Mark 13 predicts that certain events will occur literally within the generation of Jesus' contemporaries, and today's reader recognizes that some of these events have not taken place. The reader therefore appropriates the text as a false configuration of the world because it describes the world differently from how it is. However, the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur enables a reader to appropriate the text as a presentation of truth. His argument for textual autonomy supports the contention that a text's meaning is not limited to what the author intended and the original readers perceived. In new reading contexts, the meaning that comes from the text itself creates an evocative dialectic between the reader's lived world and the world description of the text. Although Mark 13 was originally understood literally, today's audience is able to read it as metaphor. Metaphor is not a rhetorically attractive literary trope; it is a transgression of language codes and categories. Through its association of previously unrelated concepts, metaphor creates new, multiple meanings and changes the linguistic structures within which it operates. Metaphor is able to present truth, not as a verifiable presentation of the world as it is perceived by the reader, but as a manifestation of the world in a new way. The reader recognizes this truth only as she is willing to engage with the text without imposing her preconceptions upon it. Mark 13, as it is read by today's reader, functions as metaphor because of the double dissonance first between the configured world of the text and the lived world of the reader and second between claim that Jesus is able to predict when the events will take place (v. 30) and the assertion that he is not able to do so (v. 32). One option for today's reader to appropriate the metaphor of Mark 13 as truth is a perception of the presence in the world of forces that challenge and subvert powers which appear to be dominant, and which deceive, destroy, and persecute
