Mark 13 and the Coming of the Son of Man

I just finished reading Jesus and the Future: An Examination of the Criticism of the Eschatological Discourse, Mark 13 with Special Reference to the Little Apocalypse Theory, by G.R. Beasley-Murray. The book, as its title states, is an examination of 120 years of criticism on the “Apocalyptic” Discourse of Jesus as it is recorded in the book of Mark, chapter 13. Mark 13 has been called the most analyzed passages in the whole of the Gospel of Mark.  Essentially, Mark 13 gives Jesus’ prediction about the coming of tribulation to the nation of Israel in the first century (vv. 5-25), followed immediately by what people interpret to be his Second Coming (vv. 26-27). What Biblical scholars noted was the obvious problem that though the predicted tribulation did occur (66-70 CE), Jesus did not immediately return. How to solve this problem?

If you are more traditional evangelical then you just assume the entirety of Mark 13 is a prediction that has not yet occurred. However, there are some problems with that interpretations of which I will mention below. If you are of a more progressive bent then you reason that either Jesus was wrong about his return or that the Gospel writers have unintentionally misrepresented him. There are many historical, exegetical, and logical reasons why neither of these two progressive options even if you reject the miraculous or the inerrancy of the Scripture. This is why the issue even among liberal Biblical scholars was not satisfactorily resolved.

Now before I read the book I had already previously rejected the conservative interpretation and solved the liberal one. My interest was simply about how various people had approached the problem and how they reasoned the issue out. I was very interested to see that no scholar in this examination had arrived at my conclusion. Granted, this book was compiled in 1954. There has been a lot more scholarship on the subject in the past 60 years and has been, at least for me, satisfactorily solved. So what it is the solution?

First of all, how do we know that Jesus’ prediction of Mark 13:5-25 was fulfilled in the first century CE? We best begin by understanding Jesus’ Mark 13 discourse in its context. Jesus has finished proclaiming judgment upon the Temple in Mark 11. He does so by citing Jeremiah 7:11. If you read the entire prophetic oracle of Jeremiah 7, you learn that it’s about God preparing to bring down judgment upon the whole of Judah for its sins against God and man. This prophecy was fulfilled with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. Put together with his actions to temporarily halt the legitimate business of the Temple, it seems that Jesus’ intention was to enact a prophetic oracle announcing God’s imminent judgment upon the Temple itself and Israel in general. This prophecy was fulfilled with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE.

Jesus has further bracketed his prophetic action in the Temple with the example of a fig tree that he purposely withered because it bore no fruit (karpos) (11:13-14, 20-21). Jesus has already used the common metaphor of fruit representing positive works in Mark 4:7-8 with the Parable of the Sower and the soils that yield and don’t yield crops/fruit (karpos). This bracketing technique is designed to indicate that God has returned to his Temple (Mark 1:1-3, quoting Malachi 3:1) and has found it wanting.

When Jesus next returns to the Temple in chapter 12, he gives the Parable of the Vine-growers. This parable is a history of Israel, referencing God’s sending of prophets and ultimately his Son to the people only to see them all murdered. The parable ends with the warning that God is going to destroy the “vineyard” in response. I would also add that in Mark 12:36, in discussion with religious leaders, Jesus references Psalm 110 which is a coronation psalm about a king receiving a vast dominion and sitting at the Lord’s right hand. Remember this.

 So we have these warnings about impending destruction building up when, as Jesus is leaving the Temple, his disciples point out the magnificent buildings of the Temple complex (13:1). Jesus responds that these specific buildings of the Temple complex are going to be torn down (v. 2). This prediction was fulfilled in 70 CE, some 40 years after Jesus predicted it would happen. These are specific buildings that existed in the first century that are being referenced. The disciples then ask what the signs are that this destruction will occur. Jesus then proceeds to give prediction of the persecution his disciples will face (including being flogged in synagogues [v. 9]). This is followed by the prediction of a time of great tribulation that will befall Judaea, in which Jesus warns his followers to flee. These are the events that occurred when Rome attacked and destroyed Jerusalem in 66-70 CE. Indeed, Jesus specifically states that this generation will not pass away until these things occur (v. 30). All the evidence supports the conclusion that the events predicted by Jesus and recorded in Mark 13:5-25 refer to events that occurred within a generation of his prediction. These events are not about the end of the world but more about political upheaval. Images of the sun, moon, and stars are regularly used as code for such events. The poetic language used for the predicted Fall of Jerusalem in Mark 13:24-25 is similar to the language used for the predicted Fall of Babylon in Isaiah 13:10.

But then what do we make of verse 26 that in those days “Then they will see THE SON OF MAN COMING IN CLOUDS with great power and glory”? Most people (both liberals and conservatives) have interpreted this verse as referring to Jesus’ second coming. If, as I have demonstrated, the previous events refer to the first century, then the immediacy of the “coming” poses a problem. Was Jesus wrong?

