The coming of the Son of Man, the ascension, and the mission to the nations

Following on from the piece on Tucker Ferda’s attempt to disconnect the coming of the Son of Man from the war against Rome, I happened to come across Ian Paul’s post this week about the second coming (“or something else?”) in Luke 21. He covers a fair bit of ground, but I want to focus on his contention that the “coming” of the Son of Man “in a cloud with power and great glory” is “actually about the Ascension and the proclamation of the gospel to the nations.” Paul is often very persuasive on these matters, but that surprised me.

So whereas Ferda wants to drag the coming of the Son of Man forward into an indeterminate future, Paul wants to push it back to a specific moment in the past.

His argument is:

• that this “coming” (erchomenon) is not the same as the parousia of Matthew 24:37, 39—the language is different;
• that the “coming” is a coming to the throne of the Ancient of Days in heaven (Dan. 7:13-14)—that is, when Jesus ascends into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Father and receive the kingdom;
• that the trumpet is a “metaphor for the proclamation of the gospel which we read about in Acts; that the ‘gathering of the elect’ is the entry into God’s people of the Gentile believers” (this point is made in another post);
• and that the muddled chronology is attributable to the fact that “the presenting question is about Jerusalem and its fate, and this is what Jesus addresses first.”

Let’s begin with the muddled chronology.

The muddled chronology

If “the language of the ‘coming of the Son of Man’ refers to Jesus’ ascension, why doesn’t this come in the narrative ahead of what almost everyone agrees are events associated with the fall of Jerusalem?” A good question. I don’t see how we can appeal to a thematic rather than chronological ordering of the material when Jesus has been asked about the timing of the catastrophe, the sign of his coming, and the end of the age—in that order (Matt. 24:3).

The temporal markers are very pronounced: “Immediately after the tribulation of those days…. Then will appear…, and then all the tribes of the land will mourn…” (24:29-30). It seems to me that Matthew has gone to some trouble not to muddle the chronology—to make the important point that the apocalyptic events will follow on directly from the tribulation that Israel will experience in the build up to the destruction of the temple.

Coming and parousia

The interest in the timing of these future events then runs through to the passage which speaks about the parousia of the Son of Man, but for the purpose of preparing the disciples for the moment of impact, not to insert a period of time between the coming of the Son of Man as ascension and a “second coming” as parousia.

The tribes of the land will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven. He will send out his angels. Then attention switches from either the seeing of “tribes of the land” or the Council (cf. 26:64) to the waiting of the disciples. When they “see all these things,” they will know that this climactic event is near (24:33). The current generation of Jews will not pass away before this happens, but no one can predict the “day and hour,” not even the Son, so they must be prepared at all times (24:34-36).

Moreover, the terminological distinction does not hold up. While Matthew speaks of the parousia of the Son of Man in the analogy with the “days of Noah” (24:37, 39), he also speaks of the “coming” (erchetai) of the Lord and of the Son of Man (24:42, 44).

The trumpet and the elect

There are too many trumpets blown in the Old Testament to announce an imminent action of God to think that this trumpet, in the apocalyptic context, signals anything other than a divinely sponsored action to put things right—not least by gathering scattered Israel.

Trumpet with a trumpet in Sion; make proclamation on my holy mountain! And let all the inhabitants of the land be confounded, for the day of the Lord has come, because it is near…! (Joel 2:1-2 LXX)

And the Lord shall be over them and shall go forth like a lightning bolt, and the Lord Almighty will trumpet with the trumpet and come with his menacing tempest. (Zech. 9:14 LXX)

And it shall be on that day that they will trumpet with the great trumpet, and those who were lost in the country of the Assyrians and those who were lost in Egypt will come and do obeisance to the Lord on the holy mountain at Jerusalem. (Is. 27:13 LXX)

And who are the “elect” who will be gathered? Not gentiles, I think.

The period of tribulation described in Matthew 24:5-28 has been cut short “for the sake of the elect (eklektous),” otherwise no one would survive (24:22). These elect must be the few Jews who are “chosen” (eklektoi) rather than the “many” who are called (22:14; cf. Mk. 13:20), who will be saved from the destruction of the war. They are the righteous “poor” in Israel who pray for vindication against their enemies, the “elect” to whom God will give justice when the Son of Man comes (Lk. 18:7-8).

Among them will be those who have fled for safety beyond the borders of Roman Palestine, perhaps also righteous Jews from the diaspora. But the eschatological horizon is the immediate aftermath of the war against Rome, and there is no reason to introduce the thought of a gentile mission.

