NOTES for Luk 21:1-24

Christ's mysterious words about the end of the world and His second coming have mattered in every age. People have always been torn between a sense that the end is near and the warning that no one knows the time. But it appears that words one writer once said about death also apply to the end of the world: it is not only in the future; it is already at work in the world.

That is why the Gospel prophecies can be addressed to every person, whatever age he lives in. They contain not only a prediction of the final horrors; they are filled with confidence that Jesus will not abandon this world on the threshold of its ruin: "I will be with you, I will give you a word for bearing witness to the faith... fear nothing; not a hair of your head will fall in vain..." So these are words not only about the world's last days, but also about the final, ultimate faithfulness of Jesus to His disciples.

What matters is not how much we give to God and to our neighbors, how much we do, but how we do it, with what feelings. Perhaps this is not always so, and it is better to help some sick grandmother with revulsion than not to help her at all. But how often our help, our good deeds, give nothing and only cause pain, because we act without love.

If we do a little with love, give a little with love, then it will be as though we had given everything. Yes, the widow's mite was all she had to live on. We cannot always allow ourselves to give everything, since often it belongs not only to us but also to our family, for example. But if we give sincerely, help sincerely, with love and not out of a sense of duty, our mite will be no less than the widow's mite.

After all, it is possible, while giving only a little, to give one's whole heart every time. In this way one can give oneself even in a simple phone conversation with a lonely friend.

For anyone seeking to build a relationship with God, what Christ reveals about the heavenly Father when speaking of the widow's mite is of the utmost importance. The prophet Micah tells us what God expects of us: “O man, you have been told what is good and what the Lord requires of you: to act justly, to love deeds of mercy, and to walk humbly before your God” (Mic. 6:8). But what effort must you make to be pleasing to God in all this? What if a great deal is required of you, while you are capable of only a little? Will the Almighty reject you because your life is too small?

It is the same with the money people put into the Temple treasury: our minds, steeped in a kind of instinctive paganism, expect Christ to approve of those who give a great deal. Yet only the poor widow, who gives a ridiculously small sum, earns His approval. The evangelist Luke conveys Christ's words about two reasons why the widow's gift is preferred in God's eyes. First, she puts in her little coin in deep humility, without the sense of superiority characteristic of the wealthy. Second, she gives her entire livelihood as a symbol of her whole life.

Of course, we very much need this account as Lent approaches. What matters to us at this time is not the magnitude of extraordinary ascetic feats, but humility and sincerity before the Almighty. Let us remember the words of St. John Chrysostom, which we shall hear on Easter night: God “accepts the deeds and welcomes the intention; He honors the action and praises the offering. Therefore, all of you, enter into the joy of your Lord...” What can we bring Him that would compare with the widow's mite? Only sincere love for Him and for the people He has created. And the notion of size does not apply to love.

Today, when the story of the poor widow is told, it is not so much about money as about something far more important, of which money becomes a symbol. Money plays the same role in society that blood plays in the body. It flows and nourishes; it envelops society in a network like the web of vessels in our body; it connects us to one another as blood connects the different members. And so, when we give money, we seem to become donors. What does every donor feel after giving blood? Fatigue and weakness, which may last even a week or longer. Mercy likewise does not leave us without loss of blood. Does the Lord then want all our blood to be taken from us, “all she had to live on”? No. But the giving that leaves you weak, unwell, and facing other unpleasant things is Christianity itself; this is precisely what Nietzsche hated. Why have two half-dead people? Better to have one, but strong. There is such evident logic in this; it is so self-evident. If one forgets the soul... Why does a soul come to earth? Even when the Lord sees that a person is now being created who is destined for a painful lot of illness and poverty, say, when the parents are alcoholics, He sends a soul into that body. He cannot do otherwise, which means that this has meaning for Him. But does the Lord ask the soul whether it wants to enter this body? It cannot be otherwise; in any event, He gives His blessing. And then something takes place between that soul and God. Life is hard for the soul, yet it has its own mission here; it did not arrive here by accident. “Whoever believes in chance does not believe in God.” How can one fail to tremble before this miracle: the union of soul and body for the sake of meaning! How, then, can one refuse to give one’s blood, one’s money... if you are still standing while someone beside you can no longer stand?

