What the Bible says about the poor widow in the temple is often used as an model of sacrificial Christian giving.

This is what I learned in Sunday School. When I went to Sunday School, the major topic of many of our opening exercises was raising money for the poor. We made little church-shaped cardboard boxes to hold our nickels and dimes so that we could help buy chickens or a cow for people in some poor village somewhere. Every Thanksgiving, we were supposed to collect food for the poor. And so we brought in cans of green beans and boxes of Jell-O to donate to the poor. We heard many times about the poor widow who gave everything she had to live on as an example of what God wanted us to do.

This kind of interpretation of the Bible story about the poor widow is a drastic misinterpretation of the teachings of Jesus about money.

A widow in ancient Palestine was in a very vulnerable financial condition. Most people lived in patriarchal family units on hereditary family land, under the authority of the ruling adult male. Women lived under the authority and protection of men. Unmarried women remained at home under the authority of their fathers. Married women lived under the authority and protection of their husbands.

While some widows in Palestine were citizens of Rome, with greater legal and financial resources, most widows were extremely vulnerable. Most widows had no legal standing and no resources of their own. For this reason, the Torah always recognized widows as a special class of people who needed protection.

In both Mark 12:38-44 and Luke 20:45-47; 21:1-4, the story of the poor widow comes immediately after Jesus's condemnation of the practices of the Scribes. The Scribes were the legal scholars. They were the experts on the oral and written Torah. In both Mark and Luke, Jesus comments on the poor widow after describing the Scribes as those who "devour the houses of widows."

Unless she was a Roman citizen, a widow had no legal status to manage the property and money her husband had left behind. After a man's death, the Scribes would appoint a pious man to handle the widow's financial affairs. The implication of the story is that the Scribes were using their status as experts in the law to defraud the widows out of their property. The Scribes who were supposed to protect her had left her with only two tiny coins to live on.

This story Jesus tells about the poor widow is consistent with his condemnation of the religious system, which defrauded the poor widows. It is also consistent with his condemnation of the practices of the rich because of their exploitation of the poor. He compares the contributions of the rich with the tiny contribution of the widow as a way to criticize the rich. Although the very rich gave large sums of money, what they gave made no difference in the way they lived. They gave out of their abundance. However, she gave all she had to live on.

When Christian teaching separates the story of the widow from the comment about the Scribes who devour the houses of widows, it misses the point of the teachings of Jesus about money.

This is not a story telling the poor to give away everything they have. It is a story about an unjust system in which the poorest and most vulnerable were being exploited by the rich and powerful.

What Sunday School taught me about this story distorts the point of the original story and creates fear and lack in the ones Jesus intended to liberate.

The words about the poor widow need to be put back into the context of the whole story of Jesus in his campaign to proclaim the Kingdom of God for the benefit of the poorest and most vulnerable. This story does not teach the most vulnerable of the society to give away everything they have. In fact, this story is a condemnation of a religious system that robbed widows of their money.