The Coming of the Son of Man
Introduction
For those of you who are sports fans, you may know the anxiety of whether your favourite team is going to win. The situation may be that your team losing by a significant margin and you are hoping for a last minute comeback or it may be a very close game which could go any way. If there is a team that you have become loyal to, it is impossible to watch passively, just enjoying the skill of all the players. You are invested in it and you have very strong opinions about who will win.
If you are not a sports fan, you may face something similar at election time. You have a particular party or candidate that you very much want to win. The early returns start coming in and it may not look good for your choice. You keep watching, hoping that something will turn around and the one you want to win will be elected.
There are other contexts in which we can feel this anxiety of things not looking good but we hope the right side will ultimately win. Think about the world around us. There is significant unrest all around us, from politically to economically to environmentally. At times it is looking pretty bad, both globally and locally. We might wonder if the side of righteousness has any chance of winning.
This is a theme that is prominent in the Bible. The Scriptures do not shy away from the fact that it looks like evil and injustice are winning at the moment. But the Bible continually reminds us of the hope that we have. It is not just a vague hope that somehow something might get a bit easier. It is a hope that everything will change at a specific event: the return of Jesus. And that is what Jesus talks about in this passage.
Jesus Looks to the Future
Luke 21 and the parallels in Matthew and Mark are some of the confusing passages in the New Testament. The reason is that two events are mixed together. One is the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the other is the coming of the Son of Man. There are reasons for this. One is that the temple was so important that to the disciples it seemed to signify the end. The other is that the destruction of the temple pointed forward to the end.
Jesus paints a picture of how bad things are going to get. The destruction of the temple is only a foretaste of how bad the world can become. Jesus does this not to depress the disciples but to provide the context for what would take place. What would take place? The coming of the Son of Man.
Who is the Son of Man? The Son of Man is Jesus. So why didn’t Jesus just say that it would be him coming on the clouds? In the Gospels, Jesus regularly calls himself the Son of Man. What does that phrase mean? It literally is a way of speaking of a human being. This was Jesus’ preferred self-description. He didn’t go around calling himself the Son of God or the Messiah. It was mostly the Son of Man.
This was a way of giving a hidden message of who he was. The religious leaders couldn’t complain about him using that phrase because technically they were all sons of man. There was nothing controversial about it. At least not exactly. But when Jesus calls himself the Son of Man he is thinking about more than himself as a human being. He is thinking about a prophecy in Daniel 7. Let’s take a look.
Daniel Looks to the Future
Before looking at the prophecy, it is important to understand the context in which Daniel lived. The book of Daniel takes place after the first destruction the Jerusalem temple and in the time of the Babylonian exile. In fact Daniel is one of those exiles. Things were looking really bad. Not only was the temple gone and the people sent out of their country, life was a challenge in Babylon. There was a price to pay to remain faithful to God as we see in numerous stories in Daniel. It was a very dark time.
In this context, Daniel received a prophecy of the future. Daniel saw the Ancient of Days, which is God. He then saw the defeat of the powers of evil that had rebelled against God. Finally there was the appearance of someone like a son of man. No details are given. All we know is that this some sort of divine being that looks like a human being. All authority is given to him and he sets up a kingdom that can never be destroyed. This would be a meaningful prophecy for Daniel who lived in a world where everything was upside down and the righteous rather than the wicked suffered. Daniel was told that God’s side would ultimately win and that part of that would include one who was like a son of man.
It is clear by the reference to the Son of Man coming on the clouds that Jesus is identifying himself with this figure and that his return would be the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy. Jesus, after his death, resurrection and ascension, would one day return to earth, evil would be defeated and the kingdom of God would come in its fullness.
In regular language, the good guys will finally win.
We Look to the Future
So what do we do with all this? There are a couple of responses we could do. One thing would be for us to try and find hidden codes in the Bible and try to calculate the date of when these things will happen. I do not recommend that.
Another thing we could do is embrace a completely passive posture. We could take the attitude that things are bad now and they won’t be fixed until Jesus returns, so we might as well sit back and wait for the end. Trying to make a difference in this world would be no more than rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.
Some Christians take that view but that is not what the Bible says. The Bible says that we are to build God’s kingdom now, even though it won’t come in its fullness until Jesus returns. We are to fight for justice and for truth. We should seek to take care of the environment. We should seek to end human trafficking. We should seek reconciliation between those who are in conflict. We should seek to care for the poor and the hungry. What we do now matters.
Doing the right thing now is not a waste of time just because the final victory happens at the second coming. By building the kingdom now, we are demonstrating our faith that we really do believe that our side is going to win. Giving up now would be the opposite.
Conclusion
The Bible talks a lot about the return of the Messiah. It is not a side doctrine that can be safely ignored. Daniel, in the wake of the destruction of the first temple, looked to the future of the coming of one like a son of man coming in the clouds. Jesus, anticipating the destruction of the second temple, looked to the future of his own return as the Son of Man coming in the clouds.
What this means for us is that even when the contest between good and evil looks the most uncertain, we can be assured that our team, the people of God, will win. That victory will take place when Jesus returns. But until that day, we do what we can to build God’s kingdom here. Every act of goodness on our part is a statement of faith of how we believe God will bring things to a conclusion.