On the one hand, the law of Moses commands the giving of a tithe. On the other hand, this widow gives, as Christ says, "all her living," that is, much more!

This is when we become true disciples of Christ: not when we count how many days remain until the end of Great Lent, but when we want to abide in it every day; not when we are true disciples of God by arriving at the service without being late and leaving no earlier than the dismissal, but when we want to come long before it begins, into the half-darkness of an empty church, and after the service want to stay longer and pray, pray, pray, when only truly urgent matters force us to leave the church. We are not Christ's disciples when we walk with a person as far as he asks, but when we are ready to walk twice as far: "and if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles" Matthew 5:40-41).

"But what is this abundance for?" someone may ask. It is for one simple reason: because God "gives the Spirit without measure" (John 3:34). If the Lord pours out His love without measure, why should we be miserly when everything we have is from Him?

What Jesus says in this passage cannot fail to horrify His listeners. Terrible pictures of persecutions, deaths, and diseases that humanity will have to endure are supplied with such details that there is no room to doubt that what stands before us is not a figurative parable, but a description of reality. And therefore Christ gives us comforting words that help us overcome paralyzing fear: "I will give you a mouth and wisdom."

The Lord calls us to the impossible. On the one hand, He invites us to remember every minute that at any moment everything we build on earth can collapse. But at the same time He opens before us the road of complete trust in God, the path of confidence that every hair on our head has been counted by Him. And the path of Christian life runs between these seemingly opposite positions in life.

In today's Gospel reading, the Lord speaks about the destruction of Jerusalem. On the one hand, Christ's predictions were fully realized in AD 70, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by the Romans. On the other hand, in every age we see in the world around us the fulfillment of what the Lord describes: nation rises against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there are earthquakes, famines, and other terrifying events. All this prevents us from limiting His prophecy to the events of the year 70. One way or another, the ruin and destruction of which the Lord speaks are an image of the fate of a world that does not accept Christ. In this connection, it is important for us to notice that the Lord gives us the hope of salvation precisely within this terrifying prospect. Knowing everything that is to happen and revealing it to His disciples, He says: “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” Christ calls us not to fear, but to put our trust in God in the very midst of the catastrophes we witness.

The combined Gospel reading read today includes three passages from chapter 21 of the Gospel of Luke, in which the Lord speaks about the destruction of Jerusalem. On the one hand, Christ's predictions were fulfilled in full in AD 70, when Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by the Romans. On the other hand, in the reality around us in any age we see the fulfillment of what the Lord says: nation rises against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there are earthquakes and famine and other terrible events.

All this does not allow His prophecy to be referred only to the events of the year 70. One way or another, the death and destruction of which the Lord speaks are an image of the fate of the world that does not accept Christ.

In connection with this, it is important for us to notice that the hope of salvation is given to us by the Lord precisely in this terrifying prospect. Knowing everything that is happening and revealing it to the disciples, He says: by your endurance save your souls. Christ calls us not to be afraid, but to place our hope in God precisely amid the catastrophes of which we are witnesses.

Speaking about the end times and about His second coming, the Lord directs the apostles' attention, and therefore ours as well, mainly not to natural catastrophes, and not even to wars, but to what will happen personally to us. The Lord says that He will come a second time to each of us personally, Himself, and at the same time to all, to the Church. And before this, catastrophes will not simply happen in the world in general; we will be persecuted. Personally, each of us may be persecuted, and each will thereby bear witness to Christ.

We often say that Christ has already become incarnate and has already come to earth, forgetting that we are those who wait: we await His second coming, which will transform us and this world. Even when we see the horrors now taking place in the world, we can see in them signs of the Lord's approach and not fear suffering, but sing: "Come, Lord," Maranatha!

The Lord says that those who confess His teaching will face hard trials. Christians will have hands laid on them, they will be brought to trial in the synagogue, thrown into prisons, persecuted... From an ordinary everyday point of view, this means Jesus' complete failure as a preacher. If His followers are facing such trials, is there any point in believing Him?

