As Easter approaches, my thoughts turn to the events of the week that was at once the most solemn and joyous of Jesus’ life on Earth. Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, Good Friday, Easter Sunday—all these have a settled place in the church’s mystic chords of memory, but one event stands out in jarring contrast. It wears the grand label “Olivet Discourse,” but “Doomsday Outburst” would be more accurate (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21).
One of Jesus’ disciples made an innocent observation about the massive stones supporting Herod’s temple: “Some rocks!”—the kind of comment you hear from any slack—jawed pilgrim visiting the big city. Out of nowhere, Jesus unleashes one of his longest speeches, a blend of startling images and commentary about what lies ahead for them and for planet Earth.
Those huge stones will be thrown down—every one of them, Jesus says. More, earthquakes and famines will break out, stars will fall from the sky, and the sun and moon will darken. “Pray that this will not take place in winter, because those will be days of distress unequaled from the beginning, when God created the world, until now—and never to be equaled again.”
I can imagine the disciples, fresh from the triumph of Palm Sunday and the thrill of the temple cleansing, looking at each other in astonishment. What brought this on?
Commentators tend to focus on the details of the speech: the meaning of the wondrous bleak phrase “abomination that causes desolation,” the identity of false prophets and messiahs, the exact signs that will usher in the world’s last night. As I read Jesus’ words, however, I am mainly struck by their emotional force, not the details. The Olivet Discourse seems more right-brained than left-brained in its approach to prophecy. As such, it offers striking clues to Jesus’ emotional state as he nears his own time of trauma.
Ticking Time Bomb
Jesus’ anxiety comes through, surely, in this speech delivered a few days before his arrest and torture. I find it oddly comforting to read further and see that Jesus responded to pain much like I do: he felt scared and wanted it to go away. He prayed not, “Thank you, Father, for this opportunity to suffer,” but rather, “Take this cup from me.” Three times he so pled with the Father, and as he prayed his sweat fell to the ground like drops of blood. Hebrews adds that Jesus prayed “with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death” (5:7). But Jesus would not be saved from death, and that awareness must have been ticking like a time bomb inside him.
I sense behind Jesus’ words a tone of compassion as well. “Flee to the mountains,” he cries in alarm, and that’s exactly what the Christians of Jerusalem did in A.D. 70 when Roman armies encircled the city. “How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers!” Jesus sighs.
Novelist Mary Gordon recalls a scene from adolescence when she first heard these words in church, perceiving in them Jesus’ instinctive concern for women. “I knew I wanted children,” says Gordon. “I felt those words were for me. Now I think: how many men would take into consideration the hardships of pregnancy and nursing.” In her opinion, Jesus is “the only affectionate hero in literature.”
Jesus’ compassion for his disciples shines through most darkly. “You will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death,” he says, spelling out the grim future of torture and humiliation that awaits them. Reading his descriptions, I cannot push from my mind a haunting scene from the novel Silence, by Shusaku Endo. A Portuguese missionary priest, bound, is forced to watch as samurai guards torture Japanese Christians, one by one, and throw them into the sea. The samurai swear they will keep on killing Christians until the priest renounces his faith. “He had come to this country to lay down his life for other men, but instead of that the Japanese were laying down their lives one by one for him.”
What was it like for Jesus, who saw with piercing vision the terrible consequences of what he had set loose in the world, not only for himself, but for the huddled few around him, his best friends? “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child.… All men will hate you because of me.”
Facing Doomsday
Finally, I detect in the Olivet Discourse a faint echo of anticipation: “At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.” Jesus’ words grow fierce as he describes the cosmic turmoil that will herald the end of the world.
Sometimes we who read the Bible’s cryptic passages on “the last days” end up feeling more confused than comforted. But as I read Jesus’ words in context, delivered just days before his death, I better understand why the Bible includes them and why Jesus must pronounce them. He, the Lamb who lays down his own life, dares not leave his cowed disciples without a preview of the future. The Lamb will return, he promises, this time in power and glory, to put a decisive end to the struggle that has not ceased since Eden—the very struggle that menaces these his beloved friends.
Revelation uses the oxymoronic phrase “wrath of the lamb” to describe that future visitation. Creation will convulse in one last paroxysm of pain as evil is cast out. Then Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, and all who followed them will face their rewards. We all will.
It must have been a terrible burden for Jesus to carry around, knowing—though not in precise detail, he insists—the future. In the Olivet Discourse, delivered during his last week of life, Jesus transfers that burden to us. Many things remain hidden and unclear. He says just enough to keep us on tiptoe, watching and hoping.
“What if this present were the world’s last night?” asked John Donne in a brooding sonnet.
Anxiety, compassion, anticipation—together, these conflicting emotions form a good blueprint for all of us facing doomsday.
