Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Luke · About this commentary
Watch, and Pray Always
Luke 21:29-38
29 He told them a parable. “See the fig tree and all the trees. · WEB
A fig tree, a warning about being weighed down by ordinary life, and a week spent teaching in the temple and sleeping outside.
"See the fig tree and all the trees. When they are already budding, you see it and know by your own selves that the summer is already near" Luke 21:29–30.
And all the trees is this account's addition, and it quietly removes any temptation to make the fig a code for something. The lesson is what any farmer knows: budding means the season has turned, and nobody predicts the solstice from a bud. You can tell that summer is near. You cannot tell the date.
"Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away" Luke 21:33. The one fixed point in a chapter about upheaval, and it is a claim about his own words made in the middle of a prophecy.
"So be careful, or your hearts will be loaded down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that day will come on you suddenly" Luke 21:34.
This warning belongs to this Gospel and it is worth setting beside the terrors of the paragraph before it. Given a chapter about armies, earthquakes and the powers of heaven shaken, the danger actually named for the disciples is none of those. It is a heavy heart — the word is for something weighed down, sagging — and three causes are listed.
Two are obvious and one is not. Carousing and drunkenness are the recognizable failures. Cares of this life is the third, and it is the same word used of the thorns that choked the seed Luke 8:14 and of Martha in her kitchen Luke 10:41. Anxiety and dissipation are put in the same list because they do the same thing: they take up the whole of a person.
"For it will come like a snare on all those who dwell on the surface of all the earth" Luke 21:35. A snare works by being invisible until it closes, and its victims are not doing anything unusual when it does.
"Therefore be watchful all the time, praying that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will happen, and to stand before the Son of Man" Luke 21:36. The remedy is prayer rather than vigilance in the sense of scanning the news — this book's consistent answer.
Every day Jesus was teaching in the temple, and every night he would go out and spend the night on the mountain that is called Olivet Luke 21:37.
The chapter closes with a description of his week, and it is oddly domestic after a discourse about the end of the age. Days in the temple courts, nights on the hillside outside the walls — the man predicting the city's fall has nowhere in it to sleep.
All the people came early in the morning to him in the temple to hear him Luke 21:38. They come at dawn, which is the last thing said before the chief priests start looking for a way to kill him.
settled What this mark means