Matthew 24:1-8
As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Jesus answered them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”
I will warn you ahead of time, this whole chapter will seem odd, even bizarre, and often be quite confusing. That’s because it represents a very different genre of literature that is largely unfamiliar to us apart from several small sections of the Bible. This kind of writing is called apocalyptic, and it’s highly symbolic, written to communities under duress to provide comfort, constructs the world almost entirely in the terms of a struggle between good and evil, and predicts earthly events that mirror heavenly ones.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke each have a small section of apocalyptic sayings of Jesus that sound a whole lot like this one, which probably means that they came from the same source. It also likely means that while the overwhelming majority of the Gospel stories about Jesus are not apocalyptic, clearly there was an apocalyptic tradition about Jesus that was strong enough that it had to be included.
In each case, it may help to remember that early Christian communities who heard and responded to these stories were experiencing some form of crisis. For some it may have been persecution or exclusion from their families and religious communities. For others it may have been the massive upheaval, confusion, and dislocation occasioned by the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. For others still it may simply have been that the initial expectations that Jesus would return soon were frustrated, and as the original eye-witnesses to Jesus’ ministry and earliest believers began to die, these later Christians wondered what was going on and whether their faith was valid.
Whatever the circumstances, passages like the one above helped root believes in the promise that past events, and often quite dramatic and even cataclysmic events – in this case likely the destruction of the Temple – were actually indicators that God’s will was progressing “according to plan.” Matthew, following Mark closely in this passage, may have therefore been suggesting to his early community of Christians that the profound disruption and upheaval caused by the Roman-Jewish wars and the sack of Jerusalem and destruction of its Temple was all foreseen by Jesus and were indeed markers that the beginning of the end was near.
While we may not have similar concerns to those earliest Christians or receive the same level of comfort from apocalyptic pronouncements, we might nevertheless hear in these passages the promise that even in the darkest times, God is still with us, working through even tragedy to care for us and all people.
Prayer: Dear God, apocalyptic passages are unfamiliar to us and sometimes sound rather bizarre. Help us to imagine the comfort they gave earlier believers and lead us to hear something of the truth of the Gospel through them. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Good reminder!