First Reading · 2 Timothy
Already being poured out
Where we are
The last day of the four-day run, and the last words of the letter that the lectionary reads. Everything before this has been instruction; here the tone changes to a formal charge, sworn before witnesses, and then to something closer to a valediction. Whatever its date, the passage has been read as a dying man's handover for as long as it has been read at all.
What happens
I charge you in the presence of Theos and of the Anointed Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his reign: proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage, with all patience and teaching. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and be diverted to myths. But you, be self-possessed in all circumstances; put up with hardship; perform the work of an evangelist; fulfil your ministry. And then: For I am already being poured out like a libation, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith. From now on the crown of right relationship awaits me, which Yahweh, the just judge, will award to me on that day — and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearance.
What to notice
Eukairōs akairōs is a two-word jingle that most English versions render in season and out of season, which is right but too tidy. Literally it is well-timed, ill-timed: stand by it when the moment is good for it and when the moment is wrong for it. The letter does not promise that the ill-timed occasions are secretly well-timed. It just removes timing from the list of considerations.
The itch is a medical image and it is in the wrong place. Knēthomenoi tēn akoēn — having the hearing scratched. The participle is passive: these are people who arrange to have the itch attended to, and the verb before it is episōreusousin, they will heap up teachers, a word for piling things in a mound. The picture is not of people who have stopped listening but of people who listen enormously, accumulating voices, each one applied to an irritation that another voice created. The diagnosis is not indifference; it is appetite.
The libation is present tense. Ēdē spendomai — I am already being poured out. Spendō is the technical word for the drink offering that accompanied a sacrifice: wine poured out at the base of the altar, alongside the animal, wasted by design. It is not the sacrifice; it is what goes with it. The apostle does not describe himself as the victim on the altar but as the wine poured beside it, and the tense says the pouring has started and is not finished. And analysis, the departure, is a word for casting off a ship's moorings or striking a camp — an unfastening, not an ending.
Three perfect tenses, and the third is an athlete's oath. Ēgōnismai, teteleka, tetērēka — I have contested, I have finished, I have kept. The perfect tense again: done, and the result standing. The first two are unmistakably from the games — agōn is the contest, dromos the racecourse — and the third, tēn pistin tetērēka, is usually read theologically as I have kept the faith. But in Greek athletic usage the phrase can also mean I have kept faith with the rules, the competitor's undertaking not to cheat. Both senses are available and the sports metaphors on either side of it make the second hard to unhear: the wreath is not given to whoever crosses the line but to whoever crosses it having competed lawfully — which is exactly what 2 Timothy 2:5, earlier in the letter, says outright.
Responsorial Psalm
When my strength fails
Where we are
Psalm 71 has no superscription and is one of the very few psalms that speaks explicitly from old age. It is stitched together largely out of other psalms — its opening verses are almost Psalm 31, its closing echoes Psalm 35 — which makes it, formally, the prayer of a person who has been praying for a long time and has the words to hand.
The selected verses
Psalm 71:8-9. "My mouth shall be filled with your praise, with your glory day by day. Cast me not off in my old age; as my strength fails, forsake me not."
Psalm 71:14-15ab. "But I will always hope and praise you ever more and more. My mouth shall declare your justice, day by day your rescue."
Psalm 71:16-17. "I will treat of the mighty works of Yahweh; Theos, I will tell of your singular justice. Theos, you have taught me from my youth, and till the present I proclaim your wondrous deeds."
Psalm 71:22. "So will I give you thanks with music on the lyre, for your faithfulness, my Theos; I will sing your praises with the harp, holy one of Israel."
What to notice
Psalm 71:9 is the frankest line in the Psalter about a specific fear. Al tashlikheni le-et ziqnah, ki-khlot kochi al ta'azveni — do not throw me away at the time of old age; at the failing of my strength, do not abandon me. Tashlikh is the verb for discarding something — the same root used for casting a corpse out, or throwing away what has no further use. The psalmist is not afraid of death here. He is afraid of becoming surplus, and he names the moment precisely: ki-khlot kochi, when the strength runs out.
The counterweight is the phrase in Psalm 71:14, and it is one word: va-ani tamid ayachel — but I will hope continually. Tamid is the liturgical adverb, the word attached to the daily offering that burned in the temple morning and evening without a break. The psalm answers the fear of being discarded with a promise of unbroken continuance, borrowing the vocabulary of the one sacrifice that never stopped.
And Psalm 71:17 makes the arc explicit: Theos, you have taught me from my youth, and till now I declare your wonders. Two ends of a life in one verse, with the teaching at one end and the declaring at the other. Read against 2 Timothy — Timothy taught the sacred writings from infancy, Paul at the end of the course — the psalm is the same shape, prayed rather than dictated.
