“Verily, I say unto you, this generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”
In the year 402 Jerome, a Latin Father of the Church living in a small monastery in Jerusalem, wrote a short letter of reply to Augustine who was then a bishop and living in Northern Africa:
“Let me say further… do not because you are young challenge a veteran in the field of Scripture. I have put in my time and have run my course to the utmost of my strength. It is but fair that I should rest, while you in your turn run and accomplish great distances… And yet, lest you think that only you can quote the poets, permit me to remind you of the proverb: ‘The tired ox treads with a firmer step.’”
What brought on this response was a letter from Augustine in which he accused Jerome of stating that St. Paul had intentionally misrepresented St. Peter’s position on the Law of Moses in order to make a greater point about the work of Christ. Augustine wrote that such a thing would be devastating for the Church were it true:
“For it seems to me that disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books: that the men by whom the Scripture has been given and then written did include falsehood. (Were that the case) every single sentence of every single book… may be dismissed.” Augustine was right.
Jerome later wrote back that he had meant no such thing and would not dream of it, to which Augustine wrote back and essentially said, “good to know.” The point that these two Fathers of the Church were disputing is as important today as it was then since it turns entirely upon the reliability of the Holy Scripture. If it can be shown that any one of the authors of the New Testament books intentionally misrepresented what Jesus said or did then it is fair to call the whole of the New Testament into question.
The Second Sunday of Advent is sometimes called “Bible Sunday,” in view of the Collect and the Epistle, from which we learn that God gave the Scriptures to us for our schooling and shaping in patience and courage. For that reason we should “ hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”
The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from what is called the Olivet Discourse or sometimes the Little Apocalypse. It goes all the way back to the Roman lectionary of antiquity and may well have been the one appointed about this time for Augustine’s diocese. Its focus is upon the end times and it includes one of the more troubling verses attributed to our Lord when after he had given a long sermon on the end of the world he states:
“Verily, I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”
This passage is especially hard to take because it appears that Jesus made a big mistake and compounded the mistake, he doubled-down, by asserting that his word was absolutely irrevocable:
“Verily, I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”
By asserting that the whole cosmic order of heaven and earth would one day vanish, but his own words would never pass away, Jesus gave his word a status equal to the Word of God. The generation he was speaking to has long since passed away and he has not returned. So what are we to make of this? Is it possible that Luke misquoted Jesus? No, that is very unlikely because the Olivet Discourse and this statement is also found in Matthew and Mark:
“This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.”
Since all three of the Synoptic Evangelists agree that this is from the very mouth of our Lord Jesus Christ himself we have to wonder what it means that he has not returned? Is it possible that Jesus was just wrong about this matter of timing? That is certainly what many people have said in the past and in this present day as well. St. Peter had already faced mockers in his day and he so he wrote to the Church:
“You must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, following their own passions and saying: ‘Where is the promise of his coming?’”
But our problem is even more acute: how could Jesus Christ be all we profess him to be and yet be mistaken concerning our most blessed hope – his glorious appearing? This we must investigate. And so we have to understand what Jesus meant by the word “generation” and then we must understand how that generation is to experience that which is to be fulfilled. Some have suggested that the word generation as used by Jesus here was actually a reference to Israel and so what he meant was that Israel would be present at his Second Advent. Some have suggested that the word generation was a reference to humanity in general, so the meaning would be that human beings would continue to exist and be present at his Second Advent. Others have suggested that generation is a reference to the Apostles and so the meaning would be that the Church would be present at his Second Advent. There are several other possible meanings of the word generation, but they all require far more imagination and stretching the plain sense of the word than the ones we have already looked at. But the bottom line is that through out the Gospels, the word generation is used straightforwardly to mean a generation; an age group, of people and what that means is that Jesus was referring to the people he was speaking to that day at the Temple – some of them were his disciples and others were simply Jerusalemites listening to a teacher of moderate fame.
