Scribes vs. Widows (Mark #44)

Before we open the Bible, I want you to do something. Think of someone you have great respect for. It could be someone you know personally — a grandparent, a teacher who shaped you. It could be an author, or someone from history. Just someone whose life and character command your genuine admiration.

Do you have that person in mind? Good. Hold onto them.

Now let me add something to the picture. Imagine that this person you respect so deeply gets caught red-handed in some horrendous, egregious sin. Maybe it turns out they had an affair. Maybe multiple affairs. Maybe some horrible financial indiscretions came to light. Maybe they covered up an appalling case of abuse — or worse, they were the one perpetrating it.

How do you feel about your person now?

For Many People, This Isn’t Imaginary

You may be thinking, “That would never happen.” But what I just described as a hypothetical is, for a great many people, simply what happened. They had someone in their life they respected enormously, and that person did something horrific. It lands like a personal betrayal.

And it seems like news of this kind surfaces every single month. Just this week, the head pastor of a large church in Florida was arrested in a police sting. He believed he was messaging an underage girl online and had arranged to meet her on a Friday night. He was actually talking to an undercover officer. That sting caught sixteen men, including him. To make it more unsettling, he was released with a court date and was back on stage that Sunday as though nothing had happened. His church didn’t find out until Monday.

A lot of people respected that man. To be considered a megachurch in America, you need at least two thousand people. I don’t know how large his church was, but there were at least two thousand people who thought he was wonderful — and look what he did.

Or consider that for months now, the number one podcast in the Christianity and religion category has been an investigation into the rise and fall of a prominent church that grew rapidly and then imploded. Its founding pastor accumulated enormous fame and influence. Some people didn’t care for him, but a great many did, and he genuinely influenced tons of people toward Jesus. What the reporting revealed is that behind the scenes there was a long pattern of verbal abuse and a trail of deeply wounded people. That church no longer exists. Its fourteen or so campuses became autonomous congregations — so one good thing came out of it, several churches — but there was an enormous amount of pain in the process.

Both of those examples come out of Christendom. We could just as easily jump to Hollywood and the MeToo movement, or to sports, where athletes regularly do or say something that causes people who deeply admired them to withdraw that admiration overnight. It’s probably happened in your family. It may have happened at your workplace. This is a regular, recurring feature of human life.

I bring it up because today Jesus is going to talk about some of the most respected men of his day — and he’s going to pull the curtain back and reveal the fraud underneath. But he doesn’t stop at exposing people. He also shows us someone we ought to become more like. He essentially pits the two against each other, and I hope it leaves us asking two things: Who do we give our respect to, and why? And what kind of life are we going to live?

Where We Are in Mark

We’ve been in the book of Mark for roughly a year and a half. I honestly didn’t believe it when I looked it up, but yes — we started back in March of last year. If this is your first time with us, you might be thinking, “Do you go one word at a time?” We’ve taken breaks. Christmas was a break. We did twenty-one days of prayer. In August we did a series on defining the church, then a series on generosity. Now we’re back in Mark for a couple of weeks.

We left off in chapter 12, where Jesus was having a series of conversations with various Jewish leaders. They weren’t approaching him to learn from him. They were approaching him to trap him. Their hope was that Jesus would fail to answer a question, look foolish in front of everyone, and lose his following — so the crowds would conclude he wasn’t so special after all, things could return to normal, and the leaders could keep their power.

Every single time, he answered beautifully. Perfectly. And he only looked better. Eventually they realized they weren’t going to trip him up, and they went quiet. Then Jesus asked them a question — one he clearly knew the answer to and they clearly did not. It was a conversation-ending mic drop.

And now, in verse 38, Jesus picks the mic back up and starts talking about the very men who had been trying to trap him. He warns the crowd to beware of the scribes — who love to walk around in long robes, love greetings in the marketplaces, love the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.

