Thursday
Thursday
The Little Apocalypse
I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.
Mark 13:30
Sitting one day on the Mount of Olives, Jesus and his disciples enjoyed the panoramic view across the Kidron Valley to Herod’s temple. It had already been about fifty years in building, and it was still not quite finished. Nevertheless, it was a spectacular sight. “What massive stones!” commented the disciples, “What magnificent buildings!” (v. 1). Yet to their astonishment Jesus responded that not a single stone would survive the temple’s coming destruction. This was the beginning of the so-called little apocalypse recorded in Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke 21, in which Jesus peered into the future. Our difficulty in interpreting this discourse is that Jesus was looking ahead both to the immediate future (the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the temple in AD 70) and to the ultimate future (the Parousia and the end of history). The two events were to some extent intertwined in Jesus’s teaching, so it is not always clear to which he was alluding.
Immediate signs would include the rise of false messiahs, wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and famines. But these, Jesus said, were “the beginning of birth pains” (v. 8); the end was not yet. Other signs heralding the end would include persecution and martyrdom, the worldwide preaching of the gospel, family divisions, and great convulsions in the sun, the moon, and the stars, which is familiar apocalyptic imagery for sociopolitical upheavals. And then people would “see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory” (v. 26). Indeed, that generation would not pass away until “all these things” (the heralding signs) had taken place. In contrast to “all these things,” however, nobody knows that day or that hour, not even the Son himself.
The main emphasis of the little apocalypse is not to be found in any program of signs and events but in Jesus’s repeated summons (seven times in Mark 13) to be alert and ready for his coming, since nobody knows when it will take place. “What I say to you,” Jesus concludes, “I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’” (v. 37).
For further reading: Mark 13