24:36 "Now concerning that day and hour, no one knows that - not even the

angels of heaven, Son, the even not but only the Father." Pesch, Markus, 310,
comments appropriately: "Even the angels do not know, although they have a
part in the End events [v. 31]; even the Son does not know, the Son of Man
himself whose Day it is!" Modern interpreters have generally preferred Jesus'
chronological "nescience" here to his "omniscience" at v. 34. They have
preferred, that is to say, our v. 36's "no one knows" to v. 34's "you can
know." Understandably. The two verses stand in a certain tension, unless v.
34's phrase "you can know" concerns the destruction of Jerusalem, and v.
36's phrase "no one knows" concerns the end of the world, as I have preferred
to understand these verses. (The solution is so convenient that it is suspect!)
The older church's attempts to save what was understood as Jesus' full deity
and so his omniscience in this text (by saying, e.g., that he actually knew
everything about the future but intentionally suppressed his knowledge in the
humble economy of his incarnation - in various forms in Chrysostom,
Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bengel) are now felt injurious to
Jesus' full and true humanity and to humanity's honorable limitations. We
believe today that Jesus could have accepted all the conditions of a limited
humanity, such as not knowing everything (as evidenced, e.g., at Gethsemane
["if it is possible"] and supremely at the cross ["why?"] ), and still be the
divine Son of God. Therefore, we can rejoice in Jesus' confession of
ignorance in this verse because it assures us of Jesus' full identity with us in
our limited humanity. And so this sentence can be expanded to say to us, "If
even the Son did not know exactly when the
end was coming, how is it that so many prophecy teachers have claimed to
know?"
But even in this humanity text, Jesus' deity shines through - Jesus speaks of
himself in the rare absolute sense (rare, i.e., in the Synoptic Gospels) as "the
Son" (ho huios), as if he enjoyed a unique relation with God the Father. (In
this Gospel see comparable but still remarkable texts: 225; 327;11:27; 28:19;
John's Gospel has this uniqueness at its heart.) Disciples are called to follow
their Lord in a certain eschatological agnosticism, not knowing just when the
end will occur. In Luke's Gospel, one characteristic of false Christian
teachers was knowing and preaching with authority that "The end is near!"
(Luke 21:8: "The time is at hand!" RSV; "The Day is upon us)" NEB). And
in Acts, when the disciples asked the risen Lord, "Will you at this time
restore the kingdom to Israel?" we remember the Lord's famous answer in a
text closely related to ours, "It is not for you [emphasized] to know the times
or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority" (Acts
1:6-7 RSV). (This verse in Luke's Acts shares our Mark/Matthew verse's
emphasis on solus pater, "The Father Alone)" but Luke's Gospel does not
have our v. 36 [par. Mark 13:32], perhaps from a concern for Jesus' deity;
thus, e.g., Bultmann,127.) It is not for disciples, not even for the original
apostles, to know ultimate times or seasons; our whole attention, insists the
Lukan Jesus, must be on Christian mission (Acts 1:8). "Christians are in
sales, not management" (Earl Palmer).
But especially in bewildering times, people long for authoritative, if not
authoritarian words from a Book they are sometimes told has all divine
answers to all human questions ("people who are confronted with the state of
the world today are eager to learn what the Best Seller has to say about the
future"; Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, 5). People are assured by
such teachers that the Bible teaches not only the gospel but also everything
from ancient geology (Genesis) to future politics (Revelation). This sweeping
claim wants to honor the divine inspiration of Scripture.
When teachers of endtime events come with sweeping assertions of a Bible
teaching everything, people are led to the strangest opinions. While believers
should have Christian certainty on the central topics of the faith, datable
endtime knowledge is not one of those central topics. The true orthodoxy
here is sanctified ignorance. "No one knows the day or the hour"; "it is not
for you to know times and seasons" (Matt 24:36; Acts 1:7).
The genuineness of our "not-knowing verse" as a historical saying of Jesus is
defended by many critical interpreters, for example, Oepke, "parousia,"
TDNT,5:867, "Who would have dared invent such a saying?"; similarly,
Taylor, 522: "Its offence seals its genuineness." Haenchen, Weg, 452,
however, counters with the early church's easy subordination of Son to Father
as seen, for example, in I Cor 15:28. Calvin, 3:99, recognizes Jesus as our
heavensent but earthly Mediator and that therefore "it was not given Him to
have what He would have after His resurrection "Luz, 3:445, even says that
Jesus' confessed ignorance here in v. 36 is paradoxically confirmed in an
unexpected way: by Jesus' mistake in v. 34 ("all this will happen in this
generation"), proving that Jesus is a true human being! I could accept this
interpretation if it did not mean that Jesus gave a false prophecy in v. 34 (cf.
Deut 13:2-4). So I prefer to think that in v. 34 Jesus predicts the imminence
of everything in his sermon except his Coming. Gregory the Great's fifth-
century attempt to protect Jesus' deity in this verse can stand for many such
attempts in the history of the church: "The Son says that he does not know
the day, which he himself causes to be unknown, not because he himself does
not know it, but because he does not allow it to be known" (in Pelikan,
1:274). Gundry's modern interpretation, 492, is not greatly different. Are
such rescue attempts necessary? I prefer Taylor's conclusion, 523: "In
modern times it is widely regarded that it is of the glory of the Incarnation
that Christ accepted those limitations of knowledge which are inseparable
from a true humanity" Calvin, 3:99, is similar. See Davies and Allison's,
3:379, review of the history of the church's interpretation of this verse.