What does ‘no one knows the day or the hour’ mean?

Where Jesus says it

It is the last week, in Jerusalem. Leaving the Temple, Jesus has just said that not one stone of it will be left on another. On the Mount of Olives, facing the Temple across the valley, his disciples come to him privately.

Tell us, when will these things be? What is the sign of your coming, and of the end of the age?

His long answer weaves two horizons together, the fall of the Temple and the end of the age. He gives signs: wars, false messiahs, a fig tree whose tender leaves mean summer is near. Then he draws a line under all of them.

But no one knows of that day and hour, not even the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

“Nor the Son”

Mark’s version holds a phrase that has kept theologians busy for centuries: “no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32). Many old copies of Matthew 24:36 have the same words; others leave them out, perhaps because they troubled copyists. Many Christians read the line as Jesus speaking from his human nature, with a man’s limits; others take it as it stands, a plain statement of what the Father kept to himself. Either way, the Gospel did not erase it.

A few verses earlier stands a line that seems to pull the other way: “this generation will not pass away until all these things are accomplished” (Matthew 24:34). Many scholars read that verse of the Temple’s fall, which came forty years later, in AD 70, and verse 36 of the final day. The first story is told in When was the Temple in Jerusalem destroyed?

Watch therefore

Jesus never answers “when.” He answers “how to wait,” with a string of stories. A householder would stay awake if he knew when the thief was coming (Matthew 24:43). A doorkeeper does not know whether the master returns “at evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning” (Mark 13:35), the four watches of the Roman night. Paul uses the same picture: the day of the Lord “comes like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2).

Then ten bridesmaids wait with lamps for a bridegroom who is late. Five brought spare oil and five did not, and when the cry goes up at midnight, the door shuts on the unprepared. The story ends with the sentence people quote.

Watch therefore, for you don’t know the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.

People who set a date anyway

After the resurrection, Acts says, the disciples asked again and got the same reply: “It isn’t for you to know times or seasons which the Father has set within his own authority” (Acts 1:7). Date-setters kept trying. In the 1840s the American preacher William Miller worked out from the Book of Daniel that Christ would return around 1843 or 1844; when October 22, 1844, passed, his followers called it the Great Disappointment. In 2011 the radio broadcaster Harold Camping named May 21. Churches of nearly every tradition answer such predictions with this one verse. In the parable, after all, the wise bridesmaids did not know the date either. They just kept oil in their lamps.