Mark

In Matthew, Jesus' teaching is about the present. The Sermon on the Mount takes up two and a half chapters with information about how the Kingdom of Heaven operates, and Jesus' parables and exhortations throughout the book are about spreading the kingdom further. Mark seems to be more concerned with the future, because of the way he uses a series of episodes of healing and journeying, without many words from Jesus, to build up to Chapter 13, in which He spends thirty-two verses talking to the disciples about the end times. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus shows His disciples the magnificence of the Jewish temple and claims that in the future, not one stone will be left upon another. The disciples' first instinct is to ask when this destruction will take place, and they specifically ask for a sign, a sign of the end times. In answer to their question, Mark gives us Jesus' longest passage of straight speaking in the entire book. And the point of what He says is this: there will be no sign. It is up to us to always be ready: "What I say to you I say to all, 'Be on the alert!'"

These two Gospels complement each other well, because we need to be reminded to live with both an awareness of God's kingdom as it exists on earth and with the constant expectation that one day He will come again to make everything new.