Who the Scribes Actually Were

The translation I’m using says “scribes.” Yours might say “experts.” You could say “scholars.” Same deal. These were men who spent their entire lives reading, copying, and studying the Scriptures, and had therefore become the recognized experts. When you needed theological guidance, these were the men you turned to. And in a faith-based culture, that means they rose to the very top of the social order — among the greatest and most respected men of their day.

We don’t have a clean equivalent. Within Christianity, the closest parallel might be pastors or seminary professors. Inside the church, they carry some respect. Out in the general population? Not so much. There was a time when pastors sat near the top of the list — right up there with the president and doctors. Pastors have slid a long way down that list. These days I think we land somewhere slightly above snake oil salesmen.

So I don’t think we fully grasp how respected the scribes were. Try this instead: take that person you thought of at the beginning, and the level of respect you have for them. Now imagine an entire city holding that exact level of respect for them. Not one dissenting voice. Now double it. That starts to approach where the scribes stood in their culture.

Which is why Jesus opening with the word beware would have been so profoundly disconcerting. It’s a punch to the gut. Beware of the greatest, most respected men of our day? Jesus, are you out of your mind?

What Jesus Is Actually Condemning

Notice carefully what Jesus is not angry about. He isn’t condemning them for wearing long robes. It isn’t a sin to be greeted in the marketplace. It isn’t even wrong to pray at length. What Jesus is against is that they didn’t merely enjoy the attention their robes brought, or the attention they got walking through the market, or the attention that came with the best seats in the synagogue. They sought it. They came to expect it. They began to demand it.

Years ago a friend of mine, a pastor on staff at a large church, was headed to a monthly luncheon for pastors and Christian leaders in his city. He was running about ten minutes late. When he arrived, the lot was packed, and he was circling with no spot in sight, resigned to parking on the street — when suddenly he spotted an open space right near the front door.

His first thought was relief. Someone must have left early. Then he thought, it’s probably a handicap space, and started to drive past. But it wasn’t. There was a sign, and the sign read: Reserved for Pastor.

He had two thoughts. The first was: the meeting’s already started, so the pastor is surely here — maybe he did what I do. At my friend’s own church, the staff parked in the far back corner of the lot so that guests and church family could have the close spots. So maybe this pastor had done the same, leaving the good spot for someone else.

The second thought was funnier. The sign doesn’t say which pastor. I’m a pastor. It’s reserved for me. So he pulled in, chuckling to himself, got out, and started walking around the front of the car.

That’s when he heard the horn. He turned around to see a brand-new luxury SUV with the window rolling down and a man inside shouting, “Who do you think you are? Get out of my spot. Now.“

My friend said he had two thoughts in that moment. First: how does this man afford a vehicle worth more than my annual salary? Second: I didn’t know a pastor could have that much rudeness and entitlement in his voice.

That pastor was acting exactly like the scribes of Jesus’s day. The question had stopped being how can I serve these people? and become I deserve these things. I deserve the best parking spot, the best seat in the synagogue, because of my title, my position, my education. So get out of my spot.

Why They Receive the Greater Condemnation

The scribes knew the Scriptures inside and out. If you needed someone to speak theologically on a difficult matter, they could do it. And yet all that intimate knowledge had not changed their hearts. They had simply twisted it. Rather than helping people connect to God, they used it to extract accolades for themselves. It became all about me.

Which means the greatest days of their eternal existence were the days they were living right then — because God’s judgment was coming. This is not what God created us for. He did not create us to take. And taking is precisely what the scribes were doing. These were the very men God intended to use to help people understand his law, his heart, and the coming of the Messiah — and instead they ignored all of that and asked, how can I twist this to get something for myself?

You see it most clearly in the phrase about devouring widows’ houses. That’s a vivid way of saying they took advantage of widows. Study the Judaic law and you find that they were supposed to be caring for widows. Widows were among the most vulnerable people in that world — in such a male-based society, if a woman’s husband died, she had no income. So God structured the Mosaic law to protect widows, to provide for them, to love them.

These scribes took the very word of God that told them to care for widows and twisted it so the widows would care for them — their money, their food, their comfort. The scribes held all the influence, and they used that power against people who had none, purely so they could get.

