advantage of the most defenseless people, like the widows, swallowing up their livelihoods by currying gifts and benevolence. Their lengthy prayers were nothing more than a covering for their hypocrisy, perhaps used as a means of influencing others to honor and support them. Such people, said Jesus, will stand before God and receive a much more severe judgment—by implication severer even than the outcasts and sinners on whom they looked with disdain. Following the warning against the religion of