Why the Son does not know the day and hour

1. Mark describes more than an ordinary human

Mark 13,32 names in sequence humans, the angels in heaven and the Son. The “not even the Son” is the enumeration's surprising climax. Immediately before, the Son of Man comes in power and glory and sends out angels to gather his elect (13,26–27). The text does not simply place Jesus in the ranks of ignorant humans.

This ranking alone does not yet prove his full deity. But it shows that the verse must not be detached from its context of high Christology. Precisely the Lord of the coming consummation speaks here of a limit to his knowledge.^[1]

2. Scripture also attests his divine knowing

Matthew 11,27 connects the Father's knowledge of the Son with the Son's knowledge of the Father. John 16,30 and 21,17 attest Jesus' all-encompassing knowledge. At the same time, Luke 2,52 reports that Jesus increased in wisdom. Both kinds of statement apply to the same Christ.

The Christian interpreter must therefore play neither his deity against his humanity nor his humanity against his deity. The question is how the one Son knows truly divinely and truly humanly. Scripture itself makes this distinction necessary.

3. The speaker is the person; the mode of knowing belongs to nature

When Paul says that the “Lord of glory” was crucified (1. Corinthians 2,8), divine nature did not become mortal. The one divine Son suffered death according to his humanity. The agent's name therefore does not determine that every predicate asserted of him must belong to his divine nature.

The same principle applies to knowledge. “The Son does not know it” is a true statement about the incarnate Son concerning his human knowledge. It does not follow that his divine knowledge is limited. This would be compelling only if incarnation had to mean that every human faculty of the Son itself becomes infinite. His humanity would then no longer be real humanity, however.^[1]

4. The contradiction arises only by deleting the distinction

A logical contradiction would be: Christ simultaneously knows and does not know the same matter in the same mode of knowing. The Christological statement is different: The Son possesses uncreated divine knowledge and lives with real created human knowledge. These are not two persons but two modes of knowing appropriate to their natures in the one Son.^[2]

How this personal unity is constituted in its full depth cannot be deduced from ordinary human psychology. What is decisive for refuting the alleged contradiction, however, is that its tacit premise is false: Complete humanity and complete deity must not be fused into a single mixed nature.

5. The verse calls for watchfulness, not a demotion of Jesus

Mark 13,33 leads directly to the disciples' watchfulness. The statement is no commission to place the Son on a creature's level. Nor must “not knowing” be reinterpreted as “merely not wanting to say.” The interpretation advocated here takes human limitation seriously while holding fast to what the rest of scripture teaches about the same Son's deity.