Matthew 24:4–8

Matthew 24:4 — "Be careful that no one leads you astray." The Greek verb planáō (to lead astray, to wander) is the root of our word "planet" — a wandering star. Jesus opens the entire Olivet Discourse not with cosmological data but with a pastoral command: guard your mind. The imperative is addressed to the disciples collectively, linking their personal vigilance to the integrity of the community of faith. Matthew has already shown Jesus warning against false prophets (7:15), and here that warning is escalated to a crisis-level threat. The first danger in the last times is not sword or earthquake — it is deception. This is strikingly counter-intuitive and characteristically Matthean: the greater peril is interior, a corruption of judgment and faith.

Matthew 24:5 — "Many will come in my name, saying, 'I am the Christ.'" The phrase "in my name" is crucial. These are not external opponents who deny Jesus outright; they are claimants who appropriate His name and messianic authority while usurping His place. The historical context includes figures like Bar Kokhba (c. 132 AD), hailed by Rabbi Akiva as the Messiah, as well as a string of first-century prophetic pretenders catalogued by Josephus (Jewish War, 6.5.3). Yet Jesus intends a trans-historical warning: every age will produce such figures. The repetition of "lead many astray" (the same verb as v. 4) underscores that the danger is not marginal — "many" are deceived. The Church Fathers noted the irony: those who are led astray are often motivated by genuine messianic longing misdirected toward an impostor.

Matthew 24:6 — "Wars and rumors of wars... the end is not yet." Jesus here performs an act of eschatological correction. The disciples — and every subsequent generation — will instinctively read geopolitical catastrophe as a sure sign of the imminent end. Jesus preemptively dismantles this reflex. The Greek dei genesthai ("must happen") employs the language of divine necessity found throughout Matthew's passion predictions (16:21; 17:12; 26:54). These events are not outside God's governance; they belong to a purposeful, if painful, sequence. The command "See that you aren't troubled" (mē throeisthe, literally "do not be alarmed/terrified") is the same Greek root used in 2 Thessalonians 2:2, where Paul warns against those claiming the Day of the Lord has already arrived. Equanimity is not indifference; it is theological confidence.

Matthew 24:7 — "Nation will rise against nation... famines, plagues, and earthquakes." The formula "nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom" is a deliberate echo of the LXX of Isaiah 19:2 and 2 Chronicles 15:6, both of which describe divine judgment catalyzing historical disruption. Jesus is casting His disciples as readers of a prophetic pattern: God has acted this way before; He will act this way again. "Famines and earthquakes" appear together in Old Testament judgment oracles (Ezekiel 5:12; Amos 8:8). The accumulation is deliberately panoramic — these are not localized events but symptoms of a world in travail. Notably, "plagues" (loimoi) is found in the Lukan parallel (21:11) and in some manuscript traditions of Matthew; its inclusion in many Catholic editions reflects the tradition's sensitivity to the full range of human suffering within God's providential plan.

Matthew 24:8 — "The beginning of birth pains." This is the hermeneutical key to the entire cluster. The Greek ōdínōn (birth pains) is a rich biblical image. In the Hebrew prophets, hēbel (the pain of labor) describes the travail that immediately precedes a new divine act — the birth of a redeemed people (Isaiah 26:17–18; 66:7–9; Micah 4:9–10). Paul employs the same metaphor in Romans 8:22 for creation's groaning toward eschatological liberation. The word "beginning" (archē) is not minimizing — it is orienting. Suffering is not the end of the story; it is the opening movement. This reframes catastrophe theologically: not as evidence of divine abandonment, but as the painful onset of a new creation. The disciples are invited to live inside the metaphor — as midwives of a kingdom being born, not as victims of a world being destroyed.

Catholic tradition reads this passage within both its immediate eschatological context and its typological depth, illuminated by several distinct doctrinal lenses.

The Two-Horizon Hermeneutic: The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that Jesus' eschatological discourse refers simultaneously to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and to the final consummation (CCC §585–586). This "double referent" is not an evasion — it means every generation truly inhabits the "beginning of birth pains." The Church has never permitted a purely futurist reading that disconnects these verses from ongoing history, nor a purely preterist reading that exhausts them in 70 AD.

Against Millenarianism and Date-Setting: The magisterium has consistently resisted eschatological sensationalism. The Decree of the Holy Office (1944) formally rejected millenarian speculation, and Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, explicitly warns that the Olivet Discourse forbids reading current events as a "code" for predicting the end. Jesus' command in verse 6 — "the end is not yet" — is, as St. John Chrysostom observed (Homilies on Matthew, 75), a pastoral inoculation against every generation's temptation to make its own suffering the center of eschatology.

False Christs and the Nature of Deception: St. Augustine (City of God, XVIII.51) identified the thread of false messiahs with the broader category of the libido dominandi — the lust for dominance — that masquerades in salvific language. The First Vatican Council's emphasis on the Church's indefectibility (Pastor Aeternus) and Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (§8) both presuppose that the community of faith requires constant vigilance precisely because it is a target for infiltration and counterfeit.

Birth Pains and Eschatological Hope: The birth-pain metaphor directly supports CCC §1042–1044's teaching on the "new heaven and new earth" — that the present order is not simply annihilated but transformed, as a mother is not destroyed but renewed through labor. Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent finds in this image the Catholic instinct that hope is not wishful thinking but a rationally grounded anticipation rooted in the logic of redemptive history.

Contemporary Catholics face an acute version of precisely the temptation Jesus addresses. In an information environment flooded with apocalyptic predictions — from religious broadcasters parsing political headlines as end-times signs, to online prophetic movements claiming Christ's imminent return — the pastoral force of verse 6 ("See that you aren't troubled") is urgently needed. Jesus does not say "be informed" or "be prepared" as a first response; He says "do not be deceived" and "do not be alarmed."

Concretely, this passage calls a Catholic to three practices. First, epistemic sobriety: before accepting any claim that current events confirm a prophetic timeline, ask whether the claim is being made "in His name" but without His spirit of humility and service. Second, affective stability: the anxiety culture of doom-scrolling and crisis-cycling is directly addressed by mē throeisthe — not as denial of real suffering, but as a refusal to let catastrophe determine the theological frame. Third, eschatological productivity: if these sufferings are birth pains, then the Catholic response is not to flee but to accompany — to be present to the world's labor as the Church has always been, in hospitals, schools, and parishes, as active participants in a delivery already guaranteed by the Resurrection.