The Coming at Cockcrow: A Reading of Mark 13:32–37

I offer a reading of Jesus’s words to “stay awake” in Mark 13:32–37 that argues for both a literal and a metaphorical realization of Jesus’s words in the subsequent narrative of Mark 14, in a way that has enduring implications for Christian discipleship. This reading is set alongside other studies of Mark 13 and 14, and it is also compared with the historicizing reading of Adele Yarbro Collins so as to clarify the nature of theological interpretation.