Yes. He’s quoted saying it twice, and both times the promise is fastened to particular people who were standing in front of him when he said it.
Here’s what goes unpreached. There are two sayings, not one. The famous one is the weaker, and it’s the only one most people ever have to defend. The second has no flexible word in it anywhere, which is why the standard answers never finish the job.
The saying everybody argues about
It closes a long speech about wars, famines, persecution, false messiahs, and the end of the temple. Just before the deadline sentence, here’s what’s coming:
Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, 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.
— Matthew 24:29–30, NRSVue
Then he puts a clock on it.
Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.
— Matthew 24:34, NRSVue
Mark 13:30 and Luke 21:32 carry the same line. All these things is the list he just gave — the darkened sun, the falling stars, the arrival on the clouds. All of it, before the people listening had died off.
The saying that has no give in it
Earlier, in a different setting, he says something narrower.
And he said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.’
— Mark 9:1, NRSVue
Luke 9:27 carries it. Matthew does something the other two don’t — he spells out what the promise contains before he makes it.
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. 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.
— Matthew 16:27–28, NRSVue
Verse 27 defines what verse 28 promises: angels, glory, everyone getting what they’ve got coming. And it’s pinned to bodies in a crowd.
Notice the word some. It’s doing real work. If he meant next week, he’d have said all of you. Some means he expected most of that crowd to be dead by then and a few still breathing.
They all died. That’s the whole difficulty, and every defense exists to get around it, so let’s run the excuses one at a time.
Run the excuses
Generation means the Jewish people, and they haven’t passed away.
One chapter earlier, the same speaker uses the identical phrase:
Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation.
— Matthew 23:36, NRSVue
That’s about the people he’d been arguing with that week, and nobody reads it any other way. A phrase doesn’t switch from you, standing here to an ethnic group across twenty centuries between one chapter and the next.
Read as a race, it stops predicting anything. Some group will still exist whenever the end arrives, no matter when that is. And this is the closing line of a speech whose whole subject is how close it is — an answer to when. Sometime while humans are still around isn’t one.
This generation means the future generation, the one that finally sees the signs.
The speech never stops being aimed at the room. You will hear of wars. You will be handed over. When you see the desolating sacrilege. Pray your flight isn’t in winter. That’s second person, over and over, at men asking him about their own city. This is the word for what’s in front of you.
And it can’t reach the second saying at all. To move that promise to people not yet born, you’d have to make standing here mean somewhere else and will not taste death mean somebody else’s death. That isn’t interpreting the sentence. That’s replacing it.
It was all fulfilled when Jerusalem fell.
This one covers real ground, and I’ll grant a lot of it. The stones did come down, about forty years on, inside the lifetime of anyone who’d been young in that crowd. Parts of the speech read like siege instructions — get to the hills, don’t go back for your coat — and there was a siege.
It doesn’t matter, though, because your own text promises more than the war delivered. The sun stayed lit. The stars stayed put. Nobody watched the Son of Man come down through the clouds while the tribes of the earth mourned, and nobody was repaid for what they’d done — Matthew’s own definition of the arrival.
So the defense has to split the speech in two — this half was the war, that half is still coming — while the deadline sits under the whole thing saying all these things. Keep the fulfillment and half the promise goes unkept. Keep the other half and the deadline is blown. It’s one or the other.
It was the transfiguration, six days later.
A promise phrased in terms of who will and won’t have died yet is measured in lifetimes. Six days isn’t a lifetime. Nobody warns a group of men that a few will live long enough to see next weekend.
It isn’t only the gospels
Paul writes to Corinth about the end and puts himself inside the group that’s still alive for it.
Look, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.
— 1 Corinthians 15:51–52, NRSVue
We will not all die. Not they. He’s writing to one congregation about that congregation, and the mystery he’s pleased to share is that some of them won’t have to be buried first. That’s only worth writing to people who could expect to still be standing when the trumpet goes off.
What the text won’t support
It won’t support a promise with no addressee. Two sayings, six verses, three gospels, every one of them fixing the event to people who were alive and listening. Move the deadline and you have to move the audience with it, and the audience is nailed down by standing here.
It won’t support a deadline that never expires, either. The sentence exists to tell people how soon. Any reading that turns it into eventually deletes the reason it was said.
Check one thing yourself. Read Mark 8:34 straight through to Mark 9:1, ignoring the chapter number in the middle — those breaks were added more than a thousand years later, and this one lands badly. It’s one speech. Take the number away and the promise sits where the speaker left it, addressed to a crowd he called over so they’d hear it.
Twelve Verses Your Church Skipped — the free guide. Twelve passages, quoted in full, with the standard defenses run one at a time. Get it here.
THE WAR AGAINST THE END OF DAYS — a novel that takes Revelation seriously as imagery and follows it where it goes. Available now.