Nobody Knows the Hour

The disciples had asked him when. A whole chapter has gone by since that question, full of wars and false messiahs and a fig tree in leaf, and now he comes back around to it and closes it.

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

That sentence has given careful readers trouble for two thousand years, and people who take every word of this book seriously, who would not dream of trimming a syllable off it, have understood it in more than one way. Some hold that in becoming human the Son accepted real limits, and that this is one of them. Some hold that he knew and was declining to say. Some hold that it belongs to what he laid down rather than to what he lacked. Mark states it and goes straight on to the instruction without stopping to reconcile anything, and we will follow him there.

What nobody disputes is that Jesus said it about himself, out loud, and that Mark wrote it down and left it standing.

The instruction takes up the rest of the chapter. Stay awake, he tells them, because you have no idea when the time is coming. Then, to give them something they can picture, he hands them a household.

It is like a man going on a journey who left his house, put each servant in charge of his own task, and instructed the doorkeeper to keep watch.

Every servant in that house is given work, one of them is given the door, and nobody at all is posted at a window to scan the road through the night. The master handed out tasks, and the household is ready because it is busy.

Then he says when the master might come back, and he says it as a list: evening, midnight, when the rooster crows, morning. Those are the four watches of the night, named one after another, which is a way of saying it could be any hour of the dark.

Those same four hours arrive almost at once. In chapter 14, in a garden in the evening, three men cannot stay awake, he is arrested in the dark and led away, and Peter denies him before a rooster crows twice. The watches he lists on this hillside are the watches he is about to walk through.

The last verse lifts all of it off the men sitting with him and lays it on everybody. What he says to them he says to us, and it comes down to two words. Keep watch.