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The Key Lukan Passage on the Two Comings
It is a bold and somewhat subjective statement to make, but the Parable of the Pounds (or Ten Minas)1 in Luke 19:11-27 is perhaps the key passage in this Gospel, if not in all the Gospels, on the theology of the two comings of Messiah.2 Since I believe it to be so crucial, I will give it special attention. The parable is introduced as follows:
Now as they heard these things, He spoke another parable, because He was near Jerusalem and because they thought the kingdom of God would appear immediately. (Luke 19:11)
The “things” to which verse 11 refers is the story of Zacchaeus and Christ announcing that salvation had come to the home of the tax-collector, and that even though he had sinned against his own people ”he also is a son of Abraham,” which is to say that, although Zacchaeus’s complicity with the ruling class put him beyond the pale as far as the Jewish religious leaders were concerned, through faith in Jesus he became an inheritor of the Abrahamic promise and a true Jew. This new parable is given a certain prominence by its introduction. Luke supplies two reasons for it: firstly, they were nearing Jerusalem, the city of the Great King (Psa. 48:2; Matt. 5:35). Jerusalem was where Christ would soon meet His death (Lk. 18:31-33).