The Prediction of the End

S. Mark xiii. 24–37

We pass now into a region where clouds and darkness are round about us. Perhaps nowhere else are we so vividly reminded of the mysteries in which the Divine Incarnation is shrouded, or so forcibly constrained to confess that “there are secret things which are the Lord’s.”

This deep and solemn utterance of our Blessed Lord to His Apostles, touching the coming of the Son of Man to judge the world, brings together two facts which the finite mind is incapable of reconciling, viz., that as God He knew all things, but as man His knowledge was limited by the conditions of His Humanity. The co-existence in the One Person of omniscience and ignorance can only be apprehended through faith. It is revealed in Holy Scripture, and on that account demands our acceptance; and we have no more right to cavil at the assertion, than we have to doubt that, by virtue of His Deity, He was supremely blessed, while through the infirmities of humanity He experienced sorrow and pain.

How often do we find that He exercised a perfect and superhuman insight into the hearts and feelings of others, reading their unspoken thoughts, and telling them what they had carefully concealed, and showing that, as S. Paul said, in Him were all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, although S. Luke writes with equal plainness that His powers of perception were limited by laws of progression, for “He grew in wisdom” as He did “in stature.”

It is in exact harmony with what we read of Him at the grave at Bethany, that “His holy cheeks were wet with human tears, while the loud voice of Omnipotence was crying, ‘Lazarus, come forth! ‘”

The Incarnation of Deity carries with it of necessity difficult contrasts and paradoxes; and for the solution and reconciliation we must wait till we no longer see “through a glass darkly, but face to face.”

Turn now to the prediction before us. It is one wholly beyond the range of human reason to conceive. It is not a vision of the near future, of which there were premonitory signs, such as a far-seeing mind, accustomed to discern times and seasons, might be able to interpret. He passes wholly beyond the horizon of things visible, beyond the destruction of Jerusalem immediately preceding, and fixes the attention on the coming of the Son of Man at the end of the world. He speaks of certain days that were to follow the tribulation, the beginning of which He had linked with the overthrow of the Jewish capital. Its consummation was to be expected only perhaps after centuries of persecution and affliction, during which, as Luke implies, Jerusalem would “be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” History is the best comment upon the meaning of the term. Has there ever been a time since the Fall of Jerusalem in which the “dispersions” have not suffered tribulation? The record of inhuman cruelty and massacre in our own generation shows that “the end is not yet,” and that our Lord’s words still await their fulfilment.

He told His disciples that strange phenomena would be witnessed before the final accomplishment: “the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven.”

The imagery is such as befitted so grand a theme. To interpret it literally is to divest it of its sublimity and grandeur, and to cavil at its inconsistence with scientific possibilities is to apply to the language of the New Testament rules that we should never think of in the interpretation of the Old. Isaiah had employed precisely similar figures to foreshadow the Fall of Babylon, and Ezekiel also in predicting the overthrow of Egypt.

It may have been that the sun and moon and stars were used as symbols for the centres of government, round which ecclesiastical, political, and social systems revolved; or possibly He pointed to the destruction of heathen religions, and foretold especially the cessation of the worship of “the heavenly host,” because it had been the earliest and most widespread form of idolatry. Enough to know that preceding the Advent there will be vast changes, it may be physical and cosmical, as well as social and spiritual, and out of the chaos to which the world shall be again reduced, Christ will come in power and glory, and gather in the elect whom He has sealed for His Own.