The answer the Savior gives does not fit within the framework of familiar logic, because Christ thinks on the scale of eternity. His words, "...this will be your opportunity to bear witness," mean that in these difficult situations His followers will be able to bear full witness to Him. For God Himself took humiliation and pain upon Himself not in order to abolish them, but in order to sanctify them. Many holy martyrs in the history of the Church revealed the light of Christ in their sufferings and in this way became His true witnesses.

When we face danger, we want to hide and run away, but these words of the Gospel call us to the exact opposite: despite our smallness and helplessness, to carry Christ in this suffering.

There is hardly a Christian on earth who has not thought about witness, either his own witness or witness in general. And persecutions for the faith are also familiar to many. It would seem that there is nothing unusual in this: history knows many martyrs for an idea who were persecuted for refusing to renounce their convictions. It can seem that Christians are no exception here: they were persecuted for their religious convictions just like many others. But is this really so?

At first glance, there really are no fundamental differences. Except, however, for one thing: Jesus, as is evident, commanded each faithful person not to think about what he would say when he had to answer before his persecutors. And this can seem truly strange: after all, the matter concerns the most important thing, the confession of one's faith, and here, as it can seem, the Savior calls us to let everything take its own course!

But it turns out that the matter is completely different: Jesus simply calls us in a critical situation to give Him the opportunity to act. He Himself will speak through us, and all that remains for us is not to hinder Him. Not to hinder Him with our fears, our self-confidence, or our self-admiration. And then He will say through us everything that must be said, but that we could never have said without His help.

Before His Passion, the Lord tells His disciples about the destinies of the world. This conversation is usually called the prophetic discourse on the Mount of Olives. In it, the Lord also speaks to the disciples about their own path: these are the words we read in today's passage from Luke's Gospel. Christ's words are both difficult and frightening, for He speaks of the way of the Cross that His disciples will be called to follow. The Lord promises His disciples that the fallen world will rise against them as it rose against Him, and that even those closest to them may become their opponents. At the same time, however, He promises them something supremely important: His help. His disciples will be persecuted for Christ's name, and in this they will find blessedness, because the Lord Himself will be with them.

This prophecy of Christ was fulfilled in the very first century of the Church's history and continues to be fulfilled. His promise that He will give His disciples words and wisdom that cannot be contradicted is fulfilled no less precisely. Countless Church Fathers, theologians and preachers in every age bear witness to Jesus, not by ‘following cleverly devised fables’, but by contemplating and proclaiming the truth through the Holy Spirit. Christ's words thus concern the essence, the true content, of life and history. Each of us can test ourselves against these words. If the world resists you, it means you are moving towards heaven. But if the fading waves of tranquillity close over your head like treacle, it means you are sinking into external, superficial things.

Judging by the Saviour's words, the Church's conflict with the world is an age-old conflict, bound up with the Church's very essence, and Jesus evidently considers it completely inevitable. Of course, if Christianity were simply another new religion, such an approach would mean that Christians were the most conflict-prone people in human history, and that the Founder of their teaching approved of this attitude.

The point is precisely that Christianity is not a new religion but a new life, life in the Kingdom the Saviour brought to earth. That Kingdom really is incompatible with the untransfigured world, not because it is of a different nature, but because after the Fall the untransfigured world came under the power of evil, captive to those dark forces for which there is, and can be, no place in the Kingdom. Hence the conflict, which will end only at the end of time, after creation has been fully transfigured and the world freed from the power of the evil whose forces now hold it captive.

It is no accident that Jesus speaks of conflict with the world as a Christian's normal condition: a Christian—unless, of course, one is a Christian in name only—is an inhabitant of the Kingdom, and the life one lives cannot be hidden. Yet that very life makes the Christian unacceptable to the world which, in the Gospel's words, ‘lies in evil’. It is not always a matter of direct persecution and harassment, but rejection in one form or another is always present, and until the Saviour returns to the world, until the Kingdom's complete triumph, nothing can be done about it. This is probably why the Saviour calls the faithful not to think in advance about what to say if they have to answer their persecutors' questions.

Of course, if it were a matter of some new teaching that needed to be defended before hostile opponents, such a defence would require thorough preparation. But it is not a matter of a teaching but of life, not of theory but of practice. It is impossible to bear witness to the life of the Kingdom if one does not live it; but if one does, and lives it fully, such testimony presents no particular difficulty. And Jesus calls His disciples to live the life of the Kingdom. And to bear witness to it without fearing conflict and rejection, for only in this way can one remain an inhabitant of the Kingdom.

This phrase was spoken by Jesus as part of His prophecy about coming disasters and persecutions, and it is precisely in this context that it should be considered. Moreover, the point is not the patience of any people in any difficult situations, but specifically Christians during persecutions. This does not mean that we should look with Olympian calm at injustices or violence happening next to us; Jesus Himself intervened in such cases, and rather promptly.

But when persecutions are being "unfolded" against us, then He calls us not to be impatient. He grounds this in trust that God holds our life in His hands, and therefore we can refrain from rushing our own reaction and allow Him to act.

Someone said that in a critical situation we have two options: reaction and response. Reaction is what arises immediately; it comes from ourselves, "from the flesh." Response is where we have stopped our first reaction, endured it, and allowed God, who never acts without our permission, to enter into action. It is no accident that in the preceding phrases Jesus says that we should not prepare or train our reaction in advance, but should trust that God Himself will give His answer. When by such patience we stop ourselves, God enters our life, and He accomplishes our salvation.

The Saviour speaks of the destruction of Jerusalem as an event preceding His return in glory. At first sight, this may seem somewhat strange. After all, everyone knows that Jesus' prophecy concerning Jerusalem was fulfilled long ago, in AD 70, when, following another anti-Roman revolt, the Roman army stormed Jerusalem and razed the city and the Temple to the ground.

There can hardly be any doubt that this was the catastrophe the Saviour meant when He spoke of Jerusalem's destruction. But how, then, are we to understand His words about His imminent return? And how do they accord with His own warning about times and seasons? Viewed in terms of the order of things familiar to us, the situation can indeed only leave us puzzled.

On the other hand, the evangelist tells us nothing about how much time separates Jerusalem's destruction from the Saviour's return. Only one thing is clear: this is a spiritually significant event marking a boundary beyond which lies the final stretch, leading us directly to the end of our present age—to that end when the world will be transformed, the Kingdom revealed in all its fullness, and the Saviour will return in glory.

The end of Jerusalem truly becomes the end of the former order of things, the order that was in fact meant to end with the Messiah's coming. Of course, those awaiting Him thought the end of the old age and the beginning of the new would happen, if not instantaneously, then at least fairly quickly. They did not think that the unfolding of the Kingdom in our world undergoing transformation would take more than a millennium.

The age of the advancing Kingdom is indeed a different age, already more closely bound to the Kingdom as it will be revealed at the end of time than to the former order of things, when the Kingdom could be seen only from afar. We who live in the age of the advancing Kingdom must decide whether we are ready, in this transitional age, to bind our destiny to that advancing Kingdom—so that its triumph may become ours as well.

The sacred in our lives faces two dangers: the danger of desacralisation and the danger of excessive sacralisation. There is a fine line along which the embodied elements of our faith do not weigh down its spiritual dimension. In the minds of many Jews during Christ's earthly ministry, attitudes towards the Temple fell prey to the second danger. On the one hand, its destruction in the early seventies became a significant symbol of the rejection of the vineyard Owner's Son. On the other hand, it also became a renewal of faith. Recall Christ's conversation with the Samaritan woman. He says: believe Me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem (Jn 4:21). This is a very important point. Revelation of the one God accumulated among God's people, as though within a small space, throughout their long history. This confinement was then necessary precisely for that difficult process of accumulation; but something like an explosion had to occur, scattering its particles throughout the world. There is a plant called momordica (momordica L.). It grows and ripens, and at first its seeds are held in something like a capsule; when it ripens, the capsule bursts and shoots out the seeds, which can now spread throughout the world. Some may dislike such a botanical metaphor. In any case, the destruction of the Temple is both a tragedy and the beginning of a new, unprecedented universalism.

Jesus' prophecy about the destruction of the city and the Temple, sometimes called the Little Apocalypse, causes bewilderment among many. This bewilderment first arose in the second generation of Christians, some of whom lived to the year 70 and saw with their own eyes the devastation of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple of which the Saviour speaks. This was because what Jesus had predicted happened, while He Himself still did not return. Another revelation, given to the apostle John, was needed before the meaning of the new era became clearer. Jesus Himself, meanwhile, seems not to have gone into detail when speaking about the end times and His return in glory. He mentions only the principal events: the end of the former age and the coming of the Kingdom in all its fullness.

The revelation received by John completed the picture: it portrays an entire age, the age of the advancing Kingdom, which the Saviour does not mention at all in His prophecy. This is understandable, however: He was telling the disciples about the coming events when history had not yet ended, when the Temple was still standing in its place. In Jesus' words, it is precisely the end of the Second Temple that becomes the end of times.

This might seem strange: almost two thousand years have passed since the year 70, yet history apparently continues. But from the standpoint of the processes that began with Christ's coming into the world, the former history really did end with the end of the Second Temple. All subsequent events belong to another age, one wholly defined by the moment of its completion and therefore by the Saviour's return and the manifestation of the Kingdom to the world in all its fullness. This is precisely why, immediately after describing the devastation of Jerusalem and the Temple, Jesus turns to the subject of His return and the triumph of the Kingdom. He says nothing about the transitional age itself. This is why those who remembered this conversation formed the impression that Jesus would return immediately, or almost immediately, after these events.

The revelation received by John after the year 70 put everything in its place: it became clear that an entire age was meant, the age of the advancing Kingdom in which we too have had to live. Yet it can already be regarded as the home stretch leading us to the goal. The main thing is to reach it.

In today's passage the Lord tells His disciples that in the future their life may change very sharply. Now everything is familiar to them: there is Jerusalem, there is the Temple, their beloved Teacher is near, and nothing is required of them except to follow Him. But Christ reveals to them that He Himself is going to His death, that the Temple will be destroyed, Jerusalem laid waste, and the disciples will face persecution, hatred, and betrayal.

To one degree or another, these words apply to each of us. The Lord calls us to keep watch, because we do not know when the ground will give way beneath our feet, when a time of testing will come. And here He gives us very important commandments about how to stand, how to survive, and how to win in this battle of good and evil. First, "do not be afraid and do not be terrified" - the Lord will not abandon His disciples. He will give them words for witness and wisdom that the world will not be able to withstand. The disciples are threatened with persecution and death, yet paradoxically "not a hair of your head will perish." Even the sufferings to come will be filled with meaning and will contribute to Christ's victory. Second, "by your endurance save your souls" - in trials they will need steadfastness. Third, "lift up your heads; your redemption is drawing near" - victory will inevitably belong to Christ, and therefore the final trials will be permeated for them with the joy of that victory. And finally, "keep watch; watch yourselves" - so that at the necessary moment they will not be unready and helpless, will not give in to panic, and will meet the coming Lord with a joyful heart.

Today's reading offers us a discourse of Jesus in which he links the beginning and the end of our age in a remarkable way. To understand what he says, it is important to bear in mind that, for faithful Jews of the post-exilic period, the Temple built by those who had returned from Babylon to the land of their fathers was the messianic Temple: it was to stand until the end of time and witness the coming of the Messiah and the triumph of the messianic Kingdom. Later, however, around the second century BC, these ideas were supplemented by the rabbinic teaching about ‘messianic tribulations’: persecutions that would descend on the Temple, the people and the country shortly before the appearance of the Messiah, who would begin the final messianic holy war. Its outcome would be the victory of God's people and the coming of the messianic Kingdom.

During the persecutions, representatives of some rabbinic schools believed, the Temple would be desecrated and possibly even destroyed, but it would be rebuilt when the Kingdom triumphed. Jesus evidently presents the whole history up to the year AD 70, up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, in the context of these traditional ideas (vv. 5–6, 20–22). For him, apparently, the events of AD 70 really do become the end of history (vv. 22–24).

But for Jesus, the end of history proves to be only the beginning of the coming of the messianic Kingdom; this process is completed later, and Jesus gives no dates here. He speaks only of the signs by which one can judge that the end is near (vv. 25–28). In fact, apart from the signs or ‘portents’, whose meaning is not entirely clear—we can only suppose that some natural disasters are meant—the chief sign of the approaching end of the transitional age is the ‘distress and perplexity’ that grips not merely individual peoples and countries, as it did in the past, but the whole of humanity.

In modern terms, we would apparently call this a crisis of values and a spiritual and moral crisis, one affecting all humanity. It is impossible, however, to say exactly how long humanity will remain in this condition before the present stage of its history ends; but it will end with Jesus' return (v. 27). In this way the Saviour joins together the beginning and the end of the historical stage in which we have found ourselves witnesses and participants. The point is not the timing, which changes nothing fundamental, but the spiritual meaning of what is happening. We have been warned. What happens next depends only on us.

We so want to know exactly when the events indicated will take place, and for two thousand years people have been puzzling over the dates of coming catastrophes, even though the Lord clearly warned us not to do this. In speculation about times and dates there is a substitution, when our attention is diverted from how we live before the end comes to the search for the date of the end. And yet what follows from His words is that it is far more important to be ready at every moment, which means that at every moment we should live worthily before the face of the Lord.

Among the hardest sayings of Christ in the Gospel are those in which He reveals that the time He indicates is near. But twenty centuries have passed, and the world still lies in evil. Was He speaking about the coming destruction of Jerusalem, and not about a global judgment at all?

There is reason to say that He was indeed prophesying about events of the coming decades, but like the Old Testament prophets, through the images of the catastrophes His listeners were to witness, He was also revealing the meaning of other events. By earthly measures these events are far from the "present moment," but on the scale of eternity they are near. Therefore it is not worth guessing how much earthly time the rule of evil in the world will last, even if it lasts for a very long time. The sentence on evil has already been passed, and it is doomed to disappear.

The terrible picture of Jerusalem's destruction is revealed in this passage in all its fullness. As the details accumulate, they become ever more horrifying. The climax is the death of people from “fear and foreboding of what is coming” alone. What could be more terrible? It is precisely at that moment that the Savior comes, and with Him everything takes on a new meaning.

No one among us knows when Christ's second coming will occur. But many people have lived through a moment when the darkness became so dense that not even a tiny gleam of light remained. It is often at just such a time that the Lord visits us and reveals His power to us. Therefore, when we encounter trials, we must not only suffer and grieve, but also try to see God behind them.

Why does Jesus object to the Christ being called the Son of David, when this expression refers precisely to the Messiah who has come into the world? Most likely because, for many, it is merely a family designation for a descendant of King David, and such people therefore see Jesus exclusively in this capacity. We can thus understand how important it was for Him to show that the Messiah is Someone greater than the Son of David according to the flesh.

But Christ does not stop there. Revealing the deeper meaning of the psalm to His listeners, He gives a direct hint that the Messiah is more than a great prophet or a messenger from above equal, for example, to an angel. No, the Messiah is called Lord, and therefore equal to Him. Here we have one of Christ's testimonies to Himself as God.

In warning against the hypocrisy of the scribes, Christ did not give a long list of unworthy deeds but mentioned one: the unjust treatment of widows. We will understand why this particular sin is singled out if we remember that widows were among the most deprived groups in society. They often lacked both the strength and the material means to obtain food, so the hypocrites' desire to profit at their expense was especially repugnant, surpassing their other outrages.

This must be why, immediately after these words, Christ drew the disciples' attention to a widow whose offering was negligible in face value but exceeded the rich donations given ‘out of abundance’...

Today's reading brings us back once more to the theme of the Kingdom, but from a somewhat unexpected angle. It begins with a question asked by representatives of the priestly circles, the ‘Sadducees’, who are said to have rejected the teaching about resurrection (v. 27). Apparently, this rejection was connected with the fact that, because of historical circumstances, priestly circles traditionally regarded only the Torah proper, the Pentateuch, as