Big Idea: The pretentious religiousness of scribes and wealthy worshipers and of the magnificent temple buildings contrasts with the simple devotion of a poor widow.

Understanding the Text

In place of the question-and-answer scenario of the first part of Jesus’s public ministry in the temple (20:1–40), we now have a series of pronouncements by Jesus that bring that phase of the Jerusalem story to an end. They begin with a response to the leaders’ hostile questioning, in which Jesus raises the question of the nature of messiahship. But that is the end of Luke’s record of Jesus’s encounter with the religious leaders, and thereafter Jesus speaks rather to his disciples (though with the crowd still listening for 20:45–47 and possibly also for 21:1–6). His comments about the future fate of th…