Category: ascension

The coming of the Son of Man in Mark and Matthew

About ten years after Mark wrote his Gospel, Matthew used Mark’s Gospel to compose a new Gospel. In fact, more than 90 percent of Mark appears in Matthew— often word-for-word, but also often generally simplified and summarized. So what was Matthew up to? Why did he even bother? Well, brilliant as Mark is, Matthew was facing a new situation. Though he stood in the same events, he was looking at a different horizon.

Writing just before the Roman legions destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, Mark was specifically addressing an audience in Palestine that was, at that very moment, hard-pressed to join the Jewish Revolt. With six legions amassed against Jerusalem and famine and civil war raging inside its walls, it was clear that unless God intervened, the Romans would indeed destroy the Holy City and God’s House once and for all. But many prophets were saying he would indeed finally act! When would the light would dawn, except in darkest night?!

But were they right? What side to choose??

“Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I Am’ and will deceive many. . . . do not be troubled; for such things must happen, but the end is not yet. . . . the good news must first be proclaimed to all the nations” (Mk 13.5-10). The destruction of Jerusalem will come, but will not be the end, because God’s reign has to be extended to the whole world.

By contrast, Matthew’s audience is not faced with any pressure to join the Jewish Revolt; he’s writing in Antioch in Syria ten years after it was suppressed, and the Temple’s destruction is already a fact of the past. For him what’s relevant about that disaster is how it’s led to the now-ongoing spread of the Good News to “all the nations”— just as Jesus said— of which Antioch is an example. He’s rewritten Jesus’ speech on the destruction of the Temple in Mark to address the troubles and persecutions that the Church is facing in this new context. If Mark wrote about “the beginning of the good news” (Mk 1.1), Matthew is writing about how it spread to the world— but not quite in the same way as Luke will, in another ten years or so.

Also, Mark is all but entirely narrative— an action thriller, if you will— and the apostolic generation is rapidly dying out. Matthew apparently wanted to include more of Jesus’ teachings, which apparently existed in some form but not as part of a formalized “Gospel” (remember, so far there’s only one Gospel, and that’s Mark). So he adds the sermon on the mount and a ton of other teaching material— making the book half again as long— and, while doing so, shifts some of Mark’s episodes or sayings around a bit to bring out some of his own didactic emphases. There’s no disrespect to either evangelist in pointing this out. This is only to describe the literary relationship between the two writers and their Gospels.

When it comes to Mt 24— Jesus’ discourse on the destruction of the Temple— Matthew describes that destruction in terms of Old Testament prophecies. Mark, of course, has already done this in his chapter 13, and indeed Matthew’s audience still needed (as we still need) to understand that catastrophe properly— i.e., in terms of how it fit in to the grand sweep of Israel’s history. So, as far as that goes, much of Matthew’s version is drawn word-for-word from Mark, and where it isn’t, Matthew has mostly just smoothed out Mark’s rougher Greek. But he does makes some tweaks, because he’s interested in Jesus’ announcement of the Temple’s destruction not just as a historical curiosity (“Oh look, Jesus predicted it, gee wasn’t he divine!”)— but as something directly helpful for his own audience.

Mark tells of how, right after Jesus left the Temple for the last time, he sat on the mountain opposite it (readers should have in mind Ez 11.22-23, the moment God abandoned the Temple in the OT), and announced its destruction— “not one stone will be left on another” (13.3). At this, the disciples ask, “When will these things be? And what will the sign be, when all these things will be ended up (synteleisthai συντελεῖσθαι)?” (13.4) (I’m using “ended up” because there are three words in play here, telos and synteleisthai (v.) or synteleia (n.), but translations say all kinds of things— “end”, “fulfill”, “complete”, “finish”— but we need to hear how they echo each other. So: end, and end up.) The disciples’ question in Mark is about the Temple’s destruction, very pressing to Mark’s audience, and when they ask how things will be “ended up”, they’re referring to what Jesus has just said about the end of the Temple, not to the end of the age.

Matthew rewrites this— “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your parousia and of the end-up of the age?” (24.3).

