repentance by which alone the kingdom could be prepared for, until martyrdom put an end to his preaching. Jesus too, in his turn, beginning with the same call to repentance, simplified his message by an appeal to and adoption of the older prophecy, and setting himself to the practical but at the same time spiritual details of fulfillment. So it went on till near the close of his ministry. Prophecy, in its more spacious sense of apocalyptic, would have its due resurgence, but the time had not yet come. The mind of men must first be educated to realize and believe it.

I. TOWARD THE END OF THE ERA

Among the apocalyptic ideas prevalent when Jesus entered upon his ministry was naturally the thought that the coming new order of things would be the end of the old. The great event was to be a turning point in history, whereat one era would reveal itself as outworn and finished and another would be inaugurated with the pomp and glory befitting so momentous a change. To the Jewish imagination this transition was to be catastrophic. All nature and history would suddenly feel it, and in a tremendous revolution which none could fail to see the new order of things would emerge. To them its meaning also was mainly political. The Roman Empire, now so universal and despotic, would collapse, and the Jewish race with its divinely ordained religion and polity would come into its own as the ruler of the world.

The end of the age would therefore be not a decay and death but a consummation; when spiritual forces, long hidden in the old order and suppressed, would burst forth into power and glory. This idea of a coming catastrophe and splendor was not peculiar to the Jews. Among the heathen also something like it was prevalent, though of course they did not connect it with the fortunes of the Jewish race.

We have seen that Jesus' task was to meet and temper and correct the ideas with which the prophetic soul of his

age was charged. It was his opportunity, but also his tremendous problem, a problem to be solved only by superhuman genius. And of all the ideas then prevailing, ideas so beset with fancies and vagaries and so variously colored with crude judgments, the grand culmination was this concept of end and beginning: what and of what nature the transition would be, and how brought about. Jesus must accommodate his speech to its terms, must keep his hearers with him in the same realm of imagery, and yet withal must gradually create a new vocabulary and atmosphere congruous with his vast purpose. Above all he must begin with the primal spiritual forces of human nature and free them from alloy. And nothing so reveals his consummate wisdom as the steady, consistent way in which throughout his earthly ministry he dealt with the vital principles of his problem.

I.

The Presage in Jesus' Words. He did not say much about the consummation of the age, or, as it is commonly translated, the end of the world, until near the close of his ministry; and then what he said left the matter as enigmatic in one way as it was clear in another. In two of his parables, indeed, the parable of the tares and the parable of the sweep-net as reported by Matthew (Matt. xiii, 39, 49), occurs the expression "the consummation of the age (sunteleia tou aiōnos); but it is to be noted that in the gospels the term is peculiar to Matthew, who may have used it as a term current among Christians when his gospel was written. In his report of Jesus' eschatological discourse the expression occurs again in the disciples' inquiry, "What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" (Matt. xxiv, 3), where also the word for "coming (parousia, "presence") is used for the only time in the gospels. In Mark's report of the discourse, which being 1 See "The Christ-Problem," pp. 535 ff. above.

older is presumably nearer to Jesus' exact words, the question is, "When will these things be? and what will be the sign when all these things are about to be fulfilled?" (Mark xiii, 4). The connecting of this discourse with the consummation and the parousia would seem to have been a deduction of the early church, to whom these ideas had become a matter of course, though Jesus' actual words may have embodied only an indirect presage. Still, a true presage it was, which from the event with which it was immediately concerned would, as time went on, enlarge into a prophecy of the greater consummation beyond. For the whole discourse, with its slightly variant forms, see Matt. xxiv, Mark xiii, Luke xxi; that of Mark being probably the most primitive.

Its Occasion

The occasion of this eschatological discourse of Jesus seems at first thought to have been casual enough. After a day of teaching in the Temple, as he went forth to the Mount of Olives, whence the view of the edifice appeared in greatest grandeur, one of the disciples called his attention to the wonders of its architecture. It was, indeed, as rebuilt by Herod, the pride and boast of the Jews, who doubtless were as confident of its permanence as they had been in the days of Jeremiah (see Jer. vii, 1-15). But he had already cleansed the Temple court of its traders and exchangers (Mark xi, 15-18; John ii, 14-20), using Jeremiah's words of reproof because it had become so worldly and commercialized (cf. Jer. vii, 11). It was his symbolic way of saying, as was said later, that judgment must "begin at the house of God" (1 Pet. iv, 17). And now his answer to the disciples' admiration is, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left here one stone upon another, which shall not be thrown down" (Mark xiii, 2).

Such a prediction about the Temple, and especially any implied disparagement of it, would be to the Jews almost

equivalent to blasphemy. We see this in the way they mocked him when he hung upon the cross (Mark xiv, 58; xv, 29), and in the charge they brought against him at his trial, a distorted reminiscence of his words when he first cleansed the Temple, as recorded in the fourth gospel (see John ii, 19, 20). The truth is, Jesus' attitude toward the Temple service touched the nation in a vital spot. It reminded them, to their discomfort, that they could not play fast and loose with conscience; their long heritage was too precious to be thus made sterile.

Its
Substance

Jesus' prophecy of events to come, called forth by his remark about the Temple, was both specific and general. The specific event which was immediately identified with the destruction of the Temple was the destruction of Jerusalem and the break-up of the Jewish state, which occurred under Vespasian, when his son and general Titus besieged and demolished both city and Temple A. D. 70, forty years after these words were uttered. Of this event which, to the consciousness of disciples still uneducated in Christian experience, would be equivalent to the end of the age, the prophecy, "This generation shall not pass away until all these things shall be accomplished' (Mark xiii, 30) came literally to pass. The Hebrew and Jewish order of things, of which the Temple was the central symbol, was doomed, and that was the only order they could yet realize.

But all Jesus' descriptions of that catastrophe were pregnant with a larger and more spiritual meaning. The event would be, as it were, the clearing of the ground for the building of an order whose meanings would be universal and eternal. This larger prophecy is blended with the more specific, so that many terms of the two are interchangeable; but it still has to be expressed in conceptions which the disciples can understand. "After that tribulation," Jesus says, they shall "see the Son of Man coming in clouds

with great power and glory" (Mark xiii, 24-26). It is the same prediction that he makes two or three days later, in his confession of his Messiahship to the high priest (see Mark xiv, 61, 62). It is put in apocalyptic terms, accompanied by such portents of nature as the older prophets had associated with world events; it visualizes things, for those conceptions are not yet of the spirit but of the imagination. That is the mold in which the current idea of future things has shaped itself. Its substance, which later events have progressively verified, is that the personality of Jesus, identified with the idealized Christ, is destined to be the re-living and triumphant power of the world and of the ages. "And then shall he send forth the angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven" (Mark xiii, 27). The completed event will be one in which not the shifting history of a state or nation alone but earth and heaven, human and divine, present and hereafter, will be involved and united.

II

In the Light of Common Day. It is to be noted that to neither of the questions raised by the disciples (Mark xiii, 4) does Jesus return a specific answer. He neither tells them when these things will be nor what shall be the sign. It is another instance of what we have noticed in all the large forecasts of the future: a foreshortened prophecy, in which the essential is kept clear from the incidental. To the former question his answer is, "Of that day and hour knoweth no one; not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father" (Mark xiii, 32). To the latter question he replies not by a sign but by an analogy, such an analogy as the wise can gather from the familiar phenomenon of the fig-tree, "when her branch is now become tender, and putteth forth its leaves," the natural prophecy of summer (Mark xiii, 28, 29). It is an appeal to men's clarified spiritual