The temple, in which Jesus is depicted by Mark as "teaching" (δίδαχη), was a symbol of all that Jesus as portrayed by Mark was in protest. The text must mean that he was holding forth somewhere in the vast outermost court, the total circumference of the outer wall being nearly a mile. One thinks perhaps he had attracted a few like himself, dissenters from the temple's business as usual.
In fact, he warned those whom he was teaching to "take heed of " (βλέπετε -- keep your eye on) the scribes, the other teachers, with whom he had a lot of problems including presumably what they were teaching, but he saved his comments for their public behavior. To an objective observer, it could have sounded like jealousy: The scribes got the nice vestments and the best seats in the house all the while get to rob widows -- read here "powerless women." No doubt, though, on whose side Mark's Jesus was.
The challenge to the readers of According to Mark in any age is to take sides with the poor, the dispossessed and those looked down upon by the pooh-bahs - political, religious and otherwise. Has anything much changed where that lot is concerned? The clergy get the splendid vestments and the seats up front and most of the air time in public worship. Beware of us.
This passage is comprised of two distinct sections (in academe they are called "pericopes") in so far as we can tell, with the common thread being the image of the widow. First there are the scribes who allegedly "devour widows' houses" (probably the verb "to appropriate" is the concept we would understand). Second is the poor widow herself who puts into the temple treasury (receptacles resembling large trumpet bells) two small coins λεπταδυό, her rich gift out of her poverty -- in tragic comparison with what the scribes were supposedly doing. Widows of that time had no right of inheritance and were powerless before the world.
What of the much-maligned scribe -- the Greek word we would see almost as "grammarian" but meaning something like "stenographer" -- who is consistently ridiculed as a tool throughout the gospels? By the early part of the first century CE, the scribe had become a combination bureaucrat-academician in the tradition of the post-exilic elder Ezra. Scribes tended to be laser-beam focused on Torah, the source of their power and privilege. In Mark's eyes, the interpretation the scribes apply to Torah was cramped and narrow. He also saw them as liturgical bloviators (12:40b).
Whether or not any of this was true generally of the scribes rather than of some of them (the "few-rotten-apples-in-every-barrel" theory) is hard to know at this remove. What is certain, however, is that Mark's narrative is part of his continuing assault on the religious establishment as he knew it, just as the middle third of the first century CE was turning into the last third. The implication is that Jesus, as Mark imagined him, took the same dim view as he. That would have put Jesus on a collision course with the establishment, just as Mark, followed in due course by Matthew, Luke and John, would go on to narrate.
There is a remote connection between the Mark reading and the portion of I Kings that is appointed in this proper. The latter concerns the widow of Zarephath who is spared starvation by a jar of meal and a cruse of oil neither of which seem to run out. The visiting prophet did not devour the widow's house, but shared it and her food with her -- perhaps an almost egalitarian act that could be contrasted with the scribes' elitist behavior.
The Hebrews reading depicts the Christ figure himself as a sacrifice -- in contrast with the sacrifice of bullocks and turtle doves going on in the deeper recesses of the temple -- in the outer precincts of which Mark's Jesus is said to have taught those who would listen.
Many years ago I was faced with a major life decision. I had to decide whether or not the only kind of congregation worth my time and energy was a large and prominent one. I would not say I was required to spend a great deal of time researching the decision, because it soon became apparent that the majority of those chosen as clergy leaders of large congregations had generally restrained whatever avant-garde impulses they might have had so as to appear to be of one mind with the majorities in those congregations, which invariably slouched toward the conservative end of the spectrum. Once incumbent, those leaders tended to stay within the bounds of the middle course to avoid offending overmuch the factions at either end.
That amounted to what I took to be the very thing St. John the Divine was fretting about when he wrote the words, "Because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth" (Revelation 3:16). Not disposed by nature to be lukewarm, I had to take what seemed to me to be the intellectually honest path. I had tried for a time to walk about the temple porticos in rich vesture and to preach the middle way, but in the end I could not do it.
Not entirely without couth, I had tried to sugar-coat the pill, but the patients were not spared the dose. I carried on such minister in "outer-court" venues, one of which turned out to be a weekly column in the large morning daily newspaper of my city in which for a number of years I wrote rather passionately about ethics and public policy to a vaster "congregation" than ever I could have imagined. It is not recorded that I devoured the houses of any widows.
