John Topel, «What Kind of a Sign are Vultures? Luke 17,37b», Vol. 84 (2003) 403-411
The only consensus about the meaning of Jesus' proverb in Q, Matthew or Luke is that it is enigmatic. But closer attention to the trope itself and its literary context may give clues to its meaning in Luke 17. The two principal preoccupations of exegetes are 1) whether aetoi means eagles or vultures, and 2) how to define the literary context in which the proverb is to be read: does it refer to the coming day of the Son of Man (17,22-34) or of the last judgment (17,34-35)? This paper argues that aetoi here must mean vultures and the appropriate context for the interpretation of the proverb is the whole speech, for which its serves as the conclusion. There is a curious interplay between the Pharisees' "When" (v. 20) and the "Where?" (v. 37a) of the disciples. Attending to the polysemic possibilities of the proverb provides a meaning which knits the whole speech together.
1) to connect the displaced proverb in a new place, 2) to end the whole speech from 17,22-35, and 3) to echo the Pharisee's question in 17,20, and so round off the unit. Therefore the meaning of the proverb itself will reflect each of these functions (215)25.
For Zmijewski, the proverb must first and foremost be understood in its immediate context as an application of 17,34-3526, the verses which introduce the notion of divine judgment into the discourse27. The proverb answers the question of where the final judgment will take place. The proverb then asserts that the divine judgment is universal: wherever humans (the corpse) are, judgment will occur (216).
But the disciples' question relates to more than the judgment in 17,34-35. Zmijewski asserts that the whole discourse, beginning with the "here" and "there" of v.23, has notions of locality running through it. Thus the disciples' question becomes a response to cues in the discourse. Throughout the discourse Jesus is not denying the notion of place, but only false perceptions of it. Thus the proverb responds to all these local notices by saying that the Reign of God as the Son of Man's final judgment will occur everywhere. And so the disciples' pou= responds to the Pharisees' po/te in rounding off the discourse
But Zmijewski has over-emphasized the local references throughout the discourse. Most often, the references to place reveal nothing more than the simple fact that time and space go together in our world: at a given time one is in a determinate place, and one can be in a given place only at a specific time. In all cases, the reference to place is subordinated to a concern for the time of the arrival of the Reign of God or the Son of Man. Thus, in 17,21 Jesus' uses place references i)dou_ w|de "Look: here!" and e)nto_j u(mw=n. But as these are in response to the Pharisees' question po/te, his answer does not refer to the place of the arrival of the reign of God, but an affirmation that it is now present in Jesus' person and works. In 17,23 the "there" and "here" do not refer to a place so much as to the presence of the Son of Man on one of his days (17,22). V. 24 continues the temporal emphasis of the day of the Son of Man28 by illustrating its suddenness. In 17,24 Noah's entering the ark is simply a designator of the day on which the rains unexpectedly wiped out his neighbors. Similarly the local reference to Lot's leaving Sodom is only a designation of the day on which fire and brimstone destroyed its inhabitants, and v. 30 explicitly states that these two ancient examples are illustrations of the temporally unexpected revelation (cf. ou)k...meta_ parathrh/sewj, 17,20) of the Son of Man. In sum, the local references up to 17,37 display no interest in place; they simply designate the times at which divine interventions occur. In these sixteen verses (17,20-35) temporal terms occur eleven or twelve