John’s Gospel is the most self-contained of all the Gospels. The ordeal of Jesus’ passion is presented as embodying the “tribulation” that the whole church must endure to the end, with Judas cast in the role of “the son of destruction” (John 17:12) and the hour in which the Apostles will be “scattered, each to his own home” (John 16:31) being the apostasy that must necessarily precede the Day of the Lord, that is, the resurrection (Peter and his three denials being, perhaps, the embodiment of this episode).

Christian eschatology is nothing if not simple common sense. The Greek term for “falling away” is apostasia, literally, “standing off.” Conversely, “resurrection” in Greek is anastasis, literally, “standing again.” Simple logic dictates that a “standing again” be preceded by a “standing off.” So when Paul says, for instance, in 2 Thessalonians 2, that “the Day of the Lord” (connected again, implicitly, with the resurrection) will not come unless the apostasy comes first, he is merely stating the obvious. It is a scenario as old as Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve fell away by eating the forbidden fruit, had their nakedness (that is, their inner man of lawlessness) revealed, and had to face the judgment of God, being able to “stand again” only after God himself had intervened to provide them an adequate covering for their nakedness. If you want to understand “the end,” then go back to “the beginning” and everything will make sense.

Following his resurrection, Jesus appears to his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias (John 21). There, he reminds Peter, in particular, of his apostasy (through symbols that recall the night of his denial, such as the breaking of bread and a charcoal fire), reinstates him in love (asking him three times, “Do you love me?”), and then says to him, “Follow me.”

Previously, in a conversation with Peter in chapter 13, Jesus said, “Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward” (v. 36). The conversation in chapter 21 closes the circle. Jesus, having gone to his death on the cross and having risen in triumph over sin and death, has established the pattern that Peter is now called to follow, even though it may lead him to a place he does not want to go. John states several times throughout his Gospel that Jesus said this or that “to indicate the kind of death he was going to die.” Now, he writes that Jesus said this to Peter “to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.”

Peter, and by implication all who would follow Jesus, must now replicate Jesus’ ministry of redemption and transformation, up to and including making the ultimate sacrifice out of love for him. The path of each individual may not be completely identical. John, for instance, would not die a martyr’s death but would, rather, glorify God through a life of abiding faith that would become an extension of the very life of Christ (“If it is my will that he abide until I come, what is that to you?”). Yet, all who follow Christ are called to hold back nothing, including life itself, from the service of his kingdom.

Six years ago, Peter Leithart wrote about an interesting take on the millennium he had come across, from an obscure Patristic commentary.

In his commentary on Revelation (in Greek Commentaries on Revelation (Ancient Christian Texts), Oecumenius interprets the millennium as the period between Christ’s incarnation and His ascension. During “the time of the incarnation of the Lord, the devil was bound and was not able to resist the marks of the Savior’s deity” (87). He is probably the only commentator ever to offer such an interpretation.

On the other hand, the “little while” during which Satan is released is “the time between the incarnation of the Lord and the consummation of the present age.”

So a big number represents three years, and the phrase “a little while” stands for thousands? Oecumenius has what you call an uphill battle to make that one convincing.

One of the frustrations with reading the lesser known ancient Fathers is a lack of exegetical consistency. Leithart is correct, of course, in saying Oecumenius would be fighting an uphill battle to make his argument convincing. He might, however, have been on firmer ground, at least typologically, if he had seen the “little while” of Satan’s release as beginning with Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane and ending, decisively, with the resurrection.

An even more consistent interpretation in this direction would see “the millennium” as encompassing not the whole period of Christ’s incarnation, but the period beginning immediately after Jesus’ temptation experience (Luke records at this point that the devil “departed from him until an opportune time,” 4:13) when he declared, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17) and, thus, ending in Gethsemane. During that period, as the Gospels record, Satan was literally powerless to prevent Jesus from healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind, even raising the dead. It is no stretch to say Satan was, indeed, “bound” during this period, at least with regard to his ability to interfere with Jesus’ ministry.

This is not to suggest that traditional arguments concerning the millennium are off the table. It is merely to suggest that the three years encompassing Jesus’ earthly ministry may be seen as a type of what John would later envision in the Apocalypse as “the thousand years.” I don’t think I am going out on a limb in suggesting there are incidents during Jesus’ first advent that were portents of his second advent. The acts which he performed, utterly uninhibited by Satanic interference, were signs of the age to come. What seemed extraordinary then, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, will be quite ordinary when the kingdom Jesus declared to be “at hand” comes in its fullness.