Chapter 30 · ~12 min read
The Apocalyptic Mood
what Jesus's vocabulary was made of
The modern Western Christian, when she comes to Jesus’s harder sayings, often finds herself caught between two ways of handling them. She can take the language literally — the furnace, the worm that doesn’t die, the weeping and the gnashing of teeth, the angels gathering up the wicked at harvest — and try to assemble it all into a precise map of the world to come, complete with timetables, signs, and a chart on the back wall of the Sunday-school room. Or she can quietly set it aside as ancient imagery that no contemporary educated person can be expected to take at face value, and reach instead for the gentle Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of grace, the blessed are the poor in spirit.
Both responses are misunderstandings of what the language is. Neither is what the first audience would have done with it. And both miss the way Jesus’s harder sayings actually function — which is, when you can hear it, more interesting than either modern reading captures.
the genre Jesus inherited
Jesus didn’t invent the vocabulary of harvest and furnace and gnashing of teeth and the age to come. He inherited it. By the time he stood on a Galilean hillside and started to speak, Jewish writers had been developing this kind of speech for roughly two hundred years. The book of Daniel — composed in something close to its final form during the Maccabean crisis of the second century BC — was its earliest fully-developed biblical example. The book of 1 Enoch, parts of which we met in chapter twenty-six, had been growing as a literary corpus across the same period. 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, the Apocalypse of Abraham, the various scrolls from Qumran that scholars now call the War Scroll and the Rule of the Community and the Hodayot: these were the books and writings the first century had been reading. They have a name now in modern scholarship. They’re called apocalyptic literature.
The Greek word apokalypsis means unveiling — the pulling back of a curtain so something hidden can be seen. The genre is named for that core gesture. An apocalyptic text typically presents itself as the disclosure of heavenly realities to a chosen visionary — Enoch ascended into the heavens, Daniel shown the rise and fall of empires, Ezra given a tour of the cosmic future, John on Patmos seeing the throne and the lamb and the four horsemen. The visionary sees what God sees. The reader, reading over the visionary’s shoulder, sees it too.
What this means for reading Jesus is something an earlier chapter of this book already opened the door to. Chapter twenty-two on the Olivet Discourse established that apocalyptic language — darkened sun, falling stars, cosmic shaking — was a register of speech the Hebrew prophets had developed for talking about political catastrophe, and that this register wasn’t, in its native setting, literal astronomy. What this chapter wants to add is that the register had become, by Jesus’s day, a fully-developed literary genre, with its own conventions, its own stock vocabulary, and a two-hundred-year body of texts the first audience would have been steeped in. Jesus’s hearers didn’t encounter apocalyptic language as something exotic. They encountered it as something familiar — the way a modern listener encounters the conventions of a courtroom drama or a detective story or a country song. The conventions were the vehicle. What mattered was what the conventions were being used to say.
the grammar of the genre
The classic modern treatment of all this is The Apocalyptic Imagination by John J. Collins — Holmes Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School, past president of both the Society of Biblical Literature and the Catholic Biblical Association, and the scholar whose 1979 definition of apocalypse as a genre has shaped academic study of these texts for two generations. Collins lays out the conventions in detail across three editions of his book, the third updated by Eerdmans in 2016. The features worth knowing, for purposes of reading Jesus, are these.
Two ages. Jewish apocalyptic divides the sweep of time into two: this age — the present, fallen, corrupted era in which evil flourishes — and the age to come — the new creation that breaks in when God finally acts. The boundary between them is sharp, decisive, and brought about by God. Jesus’s contemporaries used these two terms constantly. Jesus used them himself, and we’ll hear him doing so a few pages from now.
Cosmic dualism. The apocalyptic writers often pictured the present age as the scene of a great unseen conflict — light against darkness, the sons of light against the sons of darkness (a phrase the Dead Sea Scrolls return to obsessively), the righteous against the wicked, the angels of God against the rebellious watchers. The dualism wasn’t metaphysical in the Greek philosophical sense; it didn’t mean that matter was evil and spirit good. It meant that history was a battleground, and the lines were drawn.
Standardized imagery. The genre developed a stock vocabulary that worked, by the first century, almost as shorthand. Harvest meant the eschatological gathering, when God would separate righteous from wicked. Trumpet meant the heralding of God’s decisive action. Fire meant judgment. Furnace meant catastrophic purgation. White robes meant vindicated righteousness. The book of life meant the divine register of those who would be raised. Beasts meant pagan empires. Stars meant rulers or heavenly beings. None of this was riddle. It was the genre’s working vocabulary, and the first audience knew it the way modern moviegoers know what a wide-brimmed hat and a tumbleweed mean.
Heavenly mediators. Apocalyptic visions usually arrive through an angelic or heavenly interpreter who explains what the visionary is seeing — Gabriel in Daniel, Uriel in 4 Ezra, the angel in Revelation 17 who tells John what the beast is. The vision isn’t transparent. It needs explanation. This is part of why apocalyptic texts so often pair vivid imagery with explicit interpretation. The reader is meant to see and to be told what she is seeing.
Vindication. The whole genre, in some sense, exists to say one thing: the righteous will be vindicated. The present age looks like the wicked are winning. Evil is unpunished. The faithful are persecuted. The temple is defiled. Empires roll over the people of God. But God sees. God will act. The two ages will be separated. The righteous will be raised, gathered, given white robes, seated at the feast. The wicked will be cast out. The whole register is, at its core, a register of hope under pressure — a way of saying to a community under threat that the present evidence isn’t the final word.
