GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 13:35
When the Cock Crows
Alice and I attended a meeting where Dr. R. Alan Culpepper presented a chapter from his book The People of the Parables: Galilee in the Time of Jesus. Throughout this book, Dr. Culpepper takes readers back to the culture, economy, politics, and society of the New Testament era; for as he says, to really understand the New Testament, readers need to understand the time and place in which it was written. A good example of Dr. Culpepper’s premise comes from Jesus’ lesson to the disciples.
In this lesson, Jesus and his disciples were on the way from Jerusalem to Bethany, a distance of about two miles. They stopped at the Mount of Olives to rest, and some of the disciples looked back at the temple—Herod’s Temple—and admired it. Jesus used the occasion to talk about the future of Jerusalem and the inter-Advent era. He used the metaphor of a homeowner going away on a long journey and giving the care of his house to his servants. Then he said, “Therefore, you watch, for you do not know when the lord of the house is coming—in the evening, or midnight, or cock crowing, or in the morning.” (Mark 13:35) Jesus turned the focus of his lesson from the general to the specific: “you watch.”
Laying aside for a moment the rich theology of this sentence, there is an interesting cultural nugget. The Jews divided the night into three “watches,” while the Romans used four, as Mark does here. One of the watches, alektorophónia (al-ek-tor-of-o-nee’-ah, ἀλεκτοροφωνία, rooster + sound or voice, hence, cockcrow), extended from midnight to 3 a.m.
For urbanites, being awakened early in the morning by a rooster crowing does not compute—it simply does not happen. Maybe gunshots, screeching tires, or sirens, but not a rooster crowing. My maternal grandparents lived on a farm in the Pine Hills of Southern Illinois. When my brothers and I, who lived in a city at the time, visited Grandma and Grandpa, the $%^*$ rooster always started crowing when the eastern sky began to brighten.
The gist of Jesus’ lesson, though, was to stay awake and alert—perhaps somewhat like expecting an important phone call—for his return was certain, yet the time was known only to the Father.
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