NOTES for Mar 12:27

Jesus cites the text of Scripture that God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living, as proof of the inevitability of universal resurrection, and not only His own. If we consider this verse in its immediate meaning, we will find nothing of the kind in it: it means only that God is the God of life, not the God of death, and that He leads a person by the path of life, delivering him from death.

Usually this was understood in the context of a person's earthly life: it was presumed that God could, for example, deliver a righteous person from mortal danger threatening him, including in order to demonstrate to skeptics that He is truly ready to intervene in events and support His witness.

At the same time, however, it was taken for granted that all people are mortal, and even the righteous person whose lot was a happy and long life would still someday die. Such a death was and is called "natural," and although few in fact are granted it, in the Old Testament books it was considered the standard, so to speak, the "ideal death": a person lived the life of a righteous man and peacefully departed, leaving an inheritance to his children, whom he, it goes without saying, had already had time to raise by then as righteous as he himself had been. Later the righteous awaited resurrection, but this was an event separate from their earthly life.

Jesus, however, says that death is by definition never natural: God is the source of life and life itself. He did not create death; it became the consequence of the fall, which distorted creation. Against such a background resurrection is not something accidental, not an ordinary miracle of God which, however, might not have happened. It is part of that plan of universal salvation and transformation of creation whose culmination was the coming of the Messiah.

In the Kingdom of God there can be no death precisely because it is God's Kingdom, and life, every earthly life, has its foundation in the eternity of this Kingdom. Life cannot have any natural, physical sources, although it can and indeed does have a natural, physical projection. Life itself is a spiritual process, and what in our world limited by space and time is perceived as a short segment of time abides in the eternity of the Kingdom as the fullness, revealed to one degree or another depending on the spiritual quality of the life lived, of a concrete person who will remain there forever.

Or will not remain, if in the person's life there was nothing of the Kingdom and of that breath of God with which it is permeated. Resurrection is not simply a return to life, but a return to life in all its fullness, in the fullness of the Kingdom. Therefore it can prove for a person both joy and suffering. And what will await him in eternity depends only on the choice of the person himself, which he will have to make here, in this life.