So Jesus pulls the curtain back: this is not who you want to be. Beware of them. Don’t give them your respect, because these are not men reflecting the heart of God.

And Then Comes the Widow

But the text doesn’t stop there. In verse 41, Jesus sits down opposite the treasury and watches people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. Then a poor widow comes and puts in two small copper coins — worth about a penny. Jesus calls his disciples over and tells them that this poor widow has put in more than everyone else combined, because they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in everything she had. All she had to live on.

Every November I take a couple of days away — partly for personal refreshment, partly to build out the next year of preaching. I try to lay out the whole calendar. When I was mapping Mark, I didn’t have real sermon titles yet, so I threw in placeholders and figured I’d replace them during the week of preparation. For this week, way back in November, I had typed: Scribes vs. Widows.

Our worship leader thought that was hilarious. In our staff meeting he suddenly launched into full boxing-announcer mode: “Welcome to the main event! In this corner, dressed in the long robes…” He kept going. I had tears. I should have had him reenact it for the whole church, because I am nowhere near as funny as he is.

But in a sense, that’s exactly what Mark is doing. He shifts immediately from a story about scribes to a story about a widow.

How Mark Got This Story

I don’t think these two events happened chronologically back to back. I think they occurred at separate times. If you’ve been with us through Mark, you’ll remember that tradition holds this Gospel is essentially Peter’s account. Peter was in prison awaiting crucifixion — and he didn’t want to be crucified exactly as Jesus was, so when the time came he insisted they do it upside down. At any moment the soldiers could come for him, so he’s recounting his version of the story of Jesus while Mark writes as fast as he can.

So Peter has just finished telling Mark about all those conversations with the Jewish leaders, how they tried to discredit Jesus and failed completely, how Jesus asked a question nobody could answer, and then how he launched into the scribes. Mark is scribbling it down. And as Peter says the line about devouring widows’ houses, I imagine him stopping and saying, “Oh — that reminds me. There was this time at the temple when Jesus sat down and just watched the people…”

At the temple in Jerusalem there wasn’t a room called “the treasury.” There was an area outside the Court of the Women with collection boxes — thirteen of them, according to what I read this week, and one source described them as shaped like trumpets. Other parts of the temple were for bringing an animal for a burnt offering or grain for a grain offering. These boxes were for freewill offerings, used to maintain the temple’s operations and to provide for the poor.

Giving Used to Be Visible

In our day, nobody knows what anyone gives. Most people give online — convenient, private, no fanfare. If someone uses a physical box, the check has the same dimensions whether it’s five dollars or five million. Nobody can tell.

We do make guesses, of course. We look at someone’s clothes, their car, the size of their house, and start extrapolating. But we’re often wrong in both directions. Someone can look wealthy and give twenty dollars. Someone who merely seems to be getting by turns out to be staggeringly generous. We simply don’t know.

In Jesus’s day the money was tangible and audible. They could tell. And the way this passage is written, Jesus is making it plain that these wealthy givers wanted people to know. They’re hauling it in, plunking it into those trumpet-shaped receptacles, and the crowd is going, “Look how much they’re giving.” But Jesus knows that while it looks like an enormous sum, measured against what they actually possess it’s a fraction. They’re doing exactly what the scribes do — performing, so people will say, “Look how generous. They must be so holy, so spiritual.”

Then a widow walks up. Maybe she whispers a prayer. She tips her hand over the box, and if you’re listening carefully you hear it — two tiny coins.

Just How Small Two Coins Were

The Greek uses the word lepta. A lepton was the smallest denomination available. Two lepta equaled a quadrans, which was one sixty-fourth of a denarius. A denarius was a full day’s wages — eight honest hours of work, enough to buy your food for the day.

So do the math. One sixty-fourth of an eight-hour workday is about seven minutes. That’s nothing. That’s why the translation renders her two coins as a penny. It’s the smallest thing our currency can express. She gave the equivalent of nothing.

