Coming Persecutions - 10:23 The Apostles Are To Go From Town To Town

10:23 The Apostles Are To Go From Town To Town

When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel, before the Son of man comes.

Going through all the towns of Israel may refer either to the twelve running out of cities to which they can flee, or to the completion of Israel’s evangelization. However, because the two are so closely aligned—one will occur when the other does—it is little matter which one is read.

The Son of man is a figure borrowed from Daniel 7, and its use by Jesus is self-referential. Daniel 7:13 says, '...there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.' The coming of the Son of man has been taken to refer to the parousia, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, or some great event of early Christian history (e.g., the Resurrection, the Ascension, or Pentecost).

The parousia is rejected as too far removed from the Galilean setting of Jesus’ public ministry, where he spoke these words to the twelve. Hagner rejects the early defining moments of Christianity as being too early for the persecution of the preceding verses to have developed. Working from the background of ‘Son of man’ in Daniel 7, where the figure approaches God, Morris does look to either the Resurrection or Ascension as the meaning of the mysterious phrase. He notes that at the time there was still work to be done in Israel. This is less natural than Hagner’s interpretation, because it was not until after Pentecost that the twelve were persecuted as described in verses 17-22. Morris seems to have forgotten that he made this same point—just a few verses earlier, Jesus had shifted into speaking about the situation of the Church after he was to leave. There seems to be nothing here to indicate that Jesus has reverted to talking about the mission of the disciple while they were still accompanied by himself.

Hagner interprets the coming of the Son of man as referring to the destruction of the Temple—the coming of the Son of man as his judgement upon Israel. This time frame allowed for a development of the kind of persecution described in the earlier verses. Thus Hagner reads the verses as meaning that the twelve’s exclusive mission to Israel will not end before 70, when the focus of salvation history would shift from the Jews to the Gentiles.

Giblin moves away from seeing the coming of the Son of man in temporal terms. Rather than reading the verse to mean that the coming of the Son of man stops short the mission of going through the towns of Israel, he translates it as meaning that the Son of man’s coming completes and fulfills this mission. ‘What the text has in view is not a single historical event as such but a theological understanding of the mission of the Church.’ The sayings are addressed to the whole church, because it is apostolic.

France reaches a similar conclusion to that of Giblin. He notes that in Daniel 7, the coming of the Son of man is to God, and there is no indication of a coming to earth. The verb used in the LXX Daniel 7 and in allusions to it is distinct from parousia, so Matthew does not seem to want to convey parousia when speaking of the coming of the Son of man. France reads the coming of the Son of man as not a particular historical event, but as Jesus’ enthronement, vindication, and empowering. This seems to lead the reader towards the Resurrection or Ascension, but he had earlier said that we are not to think of it as a particular point in time. It was begun at the resurrection, but continues throughout the Church’s history until the Last Judgment.

Just as inserting ‘behold’ at verse 16 to mark the beginning of the section, so Matthew marks the end of the section with ‘truly, I say to you’—this is parallel to the end of the prior section, at 10:15. The parallel here with verse 15, and at 16 with verses 5-6 (sheep), draws a strong connection between the two passages. Ulrich Luz identifies ‘deliver up’ as the theme of this passage, which serves to distinguish it from the mission section of verses 5-15.