Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• This passage from Luke picks up right after the last one we read in Mark (Mark 13:1-8). But Luke was written a couple of decades after Mark, so the devastation of the fall of the temple has passed some. Luke is less focused on linking Jesus words to an event as he is to pointing out how to live in the in-between time of “Christ has come” and “Christ will come again.”
• Like we talked about when we read Mark 13:1-8, apocalyptic literature is not about instilling fear but in demonstrating God’s presence in the midst of chaos. Theologian Jurgen Multmann calls it a “theology of hope,” saying, “the Christian hope [is not] an ‘opium of the beyond’ but rather the divine power that makes us alive in the world.”
• I’m struck that in the midst of the terror he describes, Jesus calls us to “stand up and raise [our] heads, because [our] redemption is drawing near.”
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