Bad Theology

Text for today: Mark 12 xxxviii - Mark 13 ii

After delivering one of His diatribes about the iniquities of the scribes, Jesus sits and watches people putting money into the offering box at the temple. He compares the offerings of the rich with the two small coins donated by a poor widow, pronouncing her gift the greater because it was all she had. He then announces that the temple itself will be destroyed.

Naturally, there is no indication in the Gospels that Jesus or His disciples did anything to protest, let alone alleviate, the widow's poverty. The Saviour's words about helping the poor are generally exhortations to get rid of worldly riches for the good of one's own soul, and His final pronouncement on the subject of poverty, at the Last Supper (Mark 14 vii), was that the poor would always be around, and that their needs were in any case less important than His rituals; the idea that the needs of the poor should take precedence is explicitly associated with the thieving betrayer (John 12 iv-vi). On seeing the widow Jesus is as usual far less concerned with poverty as such than with preaching against His enemies and gloating over their approaching destruction.

In light of this destruction, the widow's gift is seen to be futile aside from its salutary effect on the widow's soul and its pedagogic utility to Jesus. Whether He is predicting the literal destruction of the temple or the supplanting of the old Hebrew covenant with His own blood-cult, the practical benefits of the widow's giving all she had are casually shrugged off as negligible or nonexistent. Given that the widow's gift was noble not because of any worldly benefits but only by virtue of her poverty, any attempt to alleviate that poverty would clearly have detracted from the moral quality of her action. In the Saviour's view, those who devour widows' houses are wrong only because they deny the widows in question any chance of renouncing their worldly substance voluntarily.