The genre’s foundational example, for Jesus’s first audience, was Daniel — the only fully-developed apocalypse in the Hebrew Bible’s own canon, and the book whose imagery Jesus drew on more than any other when he spoke about himself. Daniel 7 alone gave the tradition the four beasts, the Ancient of Days, the river of fire flowing from the throne, the books opened in judgment, and — at the center of the vision — one like a son of man who comes on the clouds of heaven and is given everlasting dominion. We met this vision in chapter twenty-two on the Olivet Discourse. What’s worth noticing here is what surrounds it. Daniel 7 is doing every move on the list above. The two ages are present: the era of the beasts gives way to the kingdom of the saints. The cosmic dualism is present: the beasts rage against the holy ones. The standardized imagery is present: the river of fire, the books, the thrones, the Ancient of Days on his throne. The heavenly mediator is present: an angel interprets the vision for Daniel verse by verse. The vindication is the whole point: the beasts will fall, the saints will receive the kingdom. Daniel 7 is, in this sense, the genre’s whole architecture in a single chapter — and the chapter Jesus pulled the title Son of Man directly out of. When he used the vocabulary, he was using vocabulary his hearers could trace, line by line, back into a book they knew.
Once these conventions are in mind, the way Jesus uses them comes into a different focus. He isn’t making them up. He’s also not, the way some modern readers imagine, working out a literal cosmology in advance. He’s using a charged inherited vocabulary that his audience knew, and using it to say what he came to say.
three sayings, audible again
The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. (Matthew 13:39, NIV). In the parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus’s explanation to his disciples (Matthew 13:36-43) is a small masterpiece of apocalyptic genre work. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one (Matthew 13:38, NIV). The harvest is the eschatological gathering — exactly the standard apocalyptic image. The angels are the reapers — exactly the apocalyptic role. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:42, NIV) — the blazing furnace and the weeping and gnashing of teeth are both inherited apocalyptic vocabulary, used not as a precise topographical description of postmortem geography but as the genre’s charged register for judgment is real, and it is coming. A first-century reader of 1 Enoch or 4 Ezra would have recognized the whole vocabulary as belonging to a tradition. Jesus’s contribution isn’t the vocabulary; it’s what he puts at the center of it. The Son of Man — Jesus himself — is the one who sends out the angels. The kingdom is his kingdom. The harvest is his harvest. The eschatological vocabulary of the genre has been re-centered on Jesus.
Either in this age or in the age to come. (Matthew 12:32, NIV). This single phrase — this age, the age to come — is the load-bearing two-age structure of Jewish apocalyptic, stated by Jesus as if it needs no explanation. He uses it again in Mark 10:30, when he tells his disciples that those who have left family or fields for his sake will receive a hundredfold in this present age — and in the age to come, eternal life. Paul picks the same vocabulary up across his letters. This age is the era of evil, persecution, and the apparent victory of the powers; the age to come is the era of God’s vindication and the resurrection of the righteous. The phrase isn’t a metaphor and isn’t a literal calendar. It is the genre’s standard temporal architecture, in which the first audience habitually located themselves. When Jesus uses it, he isn’t introducing a new framework. He’s using the framework his hearers already lived inside.
Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. (Mark 8:35, NIV). Apocalyptic vindication-of-the-righteous reading. The whole point of the genre was to say to a community under pressure that the present evidence isn’t the final word — that those who appear to be losing are, in fact, the ones who will be raised, gathered, given white robes, seated at the feast. Jesus picks up the genre’s central move and applies it to discipleship. Lose your life — the appearance of defeat in the present age. Save it — the vindication of the age to come. The two-age structure is doing the work. The genre’s deep grammar of appearance now, vindication then is doing the work. A first-century hearer steeped in 1 Enoch and Daniel and the stories of the Maccabean martyrs would have understood the saying inside that grammar without anyone explaining it.
The recovery this chapter is after isn’t the recovery of a literal cosmology. It’s also not the dismissal of Jesus’s harder sayings as ancient imagery to be discarded. It is something more useful than either. It’s the recognition that Jesus’s vocabulary, in some of his most demanding moments, draws on a charged literary tradition his first audience knew — and that letting that tradition’s grammar back into the reading doesn’t soften what Jesus said. It does the opposite. It makes the sayings more legible, not less. The harvest is real. The judgment is real. The two ages are real. The vindication is real. What isn’t required is that the modern reader pretend Jesus was producing a literal map of postmortem geography. The genre never worked that way for its first audience, and there’s no reason to demand that it work that way now. The Apocalyptic Imagination, in the title Collins gave his book, is a kind of imagination, with its own conventions and its own seriousness. The first audience knew the conventions. Recovering them isn’t optional decoration. It’s part of how Jesus’s words land.
Hearing the apocalyptic mood for what it was lets the modern Christian receive Jesus’s harder sayings without the false choice the modern Western reader has been offered for two hundred years. She doesn’t have to flatten them into a timetable. She doesn’t have to translate them into psychology. She can sit with them in their original register — charged, conventional, world-shaking, hopeful under pressure — and let them do what they were built to do.