“For the Son of Man is going to come with His angels in the glory of His Father, and then He will reward each according to what he has done. I assure you: There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” (Matthew 16:17-28)
In the last two posts, we saw that Jesus’s disciples — and the rest of the Jewish people — expected the eschatological “day of the Lord” to come eventually, a day of final judgment when God would answer all the cries of the oppressed and bring reward to the righteous and judgment to the wicked, simultaneously ushering in a new age and a new creation when even death would be no more.
Jesus connected this ultimate day of reward with the coming of his own kingdom and proclaimed himself as the eschatological judge — a truly astonishing claim.
But there was one more prediction to make:
“There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
For the disciples who originally heard Jesus say this, it might have seemed like he was stating the obvious. They already thought the messianic kingdom was coming, fully, in their own time. For us, though, it’s a problem. We live two thousand years later, and we know the kingdom didn’t come in the apostles’ time.
We still haven’t seen the Son of Man come in his kingdom.
Or have we?
”Some Standing Here”
The first question to answer in understanding this verse is the identity of “some standing here.” Jesus seems to be designating a chosen few out of a larger group, but exactly who he means isn’t clear.
He might be designating the apostles, as opposed to the crowds at the pagan shrines in the region. Or he might be designating the faithful apostles in distinction to Judas, who would not see the kingdom.
Another option is that he may be be designating Peter, James, and John, because of what happened … right after this. (Don’t worry, we’re getting there.)
Personally, I lean toward the second explanation. I think Jesus is designating all the apostles except Judas as the “some standing here.”
All of these options, though, still leave us with a problem. Jesus promised that “some standing here” would see his kingdom come in glory within their own lifetimes.
If we assume (as many Christians do) that the kingdom has not yet come, that we are still waiting for the Son of Man to come in glory, we have a problem with this passage, because all of Jesus’s apostles died a very, very long time ago.
This problem is not a small one. In fact, the controversy generated by this verse and others like it has called the whole Christian faith into question for a long time.
Some have suggested that Jesus plainly taught he would return in the apostles’ lifetime, and that Jesus was wrong. They assume the early Christians thought Jesus would come back within their generation. This “failed expectation” created such a problem for the early church, scholars suggest, that they created the religion we call Christianity whole cloth in response to their disappointed expectations, including turning Jesus into God and inventing the Trinity.
The LORD Will Come, and All His Holy Ones with Him
When Jesus said that he, the Son of Man, would come with the angels in the glory of the Father, he was alluding to a couple of key Old Testament passages. There’s Daniel 7, as we’ve already seen — a clear prophecy of the messianic kingdom. But the mention of angels also invokes Zechariah 14, a powerful prophecy of the day of the Lord.
“A day of the LORD is coming,” Zechariah begins in verse 1, and then he goes on to describe a terrible battle between Jerusalem and the nations, which is interrupted by the arrival of God himself on the battlefield. His coming alters the geography of the Holy Land forever, eternally saves and sanctifies Jerusalem, and even changes the order of nature. This is powerful “end times” stuff:
Then the LORD will go out to fight against those nations as He fights on a day of battle. On that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. The Mount of Olives will be split in half from east to west, forming a huge valley, so that half the mountain will move to the north and half to the south. … Then the LORD my God will come and all the holy ones with Him …
On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half of it toward the eastern sea and the other half toward the western sea, in summer and winter alike. On that day Yahweh will become King over all the earth—Yahweh alone, and His name alone. (Zechariah 14:3-4, 5b, 8-9, emphasis mine)
Jesus seems to be saying his disciples would see this prophecy come to pass. But how could that be so? How could Jesus possibly be telling his disciples they would see this happen within their natural lifetimes?
If we say that he isn’t referencing Zechariah 14, and the only prophecy in view is Daniel 7, we’re not really off the hook. After all, Daniel 7’s description of “the coming of the Son of Man” is not less consequential:
I saw One like a son of man
coming with the clouds of heaven.
He approached the Ancient of Days
and was escorted before Him.
He was given authority to rule,
and glory, and a kingdom;
so that those of every people,
nation, and language
should serve Him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that will not pass away,
and His kingdom is one
that will not be destroyed.