Gospel · Mark
Her whole living
Where we are
The last public teaching in Mark before the temple discourse. He has finished with the delegations; now he warns the crowd about the scribes, and then sits down opposite the treasury and watches. Two verses later, in Mark 13:1, a disciple will admire the stonework, and Jesus will say that not one stone will be left on another.
What happens
"Beware of the scribes, who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honour in synagogues, and places of honour at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers. They will receive a very severe condemnation." Then he sits down opposite the treasury and watches the crowd putting money in. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow comes and puts in two small coins worth a few cents. He calls his disciples and says, "Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood."
What to notice
Mark has put two paragraphs side by side and the seam between them is the point. The scribes katesthiousin tas oikias tōn chērōn — eat up the houses of widows — and then a widow appears and puts the last of hers into the institution the scribes administer. The Gospel does not separate these into two lessons; it runs them together as one scene, and Mark 13:2, three verses later, brings the building down.
The coins are the smallest units in circulation. Lepta duo, ho estin kodrantēs — two lepta, which makes a quadrans. The lepton was the smallest bronze coin minted in Judea; Mark's gloss into Roman currency, for readers who did not know local money, converts it to a quadrans — a sixty-fourth of a denarius, something like a few minutes of a labourer's day. She had two, which is worth noticing on its own: she could have kept one.
The treasury was designed for display. Thirteen trumpet-shaped receptacles stood in the Court of the Women, each labelled for a purpose, and offerings went in audibly. Loud money sounded loud. The architecture guaranteed that everyone could hear the size of everyone else's gift, which is why Jesus is able to conduct this comparison by sitting down and watching, and why two lepta would have made almost no sound at all.
The word for what she gave is bios. Holon ton bion autēs — usually her whole livelihood, and that is right: bios means the means of living, one's substance. But it is also simply life — the root of biology, and the word in the parable of the prodigal for the property the son squanders. The line can be heard both ways at once, and Mark does not disambiguate.
And there is a real question about what the scene is doing. The traditional reading is praise: she gave more because she gave all, and generosity is measured by what remains rather than by what departs. But Jesus never says go and do likewise, and the sentence immediately before is a condemnation of the people who consume widows' houses. Read in sequence, the passage can also be heard as a lament — this is what devouring looks like when you watch it happen — with the destruction of the temple following immediately as the verdict. Mark supplies both frames and adjudicates neither, and a reading that takes only the first has to explain why the paragraph about the scribes is attached to it.
All three readings are looking at the last of a supply.
2 Timothy's image is precise and it is not the one usually attributed to it. Paul does not say he is the sacrifice. He says he is spendomai, the drink offering — the wine poured out at the altar's base alongside the victim, the part of the rite whose whole function is to be lost. And the tense is present: it is happening now, not scheduled. What follows is not resignation but an inventory, three perfect tenses of things completed, and then a wreath that is described as awaiting rather than as earned. The passage manages to be entirely about an ending while containing no verb of loss.
Psalm 71 supplies the fear that 2 Timothy does not voice. Do not cast me off in the time of old age; when my strength runs out, do not forsake me. It is the anxiety of the person who has been useful and can feel the usefulness going, and it is answered in the same psalm not with a denial but with an adverb — tamid, continually, the word for the offering that burned without a break. Against the fear of being discarded when the supply ends, the psalm sets the one sacrifice that never stopped.
And then the widow, who is the day's hardest reading precisely because Mark refuses to tell us how to feel about her. She has two of the smallest coins minted and puts in both. By the accounting Jesus states, she gave the most in the building. By the accounting of the paragraph immediately above her, she is the object of a crime in progress — the scribes eat widows' houses, and here is a widow's house going into the box. She is at once the day's clearest picture of a life poured out and its clearest picture of what a religious institution can extract from the people least able to refuse. The temple falls three verses later.
Which leaves the three readings arranged around a single, unavoidable question: not whether to spend oneself, but on what. Paul's libation is poured at an altar he chose; the psalmist's strength is going and he asks to be kept anyway; the widow's bios goes into thirteen trumpets administered by men in long robes. The pouring is the same in all three. Only the altar differs.
A Question to Sit With
Three
lives are
being spent in today's readings and only one of the three chose the
altar. Paul knows what he is being poured out for and can say so in
perfect tenses. The psalmist does not know, and asks only not to be discarded when the
strength that made him useful runs out. The widow says nothing and is not asked. What am I being poured out for — and did I choose it, or did an institution, a habit, or somebody else's long prayers choose it for me? And if the honest answer is that most of my
bios goes somewhere I would not have picked deliberately, is the right response to pour less, or to change the altar?