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King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

Luke, Chapter 20, verse 38

²⁷ He convinceth the Sadducees that denied the resurrection

³⁸For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him.

Read more:Luke, Chapter 20

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20:38 He is not a God of the dead, or, there is no God of the dead - That is, tho term God implies such a relation, as cannot possiblysubsist between him and the dead; who in the Sadducees' sense are extinguished spirits; who could neither worship him, nor receive good from him. So that all live to him - All who have him for their God, live to and enjoy him. This sentence is not an argument for what went before; but the proposition which was to be proved. And the consequence is apparently just. For as all the faithful are the children of Abraham, and the Divine promise of being a God to him and his seed is entailed upon them, it implies their continued existence and happiness in a future state as much as Abraham's.And as the body is an essential part of man, it implies both his resurrection and theirs; and so overthrows the entire scheme of the Sadducean doctrine.

NOTES

Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman whose...

Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman who had several husbands, each of whom died in turn, was of the same kind. Yet Jesus' answer proved completely unexpected. He immediately rejects not only the traditional solutions to the problem, but also the very perspective from which it is posed; He breaks, so to speak, the traditional paradigm of thought. And this is hardly surprising: for Jesus the world is the Kingdom. That is the only way He perceives it.

Such a perception does not come easily to us, whereas He was born with it. It is not that He is unable to look at the world differently, but such a view is unnatural to Him. That is why He sees unexpected and paradoxical answers to traditional questions. In this case too, the Saviour answers quite differently from what might have been expected. As always, He speaks of the Kingdom: there are no dead in it, just as there is no concept of marriage in the earthly sense. People do not, of course, become angels after the resurrection, but in some respects their life truly becomes more like the life of angels than that of people in the fallen world.

Everything is different in the Kingdom, entirely unlike what the overwhelming majority of Jesus' contemporaries imagined. For the fullness of life there is absolute: each person has his or her own fullness, yet for everyone it is absolute. There are no dead there, whereas our human mind imagines even the Kingdom within the familiar paradigm of life and death. We often imagine even immortality not as a new quality of being, but as the endless continuation of its present earthly quality, with all the relationships of this earthly life and all its problems, some of them truly insoluble if extended unchanged into infinity. This, in fact, is precisely what the Sadducees were doing when they presented their opponents with problems like the one they put to Jesus.

But He answers in His own way, from the Kingdom, from that fullness of true life which alone can be called life in the genuine sense of the word. And those who questioned Him fall silent. They have nothing more to say: the world disclosed to them in the Saviour's answers is too unlike the one to which they are accustomed, as different as heaven and earth.

The resurrection of the dead has always raised a great number of questions, and many of them have been connected with the understanding of reality characteristic of the limited view of a fallen person living in a fallen world. The main problem here becomes...

The resurrection of the dead has always raised a great number of questions, and many of them have been connected with the understanding of reality characteristic of the limited view of a fallen person living in a fallen world. The main problem here becomes the problem of human imagination and the habit of extrapolating the processes and models of the fallen world to a place where processes unfold differently and the models are unsuitable by definition.

For example, it sometimes happens that the need to explore other planets is "grounded" theologically precisely by the inevitability of the general resurrection: if, the supporters of this rather original theory claim, all generations that ever lived on Earth are resurrected, there will simply not be enough room for them on the planet; therefore, in order to settle them, they will necessarily have to resort to colonizing other planets, and that means preparation for the general resurrection presupposes both interplanetary travel and the colonization of planets suitable for life. For now, at the present stage of its technological development, as the supporters of this view maintain, humanity is not yet ready for the general resurrection. This very peculiar theory may appear amusing, but the arguments offered by its supporters are in essence not very different from those presented to Jesus by the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection. There, too, a picture is drawn that comes down to the same pseudo-problem as the "problem" of the Earth being "overpopulated" by resurrected people: the Sadducees who draw it begin from the idea that resurrection means a person's return to the life of the fallen world that he lives now. Resurrection here is conceived not as movement forward, but as movement backward.

Jesus compares resurrected people with angels, not in the sense that people, when rising, turn into angels (following that logic, one would have to suppose that when they die they turn into demons), but in the sense that the spiritual and natural condition of the resurrected person differs from the spiritual and natural condition of the fallen person no less than the condition and life of that same fallen person differ from the condition and life of an angel. The Savior does not speak in detail about this new life, perhaps because, as fallen people, most of us would not understand His descriptions anyway; but He quite unambiguously rejects the very possibility of transferring the logic and models of the fallen world to the Kingdom, that is, He rejects precisely what we are so inclined to do in our conversations and reflections about the Kingdom.

Jesus' opponents sometimes arranged for Him a kind of examination in the Jewish theology of their day...

Jesus' opponents sometimes arranged for Him a kind of examination in the Jewish theology of their day. The question about a woman who had been married several times in her life was used by opponents of faith in the universal resurrection, chiefly representatives of the priesthood, as an argument in debate: indeed, whose wife would she be if she met all her husbands alive? This was one of those standard "difficult" questions from the Sadducees to the Pharisees, to which there were their own "elegant" answers. Jesus, as is not hard to guess, was being tested on His knowledge of such answers.

He speaks about something entirely different: the life of the Kingdom, which is completely unlike the life of the untransformed world with its laws. He wants to show those asking Him that trying to apply the coordinate system of the untransformed world to the life of the Kingdom is a path that is a dead end from the start. In the Kingdom there is no earthly marriage not because the differences between men and women disappear there, but because the very quality of life changes there; even humanity as such changes, in both of its modes, male and female.

The problem about which those who doubt the resurrection ask Jesus could arise only in the completely incredible case that the resurrection became not the triumph of the Kingdom with its new life, but merely the return of all the dead to their former, untransformed life. In the world where time and cause-and-effect relations are an absolute reality, where no effect can be the cause of itself and where time is irreversible, there is indeed no way out of the situation described by the Sadducean theologians. In the untransformed world it cannot occur: its laws do not allow it.

The world where it is possible is ordered differently; different laws operate there, there is no linear time so familiar to us, and therefore the situation can be resolved in the most unexpected way. Jesus gives two examples as illustrations: God, for whom there are no dead, so that for Him Abraham, Isaac, and other great spiritual leaders, long dead for us, are alive; and David, who calls his "lord" the One who in our untransformed world has not yet been born.

It is no wonder that Jesus' opponents fall silent: what He has said does not fit into any framework of any theological schemes. Neither does the Kingdom He brought into the world.

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