“Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

“Now learn this parable from the fig tree: When its branch has already become tender and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. So you also, when you see all these things, know that it is near—at the doors! Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away. (Matthew 24:30-35)

Jesus didn’t tell his disciples everything they wanted to know, because sometimes, what they wanted to know was utter nonsense. For the disciples who were looking for Jesus to establish his rule in Jerusalem as Israel’s rightful king, what Jesus described about his coming would have seemed to them exactly what they were expecting. When Jesus spoke about “the tribes of the earth,” they thought he meant that he at last was going to raise an army and defeat the Romans. When Jesus said that the angels would gather the elect, his disciples thought all the Jewish people were going to be brought back to Israel from wherever they had been scattered across the world. And the time frame they heard from Jesus was just what they had hoped: it would all happen within their lifetimes.

Of course, their interpretation of what Jesus was saying wasn’t quite right. Their misunderstanding illustrates the problem we sometimes face in interpreting anything that someone says. Sometimes we miss the context, and sometimes we impose our own expectations upon their words, much as a person with a crush can misinterpret the actions and statements of the one with whom they’re obsessed.

So what did Jesus mean? Within Christianity, there are nearly as many interpretations as there are churches. When it comes to figuring out the future, we should consider the difficulty that the disciples had understanding what Jesus was doing during his first appearance on earth. That should serve as a warning that we probably haven’t entirely figured out what Jesus’ second coming is all about.

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