The cosmic disturbances that precede the coming of the Son of man (Mark 13:24-25; Lk.21:25-26; Matt.24:29) must also be interpreted in relation to the circumstances of the war against Rome. They follow on immediately after the period of extreme suffering (‘in those days’, ‘immediately’: Mk.13:24; Matt.24:29) and will take place before the generation of Jesus’ contemporaries disappears (Mk.13:30). Such language is used in the Old Testament to designate the impending crisis as a final and irrevocable act of judgment. Isaiah 34, for example, is a proclamation of God’s anger against the nations and against Edom in particular. It includes the predictions: ‘All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll. All their host shall fall, as leaves fall from the vine, like leaves falling from the fig tree’ (v.4). But the world is not destroyed, and in the end Edom is depicted as a wasteland overgrown with thorns and thistles, inhabited by wild animals. Israel faces the same divine judgment that it faced in the past when Judah was invaded by Nebuchadnezzar. The difference this time is that there is no accompanying promise of the literal restoration of Jerusalem and the temple.
Jesus’ ‘prophecy’ about the ‘coming of the Son of man’ is less a prediction about what will happen, a description of future events, than a statement from within the purview of Jewish apocalypticism about the fulfilment of Daniel’s vision. He does not say that the Son of man will descend bodily from heaven to earth: he means rather that the drama of Daniel 7, in which the enemy of God’s people is overthrown and kingdom given to the saints of the Most High, will be re-enacted in the course of the coming crisis of the end of the age. This will be recognized beyond the boundaries of Israel: ‘as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of man’ (Matt.24:27). Not only the high priest (Matt.26:64) but also the tribes of the earth (Matt.24:30) will ‘see’ the vindication of Jesus – ‘the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory’.
After the final disappearance of Jesus, lifted up and carried out of sight by a cloud, the disciples are told by an angel that ‘This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven’ (Acts 1:11). This is probably better understood as a reference back to Jesus’ own statement about ‘the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory’ (Lk.21:27) than as a direct echo of Daniel’s prophecy. The account of Jesus’ ‘ascension’, however, is introduced by a question posed by the disciples about the time of the restoration of the kingdom to Israel (Acts 1:6), which at least sets the coming of Jesus in the context of Israel’s immediate political and religious hopes. This is reinforced by Peter’s later statement to the Jews gathered in Solomon’s portico that heaven must receive the Christ ‘until the time for establishing all that God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old’ (3:21). The phrase ‘by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old’ is found elsewhere in the Greek Bible only at Luke 1:70, where Zechariah speaks of God redeeming his people, raising up a horn of salvation, ‘as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old’ (Luke 1:70). This cannot be a coincidence. Zechariah goes on to define this salvation as a deliverance ‘from the hand of our enemies’ so that Israel ‘might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life’ (vv.71-75). Again, the coming of the Son of man has to do with rescue of Israel from her oppressors and the institution of a new freedom of worship and servanthood.
Paul has modified the prophetic schema of the coming of the Son of man in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 ‘by a word of the Lord’ in order to accommodate those who had died and to reassure the Thessalonians: the Lord himself will ‘descend’ prior to the ‘coming’ in order to guarantee the participation of the dead in the re-enactment of Daniel’s vision.
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