Inaugurated Eschatology
Clearly, neither of the explanations put forth by liberal scholars work for us as faithful Christians. Jesus was not wrong, the early church was not caught flat-footed believing in a falsehood, and our religion is not an invention of human ingenuity.
It should go without saying, but Jesus also wasn’t lying, or speaking so obscurely that no one could possibly understand what he meant. (As is suggested when well-meaning scholars claim “some standing here” does not refer to anyone standing there but to the last generation to ever be born, thousands of years [or more] in the future.)
The answer, rather, is inaugurated eschatology.
Eschatology, you’ll remember, is the study of the eschaton, “the last things” — what we frequently call “the end times.” It pertains to the second coming of Christ, the resurrection, final judgment, heaven and hell, and the new heavens and new earth.
To say that the eschaton is inaugurated is to say that it has formally begun. The beginning of the end is here, but the end of the end has not yet reached completion.
It is this idea, of an eschatological period, that allows Paul to claim we are living in the last days and that “this world in its current form is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31), even though he did not expect Jesus to return in glory within his lifetime any more than the original apostles did.
Paul went even further: he claimed that the new creation had arrived with Christ: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NKJV).
Peter (who was “one of those standing there”) directly addressed people who would scoff at the idea that the end times had already begun because “everything continues as it has since the beginning of creation.” Not so, he claims. In fact, everything has changed: we have already been called out of darkness into his marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9). Yes, more change is still to come, but what feels like delay to us is not delay to God.
Peter acknowledged that the day of the Lord was still to come, yet he also believed that he was living in “the last days,” when the Holy Spirit would be poured out on all flesh (2 Peter 3, Acts 2:16-17). Indeed, things were not continuing as they always had. Even as he baptized the first generation of Christians in Jerusalem, raising them up into new life in Acts 2, Peter knew that new creation was underway.
Jesus Meant What He Said
When Jesus said that some standing there with him in Caesarea Philippi would see him come with the angels in the glory of the Father, he meant it. In referencing Zechariah 14, he really did mean to tell them that they would see Yahweh standing on the mountains of Jerusalem, that they would witness him fighting his enemies there, that they would see living water flow out of Jerusalem, to the east and to the west, to water the entire world.
They would see salvation and sanctification come. They would see Yahweh, the God of Israel, present in Israel with his angels. They would see the Son of Man receive his kingdom and Yahweh become king, “Yahweh alone,” and somehow these two ideas — that a Man would be king and that God alone would be king — would not contradict each other in the least.
And they would see it soon — before any of them except Judas had tasted death.
Jesus meant exactly what he said. And if we know the New Testament story, we know when the disciples saw all these things.
They saw them when Jesus conquered his enemies on the cross and rose from the dead to stand on the earth again — frequently heralded (not coincidentally) by angels. They saw them when the Holy Spirit was poured out on them in Jerusalem, the one Jesus called “living water who will flow out from your bellies” (John 7:38-39). They saw them when Jesus was given all authority in heaven and on earth and ascended to take his seat at the right hand of the Father, in his glory.
They saw all of it. And we have seen it too.
I do not mean to say that we have seen Jesus’s second coming. He is, as the angels promised, coming again, to the Mount of Olives in fact. Remember, we have seen the beginning of the end, but the end of the end is yet to come.The final judgment has yet to play out; as Peter said, the day of the Lord is still coming.
But we have tended to shove a lot of things into the far future as pertaining only to the second coming that Jesus claimed were fulfilled — or at least begun, visibly so — in the first.
We Have Seen the Kingdom. And We Haven’t.
The idea that Jesus had already begun to fulfill “end-time” expectations is found throughout the gospels. Some of them even push this fulfillment well back, before Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection into the earliest days of his life.
At Jesus’s conception, Mary sang her Magnificat, declaring that the day of the Lord — the great reversal — had come. “He has done a mighty deed with His arm; He has scattered the proud because of the thoughts of their hearts; He has toppled the mighty from their thrones
and exalted the lowly. He has satisfied the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. He has helped His servant Israel, mindful of His mercy, just as He spoke to our ancestors, to Abraham and his descendants forever” (Luke 1:52–55).