At this point, with a transition as swift as that which transferred His thoughts from the type to the antitype, He reverts to the dissolution of the Jewish Polity. A fig-tree, beneath which in all probability He was sitting to rest with His disciples on the slopes of Olivet, furnished Him with an illustration for His teaching. Its fresh green leaves were the heralds of the approaching summer. The generation then living x might, if these were observant, see signs which would bespeak with equal clearness the near fulfilment of the predicted destruction. It was an echo of the previous declaration before His Transfiguration: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”

All this our Lord foresaw through that Divine knowledge which He had from being One with the Father. But there were times when He chose to empty Himself, and to hold in abeyance, as it were, the attributes of Deity, in order that His Humanity might be fully expressed. Hooker, in dwelling on the conjunction of natures in the Person of Christ, shows that the properties of His Manhood may be seen in that nature “which felt hunger after long fasting, was desirous of rest after travail, testified compassion and love by tears, groaned in heaviness, and with extremity of grief even melted away itself into bloody sweats;” and that these are not abolished by association with the properties of His Deity. “We may not imagine that the properties of the weaker nature have vanished with the presence of the more glorious, and have been therein swallowed up as in a gulf.” It is only by realising the truth of this that we can understand what He meant when He said in reference to the end of the world: “Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”

Nothing could have impressed their minds more deeply with the absolute uncertainty of the time of the event than this confession, that even He Himself could not tell them when it would be. The necessity of being prepared for it He enforced under a variety of figures, only one of which has been preserved by S. Mark. When He had departed they must bear ever in mind that they were left “to occupy” till He should return, each with his appointed work to do in the household of His Church. The attitude of mind that best befitted men so situated was that of constant watchfulness, not only that they might be awake l when 2 their Master should return, but that He should find them at their posts fulfilling their daily task. The two duties have been sometimes separated. Carried away by the expectation that the Day of the Lord was immediately pending, men have detached themselves wholly from the present, and have drifted, like the Thessalonians, from the anchorage of a settled mind, or been so agitated by fear that they had no spirit or energy for the duties of life. Others again, because the anticipations of men had been so often mocked, have resolved to put out of view the promise of His coming, and be satisfied to do their present work without reference to the future. Both these tempers of mind are rebuked by the warning to the Apostles. He alone obeys the Master’s command to watch, who is awake to the call of his worldly occupation, in whatever station of life his duty lies, and who at the same time looks out for Him in all that happens, “who would not be surprised, or over-agitated, or overwhelmed, if he found that He was coming at once.” orthodox did not scruple to defend the Faith by improper means. Cf. the insertion in i S. John v. 7.

Note: Sabseism has only one rival among the ancient systems of idolatrous worship in its claim to be both the earliest and most largely adopted, viz., Ophiolatry.

Note: Figs and olives were so often found together in this neighbourhood that they seem” to justify the Mussulman’s belief, that in the oath in the Koran, * By the olive and the fig,’ the Almighty swears by His favoured city of Jerusalem with this adjacent mountain” of Olivet. — Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, 179.

Note: From not being able to realise that our Lord passes in thought from the Destruction of Jerusalem to the End of the World, and vice versa, and for the ‘time may be dwelling on each one singly, men have found difficulty in understanding this expression, and have been driven to strange interpretations of the word. Strauss and De Wette both referred this prediction to the Final Coming, and used this promise as a sign of our Lord’s fallibility. Some have interpreted it as” the race of the Jews “(Stier, Dorner, Alford); others of “believers” (Origen and Chrysostom); others again of “the human race.”

Note: Cf. p. 186.

Note: ovU 6 Tibs, “not even” the Son. In the parallel passage in S. Matt. xxiv. 36 they have fallen out of the Received Text. They have however considerable authority, and are inserted in the Revised Version from MSS. B D. S. Ambrose, de Fid. v. 193, indicated that they were wanting also in S. Mark in the MSS. of his time:” Veteres non habent codices Grseci, quia nee Filius sat.” Not improbably they were purposely omitted at a time when the

Note: “Watch” of the Authorised Version in vv. 33 and 35 is represented by different Greek words — aypvirvetre and yprjyope’iTe.

Note: In olden times the Jewish night had been divided into three watches — cf. Judges vii. 19, — but Lightfoot has disputed this (Exercit. in Matt. xiv. 25). The Rabbis, however, testify to the triple division. The fourfold watch was adopted between the time of the Judges and David, not, as is commonly said, when Judoea became a Roman province. Cf. p. 141, n. 3.