Luke 21:20-24

The true Sign, and the Catastrophe. “ But when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. 21. Then let them which are in Judoea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the city depart out; and let not them that are in the fields enter thereinto. 22. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. 23. But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days; for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. 24. And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations; and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. ”

Here is the direct answer to the disciples' question: “When...and with what sign?” Jesus up till now has been warning believers not to give way to hasty measures. Now He guards them, on the contrary, against the illusions of fanatical Jews, who to the end will cherish the belief that God will not fail to save Jerusalem by a miracle. “By no means, answers Jesus; be assured in that hour that all is over, and that destruction is near and irrevocable.” The sign indicated by Luke is the investment of Jerusalem by a hostile army. We see nothing to hinder us from regarding this sign as identical in sense with that announced by Matthew and Mark in Daniel's words (in the LXX.): the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place. Why not understand thereby the Gentile standards planted on the sacred soil which surrounds the holy city? Luke has substituted for the obscure prophetic expression a term more intelligible to Gentiles. It has often been concluded from this substitution, that Luke had modified the form of Jesus' saying under the influence of the event itself, and that consequently he had written after the destruction of Jerusalem. But if Jesus really predicted, as we have no doubt He did, the taking of Jerusalem, the substitution of Luke's term for the synonym of Daniel might have been made before the event as easily as after. Keim sees in the expression of the other Syn. the announcement of a simple profanation of the temple, like that of Antiochus Epiphanes, a prediction which, according to him, was not fulfilled. But in this case we must establish a contradiction between this threat and that of the entire destruction of the temple (Matt. Luke 21:6; Mark, Luke 21:2), which is purely arbitrary.

This utterance preserved the church of Palestine from the infatuation which, from the beginning of the war, seized upon the whole Jewish nation. Remembering the warning of Jesus of the approach of the Roman armies, the Christians of Judaea fled to Pella beyond Jordan, and thus escaped the catastrophe (Eus. Hist. Ecclesiastes 3:5, ed. Laemmer). They applied the expression, the mountains (Luke 21:21), to the mountainous plateaus of Gilead.

Ver. 21. “ Let those who dwell in the capital not remain there, and let those who dwell in the country not take refuge in it. ” The inhabitants of the country ordinarily seek their safety behind the walls of the capital. But in this case, this is the very point on which the whole violence of the storm will break.

Ver. 22 gives the reason of this dispensation. Comp. Luke 11:50-51.

Ver. 23 exhibits the difficulty of flight in such circumstances. Luke here omits the saying of Matthew about the impossibility of flight on the Sabbath, which had no direct application to Gentiles.

The land should be taken in the restricted sense which we give the word, the country.

St Paul seems to allude to the expression, wrath upon this people, in Romans 2:5-8 and 1 Thessalonians 2:16.

Ver. 24. A million of Jews perished in this war; 97,000 were led captive to Egypt and the other provinces of the empire (Josephus). The term πατουμένη, trodden, denotes more than taking possession; it is the oppression and contempt which follow conquest; comp. Revelation 11:2. This unnatural state of things will last till the end of the times of the Gentiles. What means this expression peculiar to Luke? According to Meyer and Bleek, nothing more than: the time of Gentile dominion over Jerusalem. But would it not be a tautology to say: Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles until the time of Gentile dominion come to an end? Then the plural καιροί, the times, is not sufficiently accounted for on this view. Neither is the choice of the term καιρός, the opportunity, instead of χρόνος, a certain space of time. In the passage Luke 19:44, the time of Israel, καιρός denotes the season when God visits this people with the offer of salvation. According to this analogy, the times of the Gentiles should designate the whole period during which God shall approach with His grace the Gentiles who have been hitherto strangers to His kingdom. Comp. 2 Corinthians 6:2, the expressions καιρὸς δεκτός, ἡμέρα σωτηρίας. The plural καιροί, the times, corresponds with the plural the nations; the Gentile peoples are called one after another; hence there arises in this one epoch a plurality of phases.

Modern criticism accuses Luke of having introduced into the discourse of Jesus at his own hand this important idea, which is wanting in Mark and Matthew (Holtzmann, p. 406). This supposition, indeed, is inevitable, if his work is founded on those two writings or on the documents from which they are drawn, the proto-Mark or the Logia, e.g. But if this saying is not found in the other two Syn., the thought which it expresses is very clearly implied. Do they not both speak of the preaching of the gospel to all Gentile peoples (Matthew 24:14), and of a baptism to be brought to every creature (Mark 16:15; Matthew 28:19)? Such a work demands time. Gess refers also to Mark 12:9; Matthew 21:43; Matthew 22:18, where Jesus declares that the kingdom of God will pass for a time to the Gentiles, and that they will bring forth the fruits thereof, and where He describes the invitation which shall be addressed to them with this view by the servants of the Master (parable of the marriage supper). All this work necessarily supposes a special period in history. Can Jesus have thought of this period as before the destruction of Jerusalem? We have already proved the falsity of this assertion. When, therefore, in Luke Jesus inserts the times of the Gentiles between the destruction of Jerusalem and the Parousia, He says nothing but what is implied in His utterances quoted by the other two Syn., necessary in itself, and consequently in keeping with His real thought. That established, is it not very arbitrary to affect suspicion of Luke's saying in which this idea is positively expressed?

This era of the Gentiles was a notion foreign to the O. T. For, in the prophetic view, the end of the theocracy always coincided with that of the present world. We can thus understand how, in the reproduction of Jesus' sayings within the bosom of the Judeo-Christian Church, this notion, unconnected with anything in their past views, could be effaced, and disappear from that oral proclamation of the gospel which determined the form of our two first Syn. In possession of more exact written documents, Luke here, as in so many other cases, restored the sayings of Jesus to their true form. If Jesus, who fixed so exactly the time of the destruction of Jerusalem (“ this generation shall not pass till...”), declared in the same discourse that He did not Himself know the day of His coming (Mark 13:32), it must infallibly have been because He placed a longer or shorter interval between those two events, an interval which is precisely the period of the Gentiles. Is not this explanation more probable than that which, contrary to all psychological possibility, ascribes to Luke so strange a licence as that of deliberately putting into his Master's mouth sayings which He never uttered?