She viewed all of this as having happenedbefore Jesus ever drew a breath, simply in the fact of his presence in her womb — divine and human, the fulfilment of all God’s promises.
Matthew’s depiction of the pagan Magi bowing down to the infant Jesus has eschatological overtones too. So does Luke 2, where Jesus’s presentation in the temple at forty days old is a fulfilment of Malachi 3:1: “Then the Lord you seek will suddenly come to His temple.”
Speaking of that day, Erik Varden writes:
“‘Suddenly’ is the word. For who took any notice? Who expected it, except a couple of ancient eccentrics? Yet here he is, entering his house: the Lord, who like a refiner’s fire, will purify the sons of Levi … Centuries of expectation culminate in this instance. God’s promise is vindicated at last. The salvation of the world is made manifest. And no one noticed. This is what we must reflect on: the discretion of our God, who fulfils his promises without display.” (Erik Varden, Entering the Twofold Mystery: On Christian Conversion (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2002)
Christ is, says Varden, “an incognito Redeemer.” This may not make us happy, at first, but it’s true. And it’s relevant. It means that for many of us, the answer to our prayers has already come. We just need to open our eyes and see it.
Jesus’s entire life, everything he did, said, and most of all was, was the kingdom of God coming into the world. If we have read the gospels, if we’ve caught a glimpse of Jesus, we have seen the kingdom — really, truly seen it, and heard it too, even if only with dim eyes and half-deaf ears. Isaiah’s words of exasperation apply to us: “Who is blind but My servant,
or deaf like My messenger I am sending? Who is blind like My dedicated one, or blind like the servant of the Lord?” (Isaiah 42:19). Thankfully there is a remedy for our insensibility, as Isaiah also tells us: “Listen, you deaf! Look, you blind, so that you may see.”
Looking at Christ, who opens blind eyes and deaf ears, we begin to comprehend at long last what we are looking at.
The Great Unveiling
It is good for us to “wait for and earnestly desire the coming of the day of God,” as Peter told us to do (2 Peter 3:12). But just as much, or even more, it is good for us to ask the Lord to give us eyes to see what is already here.
If we believe what Jesus and the prophets said, we have to believe the kingdom of God has come. Yahweh is enthroned. Living waters have been poured out. The old creation is passing away; new creation is already flowering.
The end has begun, and the new beginning is already here.
Yes, we are still waiting for the final consummation. This is the “already/not-yet” tension of the kingdom of God, of the age of repentance in which we live. But as we repent, as we turn toward God in faith, let us also ask him to open our eyes.
Before he ascended into heaven, Jesus promised his disciples, “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” And he has. Although he is in heaven — in one of the two “interlocking dimensions” of creation, to borrow wording from the Anglican bishop and scholar N.T. Wright — he is also here, with us.
He is here in the Holy Spirit. He is here in the communion of his body and blood. He is here in his body, his people. He speaks in his Word. He has left us, but he has not left us. He is in heaven, but he has joined heaven with earth.
In one very real sense, we are waiting for Jesus to return. We are waiting for the kingdom of God to come fully. Yet, we see glimpses — of the kingdom and of Christ himself, already present here with us — all the time.
We still see the blind healed and the lame walk. We still see lives transformed. We experience the presence of the Holy Spirit, hear God speak to us, and daily benefit from the changes wrought in human society by the presence of the Church over two millennia. We see beauty, truth, and goodness present in our midst.
Mary and Joseph, Anna and Simeon, saw the Lord enter his temple. “Now let your servant die in peace,” Simeon exulted; “my eyes have seen your salvation.” The disciples, most of those who stood with Jesus at the base of Mount Hermon, saw the kingdom of God come with power. “We have seen his glory,” John later declared, “the glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father.” Paul, knocked off his feet by the light of Christ shining in the road to Damascus, saw the new creation underway. “Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NKJV).
What they saw, we may also see. It is truth. It is reality. We are called to live within it. We still pray, “your kingdom come,” because we are waiting for the day of final consummation.
But we pray these words knowing — it has already begun.
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This is Part 254 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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