Tasting Death

Sunday, August 28th, 2005
Pentecost +15
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Matthew 16:21-28

21 From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to erusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ 23 But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ 24 Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? 27 ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’

“Some standing here”

What was that again?

“Some standing here”

Will what?

“Will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Okay. (!?)

Let’s back up a little bit. We’re picking up right where we left off last Sunday, after Peter’s confession of faith – claiming Jesus to be the Messiah, the son of the living God. Jesus calls him blessed, a rock, and basically pats him on the back.

Next, we have Jesus beginning to explain to Peter and the disciples that he is going to have to go to Jerusalem, suffer, and die, then be raised from the dead on the third day. Peter, having gained a little bit of confidence from his recent exchange, takes Jesus aside and rebukes Jesus “what’s this nonsense about you having to SUFFER?” It is worth noting the tone in which Peter was talking to Jesus, the Greek word that we translate as ‘rebuke’ is the same word used in the rest of the Gospels in reference to demons and evil forces.

Jesus’ response to Peter is about as far from a pat on the back as you can get. Peter remains ‘the rock’ but goes from being compared to a foundation stone to being an obstacle, a stumbling block! Funny how within such a short span of words the same rock can become two radically different things. And Jesus doesn’t call down blessings on Peter, rather, he calls him Satan! So, gee, Jesus, tell us how you REALLY feel about Peter at this point! Don’t beat around the bush, out with it!

Reading scripture is always a daunting task. As Baptists, we’ve touched on one of our best additions to the theological endeavor before: Soul Competency: the idea that each individual has within him or herself the ability to respond to the movement of the Holy Spirit in them through the study of scripture, to enlighten and inform, inspire and challenge. So I am constantly surprised by the way there is a world of meaning in the smallest phrase.

Jesus told Peter he was a stumbling block TO HIM. Jesus was gaining a fuller understanding of what he was in for on arrival at Jerusalem. He UNDERSTOOD the sacrifice he was going to have to make. As we know from the accounts of his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus did not easily embrace his sacrifice. He struggled with it. Perhaps it was his struggle with the prospect of what was to come that prompted the angry reaction to Peter – the statement about setting his mind on divine things, and not on human things. We tend to react more strongly to things with which we ourselves struggle when we see them in others, or are reminded of those things by others’ comments. And he was trying to convey to the disciples in the short time remaining of just how serious this journey they had begun together WAS. So he tried to spell it out for them when they (and Peter) didn’t get it when he told them what was going to happen to HIM.

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

What does it mean to lose our lives for Christ? How can we lose our life, if we in fact GAIN it in giving it up to the Lord? We sometimes joke about our crosses to bear, but in truth, that is one of the more serious statements we will ever encounter. Don’t get me wrong, I still laugh at the jokes, and don’t want to stop hearing them, but it is important to recognize the depth of the meaning of the term. It is a direct reference to the Cross that Christ bore for us – and our responsibility to do likewise – inasmuch as we are able – for the life of the church.

As followers of Christ, we are called to obey his commands. What does it mean to take up our cross and follow him? You don't have to make up ways to carry a cross...just be honest, loving, compassionate, forgiving, merciful, a servant, and you'll find plenty of crosses.

Leslie and I were joking last night, if I had chosen the Episcopal reading of the passage we could have stopped at verse 26, and be done with it, but NO. So we are back to those pesky last two verses of the chapter:

27 ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’

Here’s the issue with these two verses. Verse 27 seems to be a description of the final judgment. However you view that event, or believe it, the imagery is fairly familiar: Son of Man, angels, glory, the Father, and repayment for what has been done. It certainly rings some bells if you’ve spent any time reading or listening to discussions about the book of the Revelation to John, or for that matter, any of the other gospel accounts where Jesus speaks of his return.

The problem comes in with verse 28 following directly behind verse 27. Jesus describes an event that looks like a prediction of the second coming, and then tells the people he’s talking to that some of them ‘will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom.’

Can you tell what the problem is?

If he meant the second coming, and it hasn’t happened yet, and all of the people he was talking to have since died, what did he REALLY mean?

As I was reading in preparation for the message, I read the prevailing thought of scholars, SOME scholars, I should say, who state that what Jesus was referring to in verse 28 was that some of those present, namely, Peter, James and his brother John, were present six days later at Jesus’ transfiguration, and it was THAT vision of Jesus transfigured that they saw before they tasted death that Jesus was speaking of when he mentioned the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom. It was a kind of preview of what the kingdom will look like.

I would love to tell you that that makes perfect sense to me, and that the verse and chapter numbers were added just in the past 500 years, and that it makes SENSE to connect the one with the other. And I wouldn’t be misleading you. It DOES make sense, and it does work better together to connect the two verses that way instead of the other.

But we aren’t always going to have perfect understandings. If the first disciples were slow to understand, we need not be troubled if we are also slow to understand. Spiritual growth takes place slowly and painfully. Our spiritual journey takes a lifetime. Even as we near the conclusion of that journey, our understanding is less than complete. Paul says, "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face" (1 Cor. 13:12). That is not an excuse for complacency, but does acknowledge our humanity.

So what do we do with verse 27 in conjunction with verse 28? Could Jesus have been talking about something other than physical death? Could he perhaps have been talking about spiritual death instead? John tells us ‘what has come into being in him (Jesus) was life, and the life was the light of all people.’ (John 1:3-4) Could Jesus be referring to HIS life, indwelling, enriching, empowering, encouraging, invigorating, spurring us on, so much so that the death that surrounds us, that yaps at our feet, that we see around us every day, hear about in the news, read about in the paper, THAT death, though so present in this world, will not touch us?
Do we taste death in this life?

We experience death, physical death, in any number of ways. We read of car bombings in Iraq on a daily basis, just last week we read of two plane crashes within a few days of each other. This morning we learned of the death of a woman who graduated from Farnham High school with Edythe. We open the paper Richmond Times-Dispatch on a daily basis, or the Northern Neck News on a weekly basis, and read obituaries for people we know and many more we don’t. We are faced with the death of our bodies on a regular basis.

Can we distinguish hearing of and reading of and living through physical death and the fact that, if we are in Christ, we will not taste spiritual death? Paul speaks of death as sleeping, and that is the image I’d like to leave you with today.

For Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, What do those words – tasting death – mean? To do that I need to put it in a negative sense. How are we going to be a part of helping people to NOT taste death? It goes back to what John said, “in him was life, and the life was the light of all people”. We are the body of Christ. We represent the Lord Jesus. We are his hands, and feet, his shoulders, his lap. If we are about the business of breaking in the Kingdom of God in this world, then we are conduits. We are avenues of Grace. There are avenues, and there are boulevards, and there are streets, and there are alleys, and there are pathways. Each has a greater or lesser capacity for … traffic, as it were. What would you consider Jerusalem to be? Here’s a hint: our capacity is not defined by our size. It is not defined by the number of people who sit in this room on Sunday mornings. It is defined by the ability of each of us to respond to God’s grace in our lives, but not respond like a mirror. We don’t shine God’s grace back to God, we shine God’s grace to the world around us.

We are called to be God’s people, showing by our lives his grace, the hymn goes. One in heart and one in spirit, sign of hope for all the race. Let us show how he has changed us, and remade us as his own, Let us share our life together as we shall around his throne.

Let’s pray.