Immediately after the tribulation of those days. — From this point onwards the prophecy takes a wider range, and passes beyond the narrow limits of the destruction of Jerusalem to the final coming of the Son of Man, and the one is represented as following “immediately” on the other. No other meaning could have been found in the words when they were first heard or read. The “days” of this verse are those which were shortened “for the elect’s sake” (Matthew 24:22). The “tribulation” can be none other than that of Matthew 24:21, which was emphatically connected with the flight of men from the beleaguered city. The language of St. Mark, “in those days, after that tribulation,” followed by a description of the second Advent identical in substance with St. Matthew’s, brings the two events, if possible, into yet closer juxtaposition. How are we to explain the fact that already more than eighteen centuries have rolled away, and “the promise of His coming” still tarries? It is a partial answer to the question to say that God’s measurements of time are not as man’s, and that with Him “a thousand years are as one day” (2 Peter 3:8); that there is that in God which answers to the modification of a purpose in man, and now postpones, now hastens, the unfolding of His plan. But that which may seem the boldest answer is also (in the judgment of the present writer) that which seems the truest and most reverential. Of that “day and hour” knew no man, “not even the Son” (Mark 13:32), “but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36); and therefore He, as truly man, and as having, therefore, vouchsafed to accept the limitations of knowledge incident to man’s nature, speaks of the two events as poets and prophets speak of the far-off future. As men gazing from a distance see the glittering heights of two snow crowned mountains apparently in close proximity, and take no account of the vast tract, it may be of very many miles, which lies between them; so it was that those whose thoughts must have been mainly moulded on this prediction, the Apostles and their immediate disciples, though they were too conscious of their ignorance Of “the times and the seasons” to fix the day or year, lived and died in the expectation that it was not far off, and that they might, by prayer and acts, hasten its coming (2 Peter 3:12). (See Note on Matthew 24:36.)
Shall the sun be darkened. — The words reproduce the imagery in which Isaiah had described the day of the Lord’s judgment upon Babylon (Isaiah 13:10), and may naturally receive the same symbolic interpretation. Our Lord speaks here in language as essentially apocalyptic as that of the Revelation of St. John (Revelation 8:12), and it lies in the very nature of such language that it precludes a literal interpretation. Even the common speech of men describes a time of tribulation as one in which “the skies are dark” and “the sun of a nation’s glory sets in gloom;” and the language of Isaiah, of St. John, and of our Lord, is but the expansion of that familiar parable. Sun, moon, and stars may represent, as many have thought, kingly power, and the spiritual influence of which the Church of Christ is the embodiment, and the illuminating power of those who “shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15), but even this interpretation is, it may be, over-precise and technical, and the words are better left in their dim and terrible vagueness.
The powers of the heavens. — These are, it will be noted, distinguished from the “stars,” and may be taken as the apocalyptic expression for the laws or “forces” by which moon and stars are kept in their appointed courses. The phrase is found elsewhere only in the parallel passages in St. Mark and St. Luke.