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.
In the name of the Father…
Reality, it has been said, is an acquired taste. And, like all acquired tastes, there will always be those who say to us “Why bother?” Why bother to acquire a taste for something you don’t happen to like in the first place when there are so many other more palatable alternatives on offer? Why put yourself through the ordeal of attempting to overcome your perfectly rational repugnance for fish eggs or blue cheese or fermented shark meat when you can always just stick with what you like, with what naturally appeals to you? Why bother to acquire a taste for anything at all? People have, of course, been telling us all our lives what a terribly sophisticated thing it is to acquire a taste for something disgusting and usually expensive, but I suspect that’s not an argument that’s going to take us very far this morning. I suspect that if there is a good reason for us to acquire a taste for anything that it lies elsewhere, in the recognition that what we happen to like might not be the most reliable guide to what will lead to our ultimate fulfilment; that our desires, rather than the brute facts we sometimes imagine them to be, are in fact a set of instincts in need of training, of directing, and even occasionally of overturning.
I hope none of this strikes you as especially controversial, because if it does – if you are already thinking with dread about the broccoli you are going to be facing later on today – then you aren’t very likely to go for what I am about say next, because, quite aside from fish eggs and blue cheese, the experience, it seems to me, the New Testament commends us to acquire a taste for is death. “If any want to become my followers” says Jesus “let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
It’s hard to imagine a text that could be more downright mortifying to our spiritual tastebuds than this one. What Jesus tells his disciples in today’s gospel is that what he has to offer them, the basic reality they are to orientate their lives around if they are to be his disciples, is the Cross. The Cross not just as the as-of-yet-unimagined destiny of their master, as the awful thing that is going to happen to Jesus, but as their own destiny in Christ, as a reality they must themselves learn to embrace if they are to be his disciples. And, not surprisingly, they won’t have it. St Peter’s visceral reaction – “God forbid it Lord! This must never happen to you” – is about as close to a gag-reflex as can be found anywhere in the scriptures.
And yet, for all the drama of his refusal, what we know with hindsight is that this is precisely the moment where, for St Peter, the long and difficult process of acquiring the bitter taste of the Cross begins. It is not pretty. But it is a beginning and that is what matters. Because like any taste we set ourselves to acquire, a taste for the Cross is not one we can simply will ourselves to acquire all at once, it is one that we can only come to by slow degrees, by learning to say ‘yes’ to the Cross in the thousand small, undramatic ways it comes to us in our daily lives so that when we come at last to that final surrender of ourselves, to that final embrace of the Cross, we may offer ourselves without reservation or conditions.
Which brings us to that curious little verse at the end of today’s gospel that has caused so many exegetes so many sleepless nights: “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.”
At a glance, the conundrum here is obvious: if to “taste death” means simply to die and if “the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” is what have generally understood to be the Day of the Judgement, then clearly we have a problem. For as far as we know those who were standing with Jesus when he said this all died long ago, and yet here we are still waiting for the Son of Man to come in his kingdom. But what if that is not what Jesus means by tasting death? What if to taste death means not simply to die but, like St Peter in today’s gospel, to savour for the first time the true and terrible implications of the Cross, of what it truly means to be a disciple of Jesus? There is, after all, a name for this first and transformative tasting of death. It is called the Sacrament of Baptism. “Do you not know” says St Paul in his Letter to the Romans “that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death?”
What then might it mean for Jesus to say that there are some standing with him who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom? That there are some standing with him who will not have been baptised by the Day of Judgement? Well, perhaps. I suspect, however, that we will not get off as easy as that, that the awful possibility the Lord intends to hold before us in today’s gospel – both the baptised and the unbaptised – is that on the Day of Judgement, when the Son of Man will come with his angels to repay everyone for what they have done, the truth we will have to face is that we have preferred the empty banquet of our own making, of our own status, of our own way, than to taste of that death that is our one true means of entry into life. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Amen.