The solution to the problem lies in the acknowledgement that this verse is a quotation from an apocalyptic prophecy in Daniel 7:13.

“I kept looking in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven One like a Son of Man was coming, and He came up to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him.”

This is important. The “coming” referred to in this verse is not the Son of Man coming from heaven to earth, but him coming up to the Ancient of Days, i.e., God. It’s more of a coming from earth to heaven than a heaven to earth. But why is the Son of Man coming up to God? The answer comes in the following verse 14:

“And to Him was given dominion, glory and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations and men of every language might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away; and His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed.”

These are verses about the establishment of the Kingdom of God with Jesus as the King. These are verses about his enthronement, albeit in symbolic, apocalyptic language as befits the genre. And this is an enthronement that occurred in the first century. This is why Jesus can cite this verse to the high priest at his trial telling him that “you shall see THE SON OF MAN SITTING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF POWER, and COMING WITH THE CLOUDS OF HEAVEN” (Mark 14:62). This is why the Gospel of Mark can begin with Jesus’ pronouncement that the Kingdom of God is at hand (1:15). This is why Jesus can say there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power” (Mark 9:1). And, to reference the book of Acts, this is why Stephen can see a vision of “the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (7:56). So the reference to the “Coming of the Son of Man” in Mark 13:26 is not about the Second Coming of Jesus but about Jesus’ enthronement as King of this world, his exaltation, his vindication by God.

Of course, there is a “Second Coming” of Jesus when he will make his appearance (parousia) known to the entire world and bring the Kingdom of God to consummation. Paul references this future event in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17. Also, the “two men” predict his return in Acts 1:11. It’s just that Mark 13:26 is not referencing or predicting that event here. The Gospels themselves are not very interested in the second coming as much as they are in Jesus becoming King of the world.

From a Discussion on the Biblical Concepts of Rape and Exploitation

[An excerpt from a recent discussion in which I engaged]

The next claim is that rape was only condemned because women were considered property. No, the reason both the Bible and the Israelites condemned rape is because they considered it a moral atrocity on the same level as murder. Verse 26 states this explicitly. Consider it: do you really think that if their child is raped a parent’s first thought was “oh, no, my property”? Do you really think that the Israelite people en masse didn’t care about their children? Do you really think men didn’t love their wives and only thought bad about their rape because of property? When Amnon raped Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, did her brother Absalom only become angry because of property rights? No, because of how the Hebrews conceived reality on a psychical level, they fundamentally had a very serious understanding of sex and how it affected the soul. This is why they equated rape with murder.

The next claim is that the Bible teaches that a woman who is raped is required to marry her rapist. This is absolutely not true. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 concerns men who take women for the purposes of sex without the responsibility of marriage. No sense of sexual assault is stated or implied. The word in the NASB for “seize” is taphas and can mean “handle” or “take”, as in when a pastor asks a bride, “Do you take this man …?” We know this to be true because in verses 25-27 above, which is clearly about rape, the word used for “force” is chazaq which is used for rape (see 2 Samuel 13:11 and Judges 19:29). The purpose of the law recorded in 22:28-29 is to prevent the exploitation of women.

The next claim is that “starting in verse 22 it pretty much assumes a married woman can’t be raped.” That is a notion completely absent from the text. I think you are doing the assuming.

The final claim is that the Scripture here implies that if a woman doesn’t scream she wasn’t really raped. It implies no such thing. This is completely absent from the text. You are assuming again. These verses are about protecting women from sexual assault and false accusations.

The oddity is that all these verses (22-29) are specifically designed to prevent the exploitation of and violence towards women. This shouldn’t surprise us. The Israelites believed their god was highly moral, concerned with justice, and hated the exploitation of the poor.

The Cross and Pacifism

The Southern Baptists recently adopted a resolution supporting the “doctrine” of penal substitutionary atonement. This is the belief that God punished Jesus for the sins of humanity instead of humanity itself. Supposedly this action satisfied God’s sense of justice. One of the resolution’s authors noted that Christians today are rejecting this view of the Cross because of the growing popularity of pacifism and non-violence. I’m sure there is some truth to this assertion in some places though I do not know how widespread such thinking is. Speaking for myself, I reject the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement for several reasons:

-          The Bible does not teach this doctrine.

-          It conflicts with Old Testament conceptions of sacrifice.

-          It misunderstands key concepts in the Bible (justice, grace, forgiveness).

-          It conflicts with the purpose and ethic of the Cross.

-          It is contrary to the nature and intention of God.

