Luke 18:31-34 31Then taking the twelve aside he said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things written through the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. 32For he will be handed over to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and mistreated and spit upon, 33and after they have scourged him, they will kill him; and the third day he will rise again.” 34But they did not understand these things, and this statement was hidden from them, and they did not comprehend the things that were said.
The focus of the narrative line shifts again back to going up to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is on a mountain, so everything is up to it from across Israel. Jesus had some important lessons to teach the twelve apostles. In this passage, he was preparing them for the suffering he would go through. This is the third mention of Jesus’ suffering in Luke (9:22, 43b–45). Jerusalem represented suffering and the cross. What he would experience would be in fulfillment of prophecy from the Hebrew Scriptures. The verb will be fulfilled is in the passive voice with the assumption that God will be the one to fulfill the prophecies. Everything about to take place was part of God’s plan for the salvation of the world. Jesus uses his most common self-designation of Son of Man, which has a strong incarnational and eschatological nuance in his teachings, meaning that it reflects his identification with humanity and that he would come again in fulfillment of the prophecies of Daniel.
God’s plan prophesied in the Old Testament is given in verses 32-33. The first stage is that the Jews would hand Jesus over to the Gentiles, who would turn out to be the Roman officials. Jesus would soon come to Jerusalem and be welcomed by many people, but the Jewish leaders would reject him. The next stages would lead to Jesus’ death. The Gentiles would physically and mentally abuse him badly by mocking, mistreating, spitting upon him, scourging him with whips embedded with bits of bone and metal, and finally killing him.
The good news is that death would not have the final word but that Jesus would rise again. The mention of this may have confused the disciples even more, although to us on the other side of the resurrection can fully understand it.
The middle voice (not the passive) is used here as in 1 Thess 4:14, indicating that Jesus would raise himself from the dead
In verse 34, Luke repeats the disciples’ lack of understanding in three different ways. The disciples were clueless about what Jesus was talking about, which is surprising because Jesus was very clear in what he said. But we cannot blame them too much because the meaning was hidden from them. The question is who or what was causing the mental block in their thinking. The text is not clear whether it would be God causing the block or something internal to the disciples’ own thinking. The last phrase gives the result that they did not understand what Jesus meant. The disciples were like other Jews of the time in their thinking. Perhaps they could not connect their preconceived ideas about a powerful King in the line of David with a suffering Messiah who came to take away the sins of the world.
This verse could also be interpreted to mean that they could not understand how the Scriptures spoke about these matters. They did not see the connection between prophecy and the fulfillment. It would only be after the events that they would be able to connect the dots of what the Bible said and what happened. That is often how prophecy works. We may not understand the prophecy until it is fulfilled, and then it will make sense to us.
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