Okay, I’m cheating in this play about Jesus’ warnings concerning the End Times. I base the play on the disciples being confused over whether he was talking about the end of the world or the political revolution they believe they are about to instigate when they shortly enter Jerusalem, and also on whether what he might be saying about the revolution is optimistic or pessimistic, and this open-endedness is indeed there in the text, but the trick is that the text is only half the text.
This long passage is divided into two lectionary readings, and if we consider them both together, then it becomes more likely that Jesus is talking about the End Times and not the entry into Jerusalem. In fact, if we just throw in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ words, which differs in some key ways, they also begin to tilt a little in the direction of the End Times. However, the Matthew version of things does not actually appear as any lectionary reading, and the second half of Jesus’ long monologue won’t be coming up for nearly three years, when Year C, the liturgical year we’re at the end of now, rolls around once more. So I treated this week’s reading as a standalone story, and rendered it in its own terms.
However, I think there were good reasons for my deliberate pursuit of ambiguity besides just the excuse provided by the above circumstances.
First of all, I think the disciples would have been genuinely confused during the first half of Jesus’ monologue. After all, neither Jesus nor the scriptures that they knew had ever really mentioned the End Times before, while here they were, finally on the verge of entering Jerusalem. They would naturally have interpreted anything he said at that point in terms of the Day of the Lord they thought was at hand.
Second, they would still have been confused after hearing the second part of Jesus’ monologue! We, after all, approach this passage with all kinds of preparation. Depending on the Bible version we use, we probably have a section header that announces to us what this passage is supposed to be about before we even read a word of it. And we have all the rest of the New Testament to establish that, yes, the End Times are a subject we’re going to read about here and there in the Bible. (And even after all that, our reaction to many of these passages is probably still, “Huh?”) The disciples, on the other hand, are hearing this bizarre talk for the first time ever, with no traditions of interpretation to guide them. Of course they would have been confused.
Finally, even today, there are enormous disagreements about the meaning of these End Times passages, even leaving out the crazies who try to calculate the date the world will end. So it was very much in the spirit of the subject that I purposely cultivated a conflict between differing interpretations among the disciples in this week’s story. Because the one thing we know for sure about the End Times is that people will disagree about them.