13:9-11
– Here again we see that Jesus’ primary
prophecy is towards the actual experience of his disciples. He warns them to be
on guard, and then prophesies with startling accuracy about the things that
will actually happen to them (arrests, persecutions, etc.), with many such
occurrences recorded in the book of Acts. Scripture and tradition together
witness to the way that the decades between Christ’s ascension and the
destruction of Jerusalem saw the persecution of the church, the disciples
proclaiming Christ before governing authorities, and the Gospel being preached
to all nations (prefigured at Pentecost, and put into practice when, as
tradition tells us, the disciples were all sent out from Jerusalem as
missionaries to the nations). However, if we are reading this set of prophecies
as secondarily being about the final climax of history, then we must be willing
to accept all of it as such, rather than cherrypicking the bits we like. It’s
not enough to suggest that we might live in the age that will witness the Day
of the Lord; we must also accept the fact that, just like wars and famines and
earthquakes characterize the whole period leading up to that day, so too will
persecutions. Even in our own day, we Christians who live outside the scope of
regular persecution are rather the minority. The only element of all of the
“signs” provided by Christ which might perhaps lend itself to a definitive
historical fulfillment is the one he gives in v.10: “the Gospel must first be
preached to all nations.” This is something that is accomplished in miniature
at Pentecost and in the disciples’ missionary journeys, but its final
fulfillment is still to come. There are still nations (ethnē) in the world that have yet to hear the message of Jesus
Christ. It is possible, however, and perhaps even likely, that this current
generation will see the fulfillment of that particular sign. But one thing is
clear: the proclamation of Christ to the nations has been a consistent hallmark
of the past two thousand years, just as clearly as have wars, earthquakes,
famines, and the persecution of the church. Jesus advises his disciples not to
worry about what to say when arrested and brought to trial for the sake of the
Gospel—the Holy Spirit will give them the words to say. Indeed, it has been the
church’s experience through the ages that the most compelling testimonies for
Christ spring from the mouths of common believers when standing before their
own martyrdoms. Since the context for this promise is so specific, we cannot
extend the hope of Spirit-inspired testimony to any and all situations (i.e.,
you must do your homework, plan well, and prepare before giving a sermon,
taking a test, or doing a job interview, and not just expect the Holy Spirit to
take over and give you all the answers). But we can, perhaps, extrapolate a
general principle from this promise: that when we give our all for Christ, we
will find that he is there with us, giving us all we need for every challenge
of the present moment. Though following Christ may include persecutions, it
will never include abandonment.
13:12-13 – This is one of the most difficult
warnings that Christ gives: a prophecy about the way that families will be
divided against each other because of the Gospel. This is an unfortunate fact
of the Christian experience—it was true in the first century, where converts to
Christianity from among Greeks and Romans faced persecution from their family
members, who felt betrayed by one of their own turning “atheist” by denying the
traditional pagan gods; it was true in the first century in Jewish homes, too,
where the early events of Vespasian’s re-conquest of Galilee and Judea forced
families to take sides, and sometimes there were those (like Christians) who
refused to support the Jewish rebels and then were turned over to those very
rebels by family members. And this prophecy of Jesus remains true today: in
many families, there is a cost to choosing to follow Christ—if one’s father,
mother, sister, brother, or children are not willing to answer the call of
Christ, then those relationships might be fractured. But Jesus gives a promise
to go along with the warning: “the one who stands firm to the end will be
saved.” Remember, he’s not talking about anyone’s eternal salvation in this
context, so the reader would not be advised to try to turn this saying into a
salvation-by-works teaching. Rather, Jesus is talking about the perseverance
and deliverance of his faithful people from the persecutions that are about to
descend upon them within a generation’s time. The following verses make it very
clear that Jesus is talking about salvation from the devastation that will fall
upon Jerusalem when the “abomination that causes desolation” appears. This is a
promise about God’s sure support in the midst of persecution and disaster—whatever
else may be happening around us and to us, including the prospect of our own
deaths, there is never any safer place to be than in the hands of God.
13:14-19 – When we come to this passage,
Christians are often tempted once again to jump immediately to an “end times”
interpretation. So it’s worth reminding ourselves yet again that Jesus is
specifically addressing the disciples’ question of when the destruction of the
Temple will occur, and what the signs of that event will be. Jesus’ main
prophecy here, then, is directly fulfilled in what happens in Jerusalem in the
year 70 AD. He delivers his prophecy by referring to an older prophecy from the
book of Daniel, which tells of a character called “the abomination that causes
desolation,” who will surround Jerusalem with hostile foreign armies and defile
the sanctuary of the Temple (Dan. 9:27; 11:31; 12:11). In Daniel’s context,
these prophecies clearly refer to the events of 167 BC, when the pagan
Syro-Greek king Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) sacked Jerusalem and rededicated the
Temple to the gods of the Greek pantheon, complete with the sacrifice of a pig
on the Temple’s altar. (One must remember, though, that it is often the case in
biblical prophecy that multiple fulfillments are in view, a near-present
fulfillment that is usually the primary referent for the prophecy’s immediate
audience, but also the possibility of later fulfillments that ‘telescope’ the
events and implications of the primary fulfillment into the distant future;
thus Daniel’s prophecies appear to relate directly to Antiochus Epiphanes and
the crisis of the Maccabean revolt, and then they may telescope out to give a
view of the “end times”). Jesus takes that historical prophecy and declares
that it is about to be recapitulated in the events that lead to the fall of the
Temple. Recall that he has already told his disciples what events not to regard as immediate signs of the
end: wars, rumors of wars, earthquakes, and famines. But now he tells them a
definite and specific sign—when the abomination that causes desolation appears—that
is, when Jerusalem is about to be ringed by hostile pagan armies, and the
Temple sanctuary about to be violated—then it’s time to go. This event is
specifically fulfilled in the middle of the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, when
the Romans surround the city, and Titus himself, the general who will go on to
become emperor, enters into the Holy of Holies before the entire Temple is
burned down. We know from the historical traditions of the early church that this
prophecy of Jesus was indeed interpreted as a direct foretelling of the events
of that year, because the church of Jerusalem did exactly as Jesus instructed—they
fled. Rather than taking up arms to fight for a patriotic notion of an
independent nation-state of Israel (perhaps American evangelicals should here
take note), they obeyed the words of Christ, abandoned the sinking ship of the
Jewish rebellion, and fled from Jerusalem to the east, to refuge in the region beyond
the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. But, as with Daniel’s prophecy, so with
Jesus’—there is a definite possibility that Jesus intends this prophecy to be
seen as a double-fulfillment: directly pointing to Titus’ violation and
destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, but then telescoping out beyond it to give
his followers a view of what the final crisis of the end times might also look
like. This is a debated point in modern biblical interpretation, but there is
certainly a long Christian tradition of reading end-times implications into
this text alongside the direct prophecies of the first-century fall of
Jerusalem.