NOTES for Luk 20:38

At times the aphoristic force of Jesus' sayings is so vivid that it sheds new light for us on something we had considered already unambiguously clear. The point is that we look from our human point of view, while Jesus looks from the point of view of the heavenly Father.

So it is in this case: people have always regarded death as almost the chief event in life, feared that event, and tried to understand what happens then... Even now Christians continue to argue seriously about whether one can pray for the dead, whether repentance after death is possible, and so on, thereby giving death some enormous, almost fatal significance.

But with one phrase Jesus puts everything in its place. From God's point of view, and this is the only true point of view, all this is our vanity, because for God there are no dead; all are alive to Him. Therefore our physical death changes nothing in the most important thing: our relationship with God. What happens then, and how it happens, is a secondary matter.

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.

People come to Jesus who denied the resurrection, believing that this earthly existence exhausts a person's whole life. Their attachment to earthly existence is shown by the very question they ask Him. It is a question filled with truly earthly particulars and details. Christ does not give a direct answer, but offers a completely new angle from which to consider the problem. He calls His listeners to take a position beyond time, the position of eternity. From precisely this point one can see the most important thing, which turns out not to be the clarification of family relationships in eternal life, but the fact that "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

Sometimes we ask the Lord questions and do not receive direct answers; our difficulties are not resolved through prayer, and the circumstances of life do not change from year to year. But despite this, we can sense peace and the presence of God within all this irresolution and complexity, if we learn even a little to see our life in the divine dimension.

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.

The Lord points the Sadducees and scribes to the foundation for faith in the resurrection in the Book of Exodus: when God reveals Himself to Moses, He speaks not simply of the "continuity of tradition" from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but of the fact that faith, a person's bond with God, becomes the pledge of that person's eternal life. The idea of the soul's eternal existence in a spiritual world is foreign to Scripture; the continuation of life after death means bodily resurrection from the dead. This means that all who have ever found faith in God are alive, for He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

This fully applies to us as well. Do we realize that eternal life has already begun, that there will be no other life, and therefore everything we do now, we do in eternal life? It is very important to begin living "for real" not beyond the grave, but here, today. This is exactly what the Lord called "repentance" - a change in our attitude toward life, toward the world, toward ourselves, and toward God. Life begins in the context of eternity...