The Dollar That Meant More Than the Hundreds

After my wife and I graduated from college, we felt God calling us to the mission field. I’ve shared before about our time working at a school for missionary kids in Venezuela. We were raising support, meeting with individuals and visiting churches.

We reached out to a few churches back in my hometown in southwest Iowa. My parents had helped start a church there, and after several years some things happened and the original founders left and started another one. But things had changed at that first church, and there were good relationships again, so my parents encouraged me to contact them. They said they wouldn’t take us on as a church, but individuals might want to support us, and we were welcome to share for about ten minutes during the service.

Afterward people could sign up to receive our prayer letters — this was long enough ago that we didn’t have email yet — or to support us financially. We had to track the amounts, because we couldn’t leave for the field until we hit one hundred percent.

I think only two or three people signed up financially. One of the amounts was one dollar. It was scribbled, so my first thought was that a kid had signed up. How wonderful would that be — a child saying, “I want to support you, one dollar a month.” Then I looked at the name, and it wasn’t a child.

It was a man everyone in town knew as the poor man of the community. It’s embarrassing to admit, but when I was a kid, our town told jokes at his expense the way other places told other kinds of jokes. He couldn’t afford a car, so he drove a moped. In my hometown, mopeds were for fourteen-year-olds — fourteen-year-olds and him.

And this man had joined that church, heard us share, and decided he wanted to support us. All he could manage was one dollar a month.

I’ll be honest with you: that one dollar meant more to me than some of the twenties and fifties and hundreds we received. Because I knew how poor he was, and I knew that every single month he was choosing to give a dollar of what little he had so that we could go make a difference in the lives of missionary kids and help them find and follow Jesus.

The Knockout Punch

That man was the widow of my hometown. And this widow’s two coins could barely buy half a loaf of bread. It was everything she had, and she chose to give it as an act of worship.

Then notice Jesus’s reaction. He calls the disciples over — come here, come here, look at this — and says she gave more than all of those wealthy people. I’m certain someone was thinking, “Wait a second. I was watching. That man just put in a fortune, and she gave less than a penny. What do you mean?” But out of their riches, they gave. Out of her poverty, she gave everything.

And I think the reason this resonated so deeply with Jesus is that in just a few weeks he was going to do the very same thing. He was going to give everything. He was going to give his life.

If this were a spiritual boxing match, Jesus is standing in the middle as the referee saying: in this corner are men doing the exact opposite of what God called them to do — and in this corner is someone who just landed the spiritual knockout punch, doing precisely what resonates with the heart of God. Because God has given everything for us. And this widow, overlooked and ignored, with no influence and no standing, turns out to be the person most deserving of our respect.

Question One: To Whom Do I Give Respect?

Jesus is clearly saying we should not be handing our respect to the scribes of our day, because fundamentally they are takers. We should be giving it to the widows — the ones who give to others.

Let me add a couple of disclaimers. First, this does not mean we should hunt down the scribes of our culture and run them through the cancel-culture shredder. They are people. They are human. In just a few weeks after this scene, Jesus goes to a cross to die for their sins too. He loves them. His words here are extraordinarily harsh precisely because he knows they are not living the way he called them to live. He’s calling them to something better. His image is in them and he wants it restored. He doesn’t hate them, so neither should we.

Second, though Jesus speaks of scribes collectively, I doubt every single one was awful. There were almost certainly a handful who genuinely loved God, loved studying the Scriptures, and sincerely sought to serve their community. It’s just that enough of them had gone bad to spoil the batch, so Jesus addressed them as a group. There are scribes in our own day who, if we got to know them, would surprise us.

And on the other side: poverty doesn’t automatically make someone a saint. We know nothing of this widow’s life story. We get one small glimpse. We watch her give, and Jesus praises her for it, and by God’s design that moment came through Mark’s pen so it could call us to live the same way. But it doesn’t mean every widow is a saint.

With all that said — I think we often just drift along with the culture and hand our respect to people who haven’t earned it. We put their posters on our walls as teenagers. We gush about them on social media. We buy anything with their name and likeness on it. We make it about them.