God created a good world based on peace and life for humanity, but, instead, humanity brought evil, sin, violence, and death, throwing creation into futility. Part of the purpose of the crucifixion, and the ethic of Jesus, was that love, forgiveness, peace, and life were superior and more powerful than such futility. In order to set creation right and prove its ultimate goodness, the solution must not fight fire with fire. Death and violence must not be used to fight death and violence. When death and violence attacked Jesus on the Cross, he turned the other cheek, forgiving his attackers, exhibiting self-sacrificial love, and in his resurrection proved that his ethic, the way of God, and the purposes of creation were stronger. The story of the cross is one of love, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, non-violent resistance, revealing the very person of God, and defeating the powers of evil. For me, it is because of the Cross that I am a pacifist and support non-violence.

Government, Violence, and the Gospel

I’ve noted for some time the tendency of progressive Christians to support the idea of a growing, expansive government to regulate society, albeit for the purposes of properly administering economics and social welfare. While this is a noble cause and Christians should be concerned about proper economics and the social welfare, there is a fundamental problem with such support that conflicts with the very heart of the Christian Faith: large, expansive government is contrary to the Gospel, the Kingdom of God, and is anti-Christian. What is more, there is an irony in those Christians who support an expansive government but also reject war in general.

I readily appreciate that the claim that large government is anti-Gospel runs counter to many generations of progressive Christian thinking. But let it be said that the Gospel runs counter to the way all of humanity is naturally inclined to think. Thus the conclusions drawn below are going to make conservative Christians uncomfortable as well.

We need to start off by acknowledging that there are two ethics at work in the Bible: the “eye for an eye” ethic and the “turn the other cheek” ethic. The first ethic is predominately found in the Old Testament and is spelled out in Leviticus 24:19. It is basically the ethic that states that a person who has injured another person is to be penalized to a similar degree. While you can find this ethic throughout the Old Testament, the legality of it has its antecedent in the Code of Hammurabi and in almost every society that has come before and after in every place society exists. Its near universality should not surprise us. This is the ethic of justice, of equality. This is how the world works and this ethic works very well. And, as my Old Testament professor stated, this ethic is still grace. It is grace because it mandates that a person or a society cannot mete vengeance upon the guilty party beyond the crime they have committed. This is grace. Nevertheless, it is an ethic of retribution, violence, and the implied threat of violence.

This ethic finds its fullest expression and most organized principle in government. The purpose of government is to hold back evil through violence and the threat of violence. Paul talks about this in Romans 13 where government is seen as an instrument of violence whose purpose is to fight against evil. And this is seen as a purpose ordained by God.

Government fights evil, first, by protecting society from external threats and, second, by maintaining order within that society, but both through violence and the threat of violence. Max Weber famously formulated that government has a regional monopoly on violence. This is a core concept of modern public law going back to Jean Bodin and the Enlightenment political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who latter wrote that the sovereign must be invested with the exclusive right to commit violence, the alternative to that being violence, bellum omnium contra omnes. This is the defining conception of the state and what its purpose is on a fundamental level. Indeed, in the Western world, there is near universal consensus that if any person or entity in society is to have such power, then it should be the exclusive right of the state.  And government does violence very well. That’s its purpose. It doesn’t do economics or social welfare very well. Government by its very nature is fundamentally incapable of properly administering economics and social welfare without highly negative results. This is why the standards of living and social welfare are always higher in societies with more limited government. Those areas are far too complex for government to manage. But violence is simple. The purpose of a military is simply to kill people and break things; or, at the very least, to threaten to. The same goes for the national guard and the police. The government uses violence and the threat of violence to protect society from external and internal evil. Ultimately and fundamentally, government is about violence and the threat of violence. And whether it is socialism, communism, Marxism, or dictatorships, what one finds is that massively increased governmental control simultaneously brings a higher increase in governmental violence. The American Founders knew this through both experience and Enlightenment philosophy. They rightfully saw government as a necessary evil but took steps to limit the scope and ability of its violence. Thus we have the U.S. Constitution with its checks, balances, and limitations designed to make it harder for the US government to inflict violence on its own people. As George Washington said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force.”

We see the purpose and problem of government played out through the Old Testament. Originally, Israel was designed to be a more theocratic community without a king or a hierarchal, governmental system. Yet the sinful nature that infected the world was also found in God’s covenant community. The primary purpose of the Book of Judges is to explain why it became necessary for Israel to adopt a king (Judges 21:25). Each successive story shows a further descent into evil and chaos culminating with chapter 19, in which Israel was shown to be as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah (oppression of the poor exemplified by sexual violence). Those cities were destroyed. In order to keep the plan and purpose of Israel underway, God gave his people a monarchy but warned them of the violence inherent within it as well as the accompanying loss of freedom, corruption, and seizure of property (1 Samuel 8). And the government did keep evil at bay for a time. It did work as it does in every other society. However, while government can hold back evil, it cannot defeat evil itself. Evil and sin creep in and corrupt. Israel’s government grew and oppressed the people, enacting violence upon them, seizing their property, and over-regulating their society. God continued to send prophets with a constant warning to Israel and its government not to go the way of Sodom. But the end and inevitable result was corruption and destruction by the Assyrians and Babylonians.

So government is a necessary evil ordained by God and fundamentally designed to administer violence in order to hold back evil. Yet, the more expansive and controlling it is, the more violent it becomes. But while it can hold back evil, it cannot defeat evil itself.

This brings us to the second ethic which is found predominately in the New Testament and is spelled out in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, particularly Matthew 5:38-5:42. However, the antecedents of this ethic are found in the Old Testament. In the second century BCE, the Jews were engaged in a violent struggle against the Seleucid Empire for political and cultural control over Palestine. In this time of cultural persecution and violent resistance, we have the production of the Book of Daniel that teaches a response to governmental persecution through prayer, service, and non-violent resistance. This is a later, higher ethic than that is found in the earlier books of the Bible like that of Esther with its retributive justice. At the same time, the Book of Daniel predicts that God is going to deal with these persecuting nations and governments through a “Messiah” and through resurrection. You can see much earlier in the Old Testament that God is going to establish his Kingdom through a Messiah (Isaiah 11) and that a time and ethic of peace will follow where the wolf will lie down with the lamb (verse 6) and people will no longer need their swords (Isaiah 2:4; Joel 3:10, Micah 4:3). It will be a time of freedom (Isaiah 61:1) and forgiveness (Jeremiah 31:34). This is an ethic of forgiveness, non-violence, and non-retribution. And it flows from the character of God himself. In the first case of human violence recorded in the Bible, God gives Cain grace for murdering his little brother even when Cain deserved death (Genesis 4). This is who God is. And this is who Jesus is. And Jesus taught an ethic where abuse, persecution, and violence are to be dealt with by love, forgiveness, and non-violence. Again, you can see this prominently in the Sermon on the Mount, but it is the ethic Jesus took all the way to the cross where he rejected violence (Matthew 26: 52-54; Luke 22:51) and proclaimed forgiveness (Luke 23:34). The power exhibited and unleashed on the cross is that is that of self-giving love and forgiveness. This is the heart of the Gospel.  You cannot fight force with force because, either way, force wins. You cannot fight violence with violence because, either way, violence wins. The real power lies in self-giving, turn-the –other-cheek love. On the cross, evil and sin were drawn to Jesus. The political parties of Israel’s government (Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, elders, and chief priests) and the Roman government itself attacked him with full force and violence, exhausting themselves upon him. Yet, God raised Jesus from the dead, proving that evil could do its worse but still stand impotent before God’s Kingdom. This is what victory means and this is how it is achieved. This is the ethic that God wants for his people. This is the ethic God wants for the world and will eventually get. This is the superior ethic over that of “eye for an eye”. While the kingdoms of this world run on the basis of force, the Kingdom of God runs on the basis of forgiveness. While the governments of this world run through violence, the government of God runs through non-violence. One is about death, the other is about life.

This is why Christians, progressive or otherwise, should abandon support for large, expansive government. Government is necessarily and essentially violent on a fundamental and unchangeable level. Violence is its raison d’être. It is a beast that cannot be tamed, only unleashed. And it is because of this inherent violence that it runs contrary to the Gospel of the Kingdom of God which is centrally about love, forgiveness, and non-violence. Government must be kept limited in order to limit violence. And while economics and social welfare are very important Kingdom goals and essential to the Gospel, the use of government to achieve them not only fails to work, it utilizes an ethic that is contrary to the Gospel. This is one reason why it doesn’t work. The irony is that those who too often support a big government to administer social change will simultaneously reject government’s essential purpose: to hold back evil through violent war and the threat of violent war.

So what are progressive Christians supposed to do?

1)      Abandon support of a large, expansive, controlling government.

2)      Seek the goals of the Kingdom of God through non-governmental means.

3)      Appreciate that war in general is necessary for a government to hold back evil. Such violence is also necessary for national guards and police.

What are conservative Christians to do?

1)      Do not support war and do not attach Christianity to it. Be sure to state publicly that war is a necessary evil used to hold back evil, but steadfastly maintain that it, and all other forms of violence, are contrary to the Gospel.

2)      Do not fall into the trap of expecting government to be the method by which you advance the moral aspects of the Gospel.

The fact of the matter is that government needs to be put in a proper perspective and limited to its specific, fundamental role. While it is by its nature contrary to the Gospel and at odds with how God intends the world to work, government does fulfill a divine role of holding back the forces of evil. But if government grows and expands beyond its proper role, it becomes a source of violence meted out amongst a fearful populace. Ultimately though, it is the ethic of Jesus, not the ethic of government, that defeats evil.