Jesus has just described people side by side, in one bed, at the mill, in the field, with one taken and the other left (Luke 17:34-36). The disciples want to know where this will happen. Barnes reads their question as "Where, or in what direction, shall these calamities come?" Gill thinks the askers were "rather the disciples, to whom Christ more especially directed his discourse," and that they wanted to know "not where the persons would be left, but whither the others would be taken, and by whom." It is an honest question about what Jesus has just described.

Jesus does not name a place. He answers with a proverb: "Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together" (Luke 17:37). Matthew records a similar saying in Jesus' teaching on the Mount of Olives: "wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together" (Matthew 24:28). Jesus then goes straight on to a parable "that men ought always to pray, and not to faint" (Luke 18:1).

The Greek word for "body" here is soma; Matthew 24:28 has "carcase." The birds are aetoi, which the KJV renders "eagles" and the ESV "vultures," birds that gather where there is something dead.

Commentators read the proverb in different ways. Barnes says, "Eagles flock where there is prey," and applies it to armies coming against the place of greatest wickedness, so that the disciples' thoughts "were directed at once to Jerusalem." Gill takes the body as "the carcass of the Jewish nation" and the eagles as "the Roman army, whose ensign was the eagle." Matthew Henry reads it two ways: the wicked will be found by judgment wherever they are, and the godly will be gathered to Christ.

The disciples asked "where," and Jesus answered with something more certain than a map: judgment will find what it is looking for, as surely as birds find a carcass. The point is not to locate the event but to be ready for it. Just before, Jesus told them, "Remember Lot's wife" (Luke 17:32), and "Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it" (Luke 17:33).

Luke then moves straight into prayer. The next words are a parable "that men ought always to pray, and not to faint" (Luke 18:1). The answer to fear about the end is not more detail but steady trust in God while we wait.