R. The coming of the kingdom (17:20–37)
R. The coming of the kingdom (17:20–37)
Luke has here some sayings found only in this Gospel and some shared with Matthew 24. The passage stresses the certainty of judgment and the importance of being prepared.
20–21. The Pharisees may have asked their questions out of a genuine interest in the subject. Or, since they knew Jesus often spoke of the kingdom, they may have been interested in his view on the point. Jesus makes it clear that the kingdom is unlike any kingdom with which the Pharisees were familiar. Its coming cannot be observed. It is in the midst of you (entos hymōn), an expression for which a number of meanings have been suggested. a. The kingdom is essentially inward (‘in your hearts’). But this would be unparalleled in the Gospels (though cf. Rom. 14:17). b. The words prophesy the way the kingdom will come: ‘The kingdom will suddenly appear among you.’ This is possible, but if so, the words bear a somewhat unnatural sense. c. The kingdom is ‘within your reach’, i.e. it is attainable if you go the right way about it. But Jesus usually regards the kingdom as God’s gift, not man’s attainment. d. The kingdom is ‘among you’, i.e. it is present in the Person and ministry of Jesus. This seems the way the words should be taken.
22. Jesus now speaks to the disciples on the future of the kingdom. People cannot control it. They may desire to see it but they will not succeed. The days of the Son of man is not a self-explanatory expression. It may be a designation of the times of the Messiah (so SB). Some think that in later years the disciples will look back and long for one of the days when Jesus was with them. Or they may look forward to heaven and long for one of the days with him there. Bengel thinks of the days preceding the coming of the Lord and he cites 9:51 for a similar construction, ‘the days … for him to be received up’ (on v. 26). In addition it is possible to take one as a Semitism with the meaning ‘first’ (as in John 20:1). In that case the words point to the inauguration of the Messianic era, the second coming. On the whole it seems best to take it of the times of the Messiah. People will long for the Messianic kingdom (cf. 24, 26).
23–25. People will think they see the coming of the Son of man and will call on the disciples to see it their way too. The implication is that the kingdom is present in some secret, unexpected way. Jesus flatly rejects this. Such peering into corners will not be necessary, for when the Son of man comes his coming will be as obvious as the lightning. In any case other things must happen first. Immediately ahead is something very different: his suffering and rejection at the hands of this generation.
26–27. Till the Son of man comes life will continue normally. It will all be like the times of Noah. Noah’s contemporaries were sinful people, but it is not this that Jesus stresses. There is nothing sinful about the activities he lists; they are the stuff of ordinary human life. But that is just the point. Those people of old were so taken up in the ordinary affairs of life that they took no notice of Noah. The result was that they were overtaken in the destruction they might have avoided.
28–29. A similar warning is drawn from Lot’s experience. In his day, too, people went on with the business of living and took no heed of his example and teaching. But the fact that they ignored the man of God did not bring them exemption from the judgment of God. One day God brought Lot out of the city and that day Sodom was destroyed. T. W. Manson reminds us that neither Noah nor Lot was a ‘paragon of the virtues’. But ‘both realized that the catastrophe must come, and both took measures to save themselves. The Christian message is not for those who think that they deserve a better fate than their neighbours, but for those who, in the midst of universal indifference and complacency, realize the desperateness of their situation, and ask, “What must I do to be saved?” ’28
30. Jesus applies this to the day when the Son of man is revealed. People will be condemned not because they are sinners above all sinners, but because they have been self-centred. People like this are so taken up with their own concerns, in the ordinary business of life, that they have no time and no attention to spare for the warnings that come to them from God.
31. When that day comes the situation will be urgent. Jesus brings this out by speaking of the two things people might be tempted to do. A man on a housetop might think of saving something from his house; a man in the field might turn back for a similar reason. These are natural and harmless acts, but in the day of the Son of man this kind of thing will have no place. Then people must give their whole attention to the Son of man, not to their goods. The equivalent words in Matthew and Mark refer to flight at the fall of Jerusalem and some scholars hold that Luke has taken the saying out of its context and applied it to a situation where flight is impossible. But surely Luke was intelligent enough to see that! It is much better to hold that, whether Jesus uttered the words on more than one occasion or whether Luke is correctly applying them to another situation, they really do apply to the day when the Son of man comes. They inculcate a whole-hearted devotion to the Son of man uncomplicated by a desire for material possessions.
32. Lot’s wife came as close to deliverance without achieving it as was possible. She was brought right out of the doomed city and set on the way to safety. But she looked back and lingered, evidently in longing for the delights she was leaving behind. In the process she was caught up in the destruction that overtook Sodom and she perished with the city (Gen. 19:26).
33. Jesus has already spoken about saving and losing the life (9:24, where see note). In this context the thought will be that the self-affirming life of the people of Noah’s day and of Lot’s day (26–29) will prove self-destroying when the Son of man comes. By contrast anyone who is willing to lose his life now will save it then.
34–35. That day will mean separation between those who are for the Son of man and those whose lives show that they are against him. Physical proximity will mean nothing. Of two in one bed, one will be taken but not the other. Some translations read ‘two men’, presumably because in the Greek the masculine gender is used in both one and the other. But this gender would be employed if the two were man and wife, for the man might be either the one who is taken or the one who is left (cf. 24:25). It is likely that man and wife are meant. Again, of two women grinding grain together one will be taken and the other left. Jesus does not explain what he means by taken, but evidently it means taken to be with him (cf. 1 Thess. 4:17).
36–37. AV includes verse 36, but it has inferior MS attestation and most agree that it has been taken over from Matthew 24:40 (though some argue that a scribe may have omitted it on the grounds that a daytime activity is incompatible with the ‘night’ of v. 34). RSV rightly omits it. Jesus’ hearers want to know where all this is to take place, but he does not answer directly. He seems to be citing a proverb setting out the truth that it is the dead body that attracts the vultures (so, as mg., rather than eagles; the Greek word could mean either, but eagles do not eat carrion nor congregate in flocks). Where the spiritually dead are found, there inevitably will there be judgment.