How can the "Son of Man" passages of Matthew 24 be interpreted as a fulfilled prophecy? Matthew 24 contains a prophecy spoken by Jesus.  In verse 34, He says, "Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place." (ESV)

This verse is sometimes used by critics of Christianity to say that Jesus and the early Church believed the world would end before all the initial disciples had died. Thus, they say, it is a failed prophecy.

However, for various reasons (the exact reasons are not relevant for the scope of this question), many Christians both do not see this as a problematic statement, and also believe that the prophecies of Matthew 24 have not yet been fulfilled.

There is also a third option held by some Christians: the prophecy was fulfilled in total before the last disciple died.  Parts of chapter 24 can easily be read as referring to the destruction of the Temple.  Other parts are harder to see as having been fulfilled in the first century AD.  

To keep this question reasonably answerable, I will focus on just verses 29-31:


  Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.


and verses 39b-41:


  so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left. 


How do people who believe Matthew was fulfilled in its entirety during the first century explain 1) the coming of the Son of Man, and 2) the taking away of some people?
J. Stuart Russell was a prominent 19th century preterist whose thought has been recently popularized in some circles through R. C. Sproul's book, The Last Days According to Jesus.  Russell addresses these two passages as follows.
Verses 29–31
Russell notes that verse 29 begins with the word &quot;immediately&quot; and insists that the text allows no change in &quot;time, place, [or] circumstances&quot; between the earlier verses, describing the desolation and tribulation of Judea, and the events of verses 29–31.  Thus, verse 30's &quot;all the tribes of the earth&quot; actually refers only to the land of Judea, not the entire world.  Similarly, there is no gap in time between the two sections of the passage.
Russell next addresses the challenge of those who find it absurd that anyone can believe that the phenomena of these verses (the darkening of the sun, etc.) could have already occurred.  He responds:

To argue in this strain is to lose sight of the very nature and genius of prophecy.  Symbol and metaphor belong to the grammar of prophecy, as every reader of the Old Testament prophets must know.  Is it not reasonable that the doom of Jerusalem should be depicted in language as glowing and rhetorical as the destruction of Babylon, or Bozrah, or Tyre?

Russell quotes Isaiah 13, describing the downfall of Babylon, and argues that &quot;the imagery employed in this passage is almost identical with that of our Lord&quot;:

'Behold the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.  For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine . . . . I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place' [emphasis in original]

He then asks:

If these symbols therefore were proper to represent the fall of Babylon, why should they be improper to set forth a still greater catastrophe—the destruction of Jerusalem?

He provides other examples, like Isaiah 34's reference to the historical destruction of Bozrah, the capital of Edom, and the historical punishment of Samaria and Jerusalem in Micah 1.
Ultimately, this figurative language, he argues, is a &quot;characteristic quality of prophetic diction&quot;:

The moral grandeur of the events which such symbols represent may be most fitly set forth by convulsions and cataclysms in the natural world. [...]
It is appropriate, both as it is in keeping with the acknowledged style of the ancient prophets, and also because the moral grandeur of the event is such as to justify the use of such language in this particular case.

Verses 39–41
Russell again insists that these verses also refer to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.  He understands these and the surrounding verses to be primarily warnings and admonitions to vigilance:

This watchfulness was essential to the safety of the followers of Christ, for so sudden would be the catastrophe that it would overtake the unready and unwary, as birds that are caught in a net.

He does not specifically address the &quot;one taken and one left&quot; language, but it's clear from his analysis that he believes this language is used to emphasize that

the final catastrophe would overtake Jerusalem and Judea at an unexpected hour, when the business and the pleasure of life occupied men's hands and hearts.

Those &quot;taken,&quot; thus, would include the &quot;prodigious numbers slaughtered in the siege of Jerusalem.&quot;  He quotes Josephus's record of the event, and summarizes, &quot;A more exact verification of our Lord's prediction it is impossible to conceive.&quot;
Summary
Preterists like Russell view the language of Matthew 24 as prophetic language similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and that the events described as occurring in the heavens should be seen as symbolic of the events around the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

All quotes are from Russell's 1878 work, The Parousia, pages 76–93.