The coming of the “one like a son of man” to the throne of God

Is there reason to equate the coming of the Son of Man with the ascension of Jesus into heaven? After all, Luke says that Jesus was carried up into heaven, “and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9).

Well, chronology is obviously a problem again, but there are also a couple of intrinsic objections.

First, what we have in Acts is a disappearance (the disciples no longer see Jesus), what we have in Matthew 24:30 is an appearance (the families of the land see the Son of Man coming).

Secondly, the coming of the “one like a son of man” to the throne of the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7:13-14 happens after judgment has been enacted against the great pagan kingdoms. The sequence is important because the “authority” to rule over the nations, and the “glory” associated with that rule, has to be taken from the beasts and given to the “son of man” figure.

Since there is no explicit defeat of the nations which have come to make war against Jerusalem in Jesus’ apocalyptic teaching, he appears to have used the conceit with reference to the sub-theme—evident both in Zechariah and Daniel—of the vindication of the suffering righteous against unrighteous Israel.

Arguably, though, what is seen in Matthew 24:30 is a coming from the throne of God, having received “power and great glory,” in order to gather the elect from the places to which they have been scattered.

This matches the parable in Luke 19:12-27 of the nobleman who goes away into a far country to ”receive for himself a kingdom,” who then returns to punish or reward his servants and to destroy the enemies who never wanted him to rule over them (19:27).

So perhaps this is how the story goes. After the tribulation of the build up to the final siege of Jerusalem, portents of the destruction appear in the heavens—because this is the death of a great city. All Israel will then “see,” as Daniel “saw,” the “signal” (sēmeion) of the Son of Man coming from the throne of YHWH, with the authority and glory that goes with kingly rule, both to destroy that wicked and perverse generation of Israel which had not wanted Jesus to rule over them and to punish or reward his servants.

The most that we can say about the ascension is that it prefigures the later coming with the clouds of heaven: “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).

The tribes of the earth will mourn

Matthew adds that “all the tribes of the land will mourn.” This comes from Zechariah:

And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn. On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-rimmon in the plain of Megiddo. The land shall mourn, each family by itself…. (Zech. 12:10-12)

Ian Paul thinks that Matthew uses this “in reference to Jesus’ crucifixion and then the events of Pentecost.” It seems likely that the crucifixion is implicitly in view (“him whom they have pierced”), but this is not the “spirit” poured out on the disciples at Pentecost.

What Zechariah describes is a national movement of repentance and mourning connected in some way with the piercing of a true prophet, when Jerusalem is cleansed from its sin, the idols are removed the land, and false prophets are themselves “pierced” and put to shame (Zech. 13:1-6).

I have argued before that the saying that only the Father knows the “day and hour” (Matt. 24:36) is dependent on Zechariah 14:7 and, therefore, presupposes the same narrative of judgment against Israel.

The “spirit” poured out on the day of Pentecost, by contrast, empowers a small community within Israel to see what Jesus saw and prophesy what Jesus prophesied regarding a coming day of the Lord against Jerusalem.

There is no ruin of Jerusalem in Zechariah’s vision—to the contrary, “on that day” YHWH will “destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem” (12:9). So in fact, what we have is a vision of the salvation of “all Israel” at a time of a great political crisis not so different from the hope that Paul expresses in Romans 11:26-27. Such a movement of repentance might have been triggered by Peter’s preaching in the power of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2:38-39), but it wasn’t.

Jesus has said, however, that not one stone of the temple will be left standing on another (Matt. 24:2), so presumably Matthew takes over from Zechariah only the mourning of the tribes of the Israel (over the one whom they pierced) and makes it a response to the “tribulation of those days” and the disturbances in the heavens, and the appearance of the “sign of the Son of Man.”

What does this mean for preaching this passage?

In his concluding section, Paul argues that preachers should take the historical dynamics of the narrative seriously, at least insofar as the war and the scattering of the Jewish followers of Jesus are “bound up with the breaking out of God’s grace in Jesus to gentile as well as Jew.”

But there seems to be an overarching “end days” paradigm in operation—the extension of this critical moment in Israel’s history to include the whole history of the church in order to ensure that the Gospels have something to say to us.

The problem with this approach is that it suppresses historical development, it gives us no way to make sense of subsequent crises and transformations. It does not account for the emergence of Christendom, or the rise of modernity, or the collapse of Christendom, or the threat of climate catastrophe. We may well be in another “end days” transition, but it is not the end of the age of second temple Judaism or of classical Greek-Roman paganism.

History needs to teach us more than that gentiles have received covenant grace. That is old news. What we need to know is where God is in the current crisis.