Take sports. Wins matter, so the coaches with the most wins get the most respect. But what if a coach is merely using his team to build his own legacy? Set professional sports aside and think about college athletics. In my opinion, college sports exist to help young men and women learn to persevere and work through hard things so they can become excellent citizens. It isn’t ultimately about the win. Compete hard, absolutely — but that’s not the point.

If all our respect flows to the coach who racks up wins while treating his players as instruments, I’m not sure that’s where it belongs. Maybe our respect should go to the coach who pours himself into those young men and women, wins fewer games, and changes lives.

So who are you giving respect to? Are you giving it because of the wins? The title? The car? The apparent bank account? Because they vote the way you vote? Or are you giving it because you see someone laying their life down for someone or something?

Question Two: Who Wins Your Internal Battle?

If we’re staging a boxing match between scribes and widows, here’s the thing — there’s a little of both inside every one of us, and the match is happening internally.

The scribe in us wants the attention, the new things, the comfort. Some of us carry more scribe than others. But even the person who has done an excellent job of muting their scribe, to the point that it looks dormant, still has one. The very fact that Jesus had to come and die on a cross reveals that every last one of us has a scribe inside.

But I also believe there’s a widow in each of us, and that part gets overlooked. Some of us think, “Well, I’m like the widow — I don’t know the Bible, I’m not as educated, I don’t have all the answers,” and so we spend our lives chasing after the scribe. But I think there’s a part of us that genuinely wants God and wants to do the right thing. Maybe nobody has shown us how. Maybe we’ve been trying to do it in our own strength.

And that’s the trap. If you engage this inner battle by beating up your scribe so the widow can emerge, and you do it under your own power, you’ll walk away saying, “Look what I accomplished. Look how great I am.” Which means the scribe was winning the whole time.

The only way real internal change happens is by submitting yourself completely to God — letting the Holy Spirit come in and do the work only he can do, putting the scribe in his place and drawing the widow out, until you’re willing to give everything.

You Have Everything to Give

Many of us assume we don’t have much to give. But you do. You have everything to give — you have your life. Because that’s what Jesus gave. He didn’t merely give us his time, his wisdom, and his presence. He gave his actual life.

Because of the scribe within us, all of us are sinners. We are selfish. And yet Jesus went to the cross to die the death we should have died and pay the penalty our inner scribe had earned — so that we could be released from it, and live like Jesus lived and love like Jesus loved, and give everything to him.

So who is going to win your internal battle?

Sit with that question. As you take the bread and the cup, remember that this is his body broken for you and his blood poured out for you. He gave it all. And ask him: Jesus, would you mute my scribe? Would you bring out my inner widow, so that I give everything to you? If there’s an area of your life you’ve been holding onto and refusing to release, release it to him in prayer. You may need to go do something this week. There may be someone you need to contact. There may be something you need to go give away. What are you still holding?

And if you’re not a follower of Jesus, I’m genuinely glad you’re here. We honestly started this church for you. Our goal is to help people who feel spiritually disconnected find and follow Jesus. We’re not going to look down on you — the opposite is true. We’re here for you.

What I’d gently ask is that you not take the communion elements yet — not to deny you something, but because God has something better for you first. If you take them now, you might fool yourself into thinking you’re fine. These elements say the opposite: none of us are good. They remind us that we each have an inner scribe who only wants to take, while God is calling us to give. So the first thing to give is your life.

Instead of coming forward, stay where you are and pray. Ask him whether it’s true — that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. If it’s true, let God bring out your inner widow, and give everything to him right now.

And if you already know this gospel and have given your life to Jesus, then come. You don’t have to be an official member here. This isn’t about our church; this is about Jesus. Come humbly. Come joyfully. Come willingly. Come saying, “God, I surrender this to you.” Let the words of the song become your prayer, and let yourself be reminded of everything God has done for you — because remembering is what draws us to him and moves us to give it all to Christ.

Let’s do this now in remembrance of Jesus.