Parousia (παρουσία) does not mean “coming”, much less any “second coming”, but the presence or residence (literally, the being-near) of the emperor in a given city. Our Bible translations are simply wrong to translate parousia as “coming”! Matthew does not talk about any “second coming”; at the end of his Gospel, Jesus does not ascend to heaven but reassures his disciples, “I am with you all days, even unto the ending-up of the age (synteleias tou aionos συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος)” (28.20— using the same phrase as here in 24.3). We find the story of the ascension and the promise of a “coming [again]” only in Luke 24.51 and Acts 1.11, and Luke uses eleusetai ἐλεύσεται, not parousia. In the New Testament, the ascension belongs to Luke’s specific narrative and theology. Of course, the Church later reflects on all the Gospels at once and speaks from all of them together in the light of her living experience of the living Christ, but that’s not yet the case inside the Gospels— the four different narratives are only in the process of being written. So, in Matthew, the disciples are asking, What will be the sign of your residence as King? And the ending-up, on the other hand, is not that of the Temple, as in Mark, but, specifically, that of the present age as a whole. In fact the destruction of the Temple had turned out not to be the end of the world— just as Jesus had said— but then, how will it end?

So, changes: Where Mark’s Jesus said, “they will hand you over to councils, and you will be beaten in synagogues, and stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them” (13.9)— Matthew’s Jesus doesn’t mention synagogues, but only that “they will hand you over to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake” (24.9).

Matthew does use Mark’s saying about witnessing before synagogues, but he puts it into Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve, as he sends them out for the first time (10.17-18). In that context, Jesus warns them, “They will hand you over to councils and scourge you in their synagogues; you will be brought before governors and kings for my sake, as a testimony to them and to the nations” (10.18). In Mark’s version of this commission (6.7-11), there is no mention of being handed over or scourged, or of governors and kings— but persecutions by both civil and religious authorities are the reality that Matthew’s Christians are facing. So when Matthew’s Jesus gives the Twelve their commission, he does so in a way that will culminate at the end of the Gospel with a command to teach “all the nations” (28.19-20).

Even inside the speech on the destruction of the Temple, where Mark’s Jesus does say, “the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations” (13.10), Matthew’s Jesus emphasizes, “this good news of [God’s] reign will be proclaimed in all the inhabited [earth] as a witness to all the nations, and then the end (telos τέλος) will come” (24.14). By adding mention of the “end” here, Matthew again ties the speech not only to the disciples’ initial question about the “ending-up of the age” (24.3), but also to the final horizon of Gospel, when the risen Messiah tells his disciples, “make disciples of all nations. . . . and behold, I am with you always, to the ending-up of the age” (28.19-20, cp 24.3). In Mark, Jesus told the disciples that wars and earthquakes would not be the end, because the good news must first be proclaimed to all the nations (13.5-10). In Matthew, Jesus talks about the end as something that happens after the good news is proclaimed. Same thing, but the perspective has slightly shifted.

Again, Matthew heightens the evangelical implications of the persecutions, by inserting into Mark’s account of Jesus’ speech the words, “If they say to you, ‘Look, he’s in the desert!’— don’t go out; or ‘Look, he’s in the inner rooms!’— don’t believe it; for as lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the parousia of the Son of Man be” (24.26-27). The parousia of the Son of Man will be like lightning shining from east to west, obvious to the whole world, and not some secret teaching by a separatist sect. What will this look like?

Well, we see the same missional emphasis with mention of “the tribes of the earth” in 24.28-30, amid a dazzling tour-de-force that describes the Son of Man “coming (erchomenon ἐρχώμενον) on the clouds in power by referring all at once to Dn 7.13–14,18, Is 13.10, Ez 32.7, Jl 2.10,31, 3.15, and Zc 12.10,14. After he “comes in power”, then “he will send his messengers (angeloi ἄγγελοι) with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together his chosen from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” (24.31). Now, if you want to know what Matthew thinks what the Son of Man’s coming in power is about, read Daniel 7.13-14,18, where the Son of Man comes up to the throne of God and is given dominion over all nations, along with Mt 26.64, where Jesus tells the High Priest, “from this moment (ap’ arti ἀπ’ ἄρτι) you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven”, along with and 27.27-53, his enthronement. That Jesus said his crucifixion was the coming-in-power of the Son of Man was of course already what Mark had reported, but Matthew underscores it with his expression, “from this moment”. Just in case you missed the point! And the “messengers” that he sends out to the ends of the earth? Those would be those whom the risen Son of Man charged to “Go . . . . and make disciples of all the nations” (28.19).

Deflates a lot of misunderstandings, doesn’t it. Oh well.

Mark has the Jewish Revolt in mind; Matthew, the mission of the Church to all the nations. Each is dealing with the prominent fact of Church life in his own circumstances. And you see (I’m now responding to someone whose challenge inspired this post), paying careful attention to the actual Text— which is all that scholars try to do, really— does in fact help you to understand the “discrepancies” in the Bible without resorting to explanations like, “Matthew lied”, or “Mark got it wrong”. All four Gospels are perfect, and there are no “contradictions”. We ought to know that if we come up with answers like tht, we’re either asking the wrong question, viewing the matter in the wrong framework, or we haven’t dug deep enough. The very idea that the Gospels could be “wrong”—!!

Why is there no Ascension in Mark?

Scientific (historical) questions about Scripture episodes can lead to inconsequential answers at best, and completely wrong and misleading ones at worst— not because science is bad, but because it filters the object under discussion through the wrong categories.

Someone in one of the Facebook groups I participate in recently asked how we’re to understand Luke’s story of Jesus’ ascension, since trying to calculate his present location at a certain (assumed) rate of ascent obviously leads to absurdity. I responded that the only way for us in the 21st century to understand it, is obviously the way its audience was meant to understand it in the 1st century. We absolutely need to stop trying to read first-century, Iron-Age documents with Cyber-Age, scientific eyes!

Mark has no Ascension story, because his theological narrative doesn’t need one. (Some other time I’ll talk about why that’s the case.) It would be also be wrong to say (as I’ve read elsewhere) that Matthew, for his part, denies Jesus’ “ascension” when he has the disciples go to the mountain in Galilee that Jesus had specified, where Jesus meets and commissions them, saying only, “Behold, I am with you all days, even unto the end of the age” (Mt 28.20)— showing that he’s not going anywhere! (“Aha!”, shout the critics. “Contradictions!!— untrustworthy!! lies!! they made it up!!”)— But of course, setting the gospels at odds with each other in this way is foolish; they tell different stories simply because they’re making different but interlocking theological points. But it’s still wrong to try to harmonize— “Well, Matthew left that part out; Luke only completed the story!” No, we need to appreciate the profoundly literary and theological nature of our Texts. Historicism is not our friend!

The story of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven is found only in Luke/Acts, so we need to read it as part of Luke’s theology, not as a scientific description of something that would have been accessible to anyone with proper equipment.

“But it can’t be just an idea, right? Because Luke mentions the disciples actually gazing up into the sky!” Well, as I said, historicism is not our friend. In Luke’s narrative, the disciples’ gazing at the sky confirms the ascension; but the ascension itself is already a literary device that alludes to Daniel 7.13-14— there, Daniel was standing in the celestial throne room and saw the Son of Man being brought up in the clouds; here, the disciples are standing on earth seeing the Son of Man going up in the clouds. The prophet’s vision is celestial, the disciples’ vision is earthly, but both Daniel and Luke are describing the same exaltation of the Son of Man (and that’s the point!)— “Dominion, glory, and kingship were given to him; all peoples and nations of every language must serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship, one that shall not be destroyed” (Dn 7.14). When the “men” (angels) in Luke’s story then rebuke the disciples for gazing upward, this also serves Luke’s point that Christians are not to look for heavenly visions, but to get to work on earth.

But does this mean that the Ascension is “just a story” and that it “didn’t actually happen”? No, not at all— because first of all, there’s no such thing as “just” a story— “everything is story”, as Muriel Rukeyser said. But more importantly, we need to understand that the exaltation/ascension of the crucified and risen Son of Man is itself what St Paul calls “mystery”— not something unintelligible, nor something that just hasn’t been figured out yet (scientifically), but something of unfathomable depth that can’t be put into a mere definition like 2 + 2 or even e=mc^2. Mystery requires a story; only by a story can we be introduced to it! And the story of the “Son of Man” which the evangelists are telling has a history, which is Daniel 7. Daniel 7 is about the mystery of Israel, of what the Creator God is doing with his world through his people. But this is beyond fathoming; St Paul says, “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rm 8.21). Mystery is what we call that fathomless reality of God’s interaction with humanity that is to be experienced ever more deeply by those who trust in what God has done in Jesus, by raising him from the dead and exalting him at his right hand. So, what the Gospel writers do, each in his own way, is introduce us to what Jesus himself called the “mystery of God’s regime” (Mk 4.11), or what St Paul called “the mystery of Christ among you, your hope of glory” (Col 1.27). They give us the apostles’ own experience of Jesus in the language of Daniel. This is what we get, as we come to understand each of the Four Gospels in its own specific terms.

In his masterful study of Mark entitled, Jesus’ Defeat of Death: Persuading Mark’s Early Readers (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series; Cambridge, 2003), Peter Bolt noted that Mark’s Transfiguration story has the form of a classical “apotheosis” narrative— the hero takes his best friends to a high mountain, the gods or great heroes of old appear and converse with him, a cloud comes, the cloud departs, and the hero is no longer there, but has been taken to the abode of the gods / heaven and deified, leaving his friends astonished at his disappearance. This story is told over and over in classical literature, and it was even told of some of the Roman emperors when Jesus, Paul, Mark, and Luke were alive. So it was well-known all over the Empire.

Well, the shocking thing about the transfiguration story is that when the cloud departs, “suddenly looking around, [the disciples] saw no one with them any more”— so far, so good, eh? this is just what we expect— “but only Jesus” (Mk 9.8). Uh oh. Jesus is still there. He has refused his apotheosis. And that can mean one thing only: he will go back down the mountain to die, just as he told them in the immediately preceding episode. Jesus means business! He will not escape death, like the heroes in the classical apotheosis stories. And indeed the three disciples and Jesus discuss this very thing on their way back down. In Luke, the “heroes” (Moses and Elijah) discuss his “exodus, which he will accomplish in Jerusalem” (Lk 9.31). Interesting word, “exodus”. . . . .

Matthew and Luke do not deviate from Mark’s outline, but Luke ends his Gospel with a story that “completes” the “apotheosis” formula begun but aborted in the transfiguration narrative. He completes it in terms of Daniel 7, but on the way to doing so— unlike other ancient heroes— Jesus, the Son of Man, is crucified and dies. Luke’s purpose is to show that Jesus was indeed the Son of Man whom Daniel saw— and whom the disciples saw at the transfiguration— and that he was exalted precisely as Daniel had said— but that the way to such exaltation was not Hercules’ fantastic show of strength, nor Caesar’s impressive military and political exploits, but the Way of the Cross. In fact both Mark and Luke puts the Transfiguration (“apotheosis refused”) episode precisely at the beginning of their long treatment of the Way to Jerusalem (which is the way to exaltation)— in Mark, the whole of Section 2.1 (8.22–10.52), and in Luke, the entire middle third of his Gospel (Lk 9.51–19.44). On that journey Jesus explains and demonstrates by many parables and actions what he’s up to. He then arrives in Jerusalem and accomplishes his “exodus”, and is exalted in glory not by escaping death, but by dying.

That the Son of Man is enthroned precisely on the cross is the point affirmed in all three synoptic gospels when the High Priest asks, “You’re the Messiah?”, and Jesus answers, “I am; and you will see ‘the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven’” (Mk 14.62). In fact, just to make sure we don’t miss the point, Matthew and Luke add a couple of words to Jesus’ response: “From now on [ἀπ’ ἄρτι] you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Mt 26.64); “from this very moment [ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν— lit., “from this now”] the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of God’s power” (Lk 22.69). What the High Priest is going to see “from this very moment” onward is precisely Jesus enthroned— and he will see him on a cross!

Only after dying on a cross does Jesus, the Son of Man, complete his apotheosis by “ascending to heaven”, the place of God (cf, eg, Ps 115.16), fulfilling Daniel’s prophecy. But as the “men” (angels) of Acts 1.10-11 assure the disciples, precisely because God has exalted him, he now in a position to come again— not to “rapture” us (that idea is less than 200 years old), but to judge and to rule the nations forever. Meanwhile, the disciples are to bring the good news to all those nations that the Father has raised this man from the dead and appointed him as judge, so that they too might be included in his regime and share in the blessings of the messianic Age. That’s the story in Acts— see especially Acts 17.31— and especially in Romans and Galatians.

The discussion on Facebook was in the context of a debate about the value of “apologetics”. I asserted that usual kind of apologetics— the kind where we “prove the existence of God”, or (worse) the “historical truth of Genesis”— is pretty much worthless. Instead, my experience in Africa (and differently, in Utah and San Francisco) taught me that we need to train in this kind of “narrative apologetics”. We have to learn how to tell the story of Jesus, not as we have it in our own heads, but as the Gospel writers told it. But of course that entails learning what the story in the Gospels actually is. It’s not about finding a satisfactory scientific explanation for things like the Ascension; rather it’s about learning to understand the language in which the writer (in this case only Luke) told it, which is provided by Daniel 7. And it’s in each evangelist’s specific story of Jesus that we get the particular experience that he wants us to get.

God is like Jesus, but to understand Jesus, we need to inhabit the story Jesus inhabited, which is that of Daniel’s “Son of Man”.