But to understand what this passage means and how it applies to the Church we need to begin by getting an overview of the whole of the Olivet Discourse in Luke chapter 21. That way we may at least put the whole matter in context. The narrative context is his last week in Jerusalem after his triumphant entry. That day Jesus was with his disciples and a lot of Jerusalemites in the Temple where he had been healing the blind and the lame; and then someone in the group pointed out to him the majesty and beauty of the Temple. But Jesus replied in a way that must have been disturbing:
“As for the things which you see, the days will come when there shall not be left one stone upon another…”
Remember last week that I pointed out that anyone who prophesied the destruction of the Temple could receive the death penalty? Well that is exactly what Jesus did. His disciples and the other Jews were shaken and asked him when the Temple would be destroyed. From there Jesus began the long discourse about the end of time, the coming of the Son of Man, that also included the part the Temple and Jerusalem played in the Last Things. He warned his disciples not to fall for lies and deceptions about the last days. Jesus gave a very specific list: there will be false-Christ claiming to be him, don’t listen to them. There will be those who will come and say, “The day is here, the time is at hand,” don’t listen to them. Stay away from those people. Furthermore there will be wars and rumors of wars, but don’t be fearful. There will also be great earthquakes, kingdoms falling, famines, pestilences, terrors and persecutions of Jesus’ disciples all over the world. But Jesus said, do not be afraid.
Then Jesus prophesied that his prophesy of the destruction of the Temple was also a prophesy of the destruction of Jerusalem. Not only will the Temple be destroyed, but also all of the Jerusalem will be ruined – leveled to the ground – this is God’s coming judgment:
“But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come.”
After his prophesy of the desolation of Jerusalem our Lord described his Second Advent as the whole cosmic order of heaven and earth seemed to pulsate and shatter. The creature would tremble at what is coming upon the earth and then he will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with great power and glory.
Our Gospel for today comes at the very end of the Olivet Discourse, but what is clear, when we look at the whole, is that for our Lord and the Church, God would bring a final judgment upon Jerusalem and that judgment was bound to the Last Judgment and the Second Advent. The judgment of Jerusalem, for her sins and her rejection of the Messiah, was a microcosm of the Last Judgment in which Christ will come to judge the living and the dead. Jerusalem was in a very real sense the very necessary prequel to the Second Advent. There is a strong sense in which “all is fulfilled” with the judgment of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. And so 40 years after our Lord prophesied her destruction, in the year 70 a Roman army under the leadership of the future emperor Titus, laid siege to Jerusalem. On September 7 of that year the city was completely under their control and Titus gave the order to destroy the Temple and every home, every building, every wall and every high tower in the city and even chop down and uproot all the trees inside and outside the city. All of Jerusalem’s life and beauty was taken away. Josephus wrote that the Romans killed well over 1,000,000 Jews during that destruction. Temple worship came to an end; ritual sacrifice and burnt offerings were finished. The desolation that Jesus had prophesied came upon Jerusalem:
“This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.”
I submit to you that based upon Luke and taking into account Matthew and Mark, what was fulfilled before “this generation” passed away – what was fulfilled was the prophesy of Jesus that the Temple and Jerusalem would be completely destroyed. And in that fulfillment Jerusalem’s desolation is a microcosm, a prequel of the Last Judgment when Christ will come with power and glory.
I want to close with two points. First, I also want to suggest that such difficult passages ought to increase rather than decrease your confidence in the Holy Scriptures. Why? – Because they demonstrate the gravity, the truthfulness, the unswerving devotion to the words of Christ that the Evangelists. If the Evangelists were driven by a sort of marketing tendency – a desire to leave the Church a harmonious, trouble free presentation of all that Jesus did and said they would have edited such passages from the texts.
And finally, I want you to see is that Jesus discouraged us from engaging in speculation about the end of the world, but he encouraged us be vigilant, alert and specifically to see opportunities to bear witness to Jesus, which between now and then is our whole purpose for being.