The story Jesus told had a clear end in view: divine judgment on Israel in the form of ‘political, military and social’ disaster and the escape of his followers from that disaster. This reading is controversial at four points:
(a) Passages about impending judgment have regularly been seen as predictions of the end of the space-time universe….
(b) Alternatively, such passages have sometimes been denied to Jesus on the grounds that he was not an ‘apocalyptic’ thinker of this sort; they are then accredited to the early church….
(c) Similarly, passages about the vindication of Jesus and his people have routinely been treated as later constructions of the church, on the grounds that Jesus did not envisage either his own resurrection or a community of people loyal to himself….
(d) The idea that Jesus warned his contemporaries, and the city of Jerusalem, of impending judgment has sometimes been rejected as making Jesus somehow anti-Jewish…. (320-321)
The warnings of judgment run through all strands of the gospel traditions; they have an historical frame of reference and should not, in the first place at least, be read as statements about ‘a general post mortem judgment in hell’. There are four aspects to their relation to the immediate historical context: i) they fit quite naturally into the wider context of Jewish sectarianism; ii) they make good sense in view of the threatening presence of Rome (‘it did not take much political wisdom to extrapolate forwards and to suggest that, if Israel continued to provoke the giant, the giant would eventually awake from slumber and smash her to pieces’); iii) Jesus did not issue a general or universal warning but addressed a particular moment in Israel’s history; and iv) Jesus’ warnings were at odds with the agendas of many groups within Israel at the time – the revolutionaries on the one hand, the temple hierarchy on the other.
Wright then surveys a wide spectrum of passages, excluding Mark 13 and parallels, that contain this message of judgment (326-336), and concludes that Jesus consistently ‘told a story… in which the judgment usually associated with YHWH’s action against the pagan nations would fall upon those Jews who were refusing to follow in the way he was holding out to them’. He also deals briefly the words of assurance to the disciples in similar fashion, then proceeds to examine the key passage of Mark 13 and parallels.
Wright’s exposition of this text needs to be examined in detail; here we will simply quote a summary passage:
…the whole passage seems to me (a) to refer clearly to the forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem, and (b) to invest that event with its theological significance. This is emphatically not to ‘demythologize’ the apocalyptic language concerned. Nor is it to reduce it to a ‘mere metaphor’. It is to insist on reading it as it would have been heard in the first century, that is, both with its very this-worldly, indeed revolutionary, socio-political reference and with its fully symbolical, theological, and even ‘mythological’ overtones. The event that was coming swiftly upon Jerusalem would be the divine judgment on YHWH’s rebellious people, exercised through Rome’s judgment on her rebellious subject. It was also the rescue from judgment of Jesus’ people, in an event which symbolized dramatically their final escape from exile. All of this spoke powerfully of the vindication of Jesus himself, both as prophet, and as the one who has the right to pronounce upon the Temple, and (in a sense still to be fully explained) as the actual replacement for the Temple. (342-343)
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