Christ’s journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is an ascent, literally, that occupies the central third of Luke’s Gospel. When the journey begins, it is made explicit that this is a journey toward the cross: ‘And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem…’ (Luke 9: 51) Christ’s teachings as he and his disciples travel are cued to the sense of steady, deliberate movement toward the Passion [ … ]

Most of the signs Christ describes to his listeners in the eschatological discourse had already been realized by the time Luke’s first audience would have heard his Gospel. There had been, and were, wars, persecutions, family conflict, and Jerusalem with the Temple had been destroyed. The Christians of Luke’s time listening to these Gospel verses, of today and since Tuesday, could then have been encouraged to know that they were very close to Christ’s full revelation, his apocalypse, and so have courage to bear persecutions and other great challenges of the early Church [ … ]

Just as Jesus’ listeners know how to interpret signs in nature, the trees beginning to bud and shoot new leaves as they come to life in spring, so Jesus tells them that, when they see and experience the upheavals described by Jesus in our Gospel verses of the past few days, they will know that the Kingdom of God is near [ … ]

In Luke’s account of the eschatological discourse, the apocalypse – from the Greek for revelation – is clearly envisaged as beginning in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. The natural world is portrayed as being in a state of turmoil, and this reinforces for the listener the impact of what will be – has been by the time of Luke’s writing – a political event.  The Jewish rebellion and the sacking of Jerusalem will be brutal and bloody [ … ]

Jesus continues to speak to his listeners about the apocalyptic coming of the Son of Man. Using a highly elevated, figurative language, laden with symbol and metaphor, Jesus describes the second coming, or Parousia, which marks the end of this period of history and the inauguration of the new age, the days of the Son of man; it is a scene of sudden, violent destruction and transformation, and a scene of judgement [ … ]

The Kingdom of God has come in the person of Jesus. This is Jesus’ message, and it is this that will lead to his being crucified. It is this toward which the language of apocalypse directs us: our old way of being fractures with the coming of Jesus; the new reality of which we are a part is as lightning flashing across the sky – across the whole sky, the whole of our world, from one side to the other. And still we are told there is to be no visible sign of the coming of the Kingdom. It is within us, in the midst of us, when we walk as disciples with Jesus [ … ]

To cause scandal is to drive other people away from the path of faith, to cause another person to sin, to withdraw from a life of grace, to cease to believe in redemption in Jesus Christ. This is a terrible sin, and we know that it does not stop there. The evil spreads, and soon it is common practice to denigrate Christianity. We think of the millions upon millions of little ones – and this in ‘Christian countries’ – who have never been introduced to Jesus, and of all the attendant troubles they experience because their spiritual lives have not been fostered. The signs of this spiritual neglect are endemic, while when many people speak against Christianity they do not even know what it is that they are objecting to; they have become in so little time so far removed from what could have been their inheritance, the living faith [ … ]

Some few of the Pharisees now show solidarity with Jesus, warning him that Herod Antipas means to kill him. Herod has previously expressed a wish to meet Jesus (Luke 9: 9), about whom he was perplexed, wondering if John the Baptist had risen again. We do not know whether the Pharisees simply want to get Jesus to go away or if there is danger [ … ]