heart. The last stern and terrific word of denunciation uttered, He waited, in the treasury, in the place where people were bringing gifts, in which though man was constantly forgetting it, there was a sacramental symbolism. Where the heart is, there the treasure will go. That is not the quotation, I know.

But the change is implicated. Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also; and, therefore, where the heart is, there the treasure will go. Upon all giving, there rests the light of a Divine scrutiny and appraisement.

So waiting and watching with the Son of man, we see what we should not perhaps have noticed, had He not drawn the attention of His disciples to it; a woman amid the crowd, a poor, lonely widow, dropping into the treasury two mites, a farthing. In the light of what happened He declared that when she dropped in those two mites, she dropped in “all her living.” Do not be persuaded to doubt that. There have been many attempts made to prove that she did not give all her living, and that our Lord did not really mean that. For the moment, however, forget that final word, and look at her gift; two mites, equal to a farthing; two of the smallest current coin. We should never have seen it if attention had not been drawn to it. If a list of subscriptions that day had been published, these two mites would have been included in the final item, of amounts below a certain value! Yet out of the midst of all the gifts, the Son of man selected these two mites; and lifted them into the light of the centuries.

Looking at those two mites, those little coins, and speaking of them in the singular number, as one gift, I see here first a gift of faith; secondly, a gift of sacrifice; thirdly, a gift of spiritual life; and finally a gift law-fulfilling. I see one lonely widow woman doing a thing out of the passion and inclination of her inner life, unobserved so far as she knew by any eyes, in all probability attempting to hide from everybody the thing she did. Yet I see this one lonely woman in the midst of that crowd that day, standing in contrast to all the men who had harassed the Lord. All the hostility massed in the questions that we have tried hurriedly to survey is ranked on one side; and over against it is the simple act of a woman who put two mites into the treasury.

It was a gift of faith. The temple was the house of God to that woman. Her gift was the sacramental symbol of her loyalty to God. She, as surely as the great lawgiver of her nation, “endured as seeing Him Who is invisible.” We would never have seen those coins, if Jesus had not pointed them out, but what are they? A sacramental evidence of a woman’s belief in God. When He cursed the fig tree, and the day came when it withered from the roots so that the disciples were amazed by the swift withering, He told them the secret of how the nation might escape a like withering as He said, “Have faith in God.” He had just been in the temple, and the rulers of the temple who were the rulers of the city, had challenged Him as to His authority, and thereby had revealed their lack of faith in God. But behold, one woman among the crowds, the sacramental symbol of whose faith in God are the two mites which she drops into the treasury.

Again, it was a gift of sacrifice; “all her living,” a tremendous dedication. I go back to the scene before it, and I see a coalition of Pharisees and Herodians who came to ask Jesus a question about tribute, about the things they were to give in recognition of right, authority, and benefit received. That is what taxation really is. We may object to it and quarrel with it, and may be perfectly right in our objection with regard to some of its methods. But in the payment of taxes we are making our personal gift to the well-being of the State, our acknowledgment of the benefits of the. government under which we live. That matter lay behind this question whether they should pay to Rome, or whether they should not.

They were in the region of gifts. Remember also, their question was one of selfishness. It was one of expedience, dealing with the whole relation of a man to his fellow-men in the State; and the relation of a man to his fellow-men was degraded by the question they asked. Here, however, was a woman, probably knowing little about these Pharisees, or of the discussion of principles, of difference between Herodians and Pharisees, but recognizing her immediate relation to her God. Hers was a gift of sacrifice. She cast into the treasury “all her living.”

Again, and this is the deeper note: it was a gift of spiritual life. It was the result of vision, and it was the expression of feeling. There are moments when one wishes one could draw aside the veil and know more. We would like to know where that woman lived, and how she lived, and how she suffered, and what her poverty meant; a lonely widow woman in the great metropolis, and she only had those two mites that day. They constituted “all her living.” What made her find her way through those women’s courts, and drop the whole of her living into the treasury? Vision!

She saw finely, and her heart responded to what she saw. That act was a demonstration of the spiritual life, an argument against rationalism, a refusal to accept a Sadducean philosophy-that asked men to be content with the dust, and to live in the realm of the material. By that act, unknowingly, her whole soul responded with holy love, to the vision; and in the dedication of her living was her recognition of the vision which her eyes beheld.

Yet once again, it was a gift law-fulfilling. Hear the question: “What commandment is the first of all?” Hear the answer of Jesus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . . thou shalt love thy neighbour.” What relation had that to the gifts that were placed in the treasury in the temple? All gifts placed in those chests in the treasury of the temple were divided between the priests and the poor. Now, however much the priests were degraded, let us never forget that to the simple heart of this woman they stood as the representatives of God, they stood for relationship to God. And the poor? She was of the poorest of the poor, but they were her neighbours; and when she dropped her gifts into the treasury she was keeping the whole law.

She was expressing her love to her God, and her love to her neighbour. So I repeat, that while Jesus waited and watched, He saw in that dark and desolate hour, one woman in whose life, ail unconsciously, Divine requirements were being fulfilled. The sacramental symbol of the beauty and glory of her life, in her gift of two mites, contradicted and corrected the atmosphere which was hostile to sacramental symbols.

Look finally, not at the foes of the Son of man, not at the woman worshipping alone, but at the Son of man Himself. He had claimed but recently to be the Son sent to the vineyard for fruit, when the husbandmen had ill-treated and murdered all that had preceded Him; but He knew that their fate would be His, for the husbandmen were saying ere He came, “Let us kill Him.”

In His final question there was a further revelation concerning Himself. He was David’s Lord. Offspring of David, yes; but Root of David also; the One from Whom David had come, the One Who after the flesh had come from David.

Here then, are three things to be observed. First let us observe His observing. Then let us hear His appraisement of the things that He saw that day; and remind ourselves how He was, and is for ever vindicated in that appraisement.

Observe first, His observing. Here Mark is very particular: “He sat down over against the treasury, and beheld how the multitude cast money into the treasury.” He did not behold the multitude casting in. He was not watching them. He beheld how they did it. In the very simple and artless declaration of Mark something is revealed concerning Him that was peculiar to Him; in which He stood, and stands for ever differentiated from all others. What was He watching? Oh! not the trick of the hand, or the poise of the head, although all these things may very often be suggestive. Christ was looking deeper. He was looking at the motive behind, the reason for the giving, the impulse of the donation, the inspiration of the offering. That is what He is always doing. He beheld how they gave.

In the Old Testament, in the dim twilight of that earlier dispensation, there is a great psalm. It is the song of a woman, Hannah. In the midst of her song, celebrating the government of God, she said, “By Him, actions are weighed.” Here the Lord is seen weighing gifts, and when the gift is to be weighed, the important thing is the weight He puts in the other side of the balance. He was observing how they gave. That is what He always watches. The Lord of pity and compassion is watching to-day how this nation is giving.

We see in our newspapers a list of names connected with large amounts. Then presently there is that remarkable group at the last, “Amounts Under-”! All the poetry is in the last item, and not in the first. The compassion of the human heart is finest and purest among the gifts where there is no record of a name. He is still observing how!

But He was observing, unobserved. We have no hint in the Gospel story that the woman knew she was watched, or that she was told. She is seen in her gift, and her passing. He called His disciples privately, and drew their attention to that which had happened; but He did not tell her. I do not think she ever knew. I think that she lived all her days, and never knew, until there came one sweet morning of the light that never fades, when He met her on the other side; and then she found that He had kissed the poor copper of her gift into the gold of the eternities.

Then note His appraisement of that offering. Drawing the special attention of His disciples to it, He said this to them, “This poor widow cast in more than all.” It is an amazing thing, this! He did not say, This poor woman hath done splendidly. He did not say, This poor woman hath cast in very much. He did not say, She hath cast in as much as any one. He did not say, She hath cast in as much as the whole of them.

He said, “More than all” I Presiding over the temple coffers that day, the Lord of the temple took the gifts and sifted them. On the one hand He put the gifts of wealth, and the gifts of ostentation; and on the other, two mites “more than all”! That we may not misunderstand it, He gave the reason: “They … of their superfluity”! Oh! how the thing scorches, how it burns. Superfluity!

A little girl, during the war, wrote a letter to the Prince of Wales, a sweet letter, which was printed in all the papers at the time. She sent, I think it was seven-pence-halfpenny, and ended her letter by saying, “I am so glad I am an English girl, but I am sorry for those German children.” That was an unveiling of the glory of the Christian heart in a little girl! I think that day Jesus took the seven-pence-halfpenny, and said, More than all! And why? Because His standard is quality; and the quality is life. When a gift has that quality, that gift is God’s currency. God can do much more with small amounts that have that quality, than with all the gifts that come from superfluity

The gift that is not easy, that comes out of blood, out of penury, is current in the spiritual realm, and God can do infinitely more with it than with the gifts that come out of superfluity.

The last thing concerns the vindication of our Lord. Was He right? Business men will forgive me if I am commercial here. Those two mites, given in that way, so that He was able to commend the giving, have produced more for the Kingdom of God in two millenniums, than all the other gifts that day. Oh! the inspiration of this story! How it has helped lonely, poor, and sorrowing hearts to give.

Running on, and running ever, these two mites are rolling up their dividends, and their results are great and mighty, inspired by what that lonely woman did. May God help us to give to Him in the light of this story; and may He grant that the glory of it, and the beauty of it may be a transfiguring power upon our giving. I do not think a collection is ever taken but that somewhere He finds a copper coin, and kisses it into gold. Of course this is two-edged. He still writes across many a gift, superfluity!

It is not for me to measure the gifts to God, I cannot; but it is for us ever to remember that religion, politics, ethics, were all included in that gift, and are always included in our giving. Giving is still a sacramental symbol. The giving which is true is the outcome of vital religion, high politics; true philosophy, perfect ethics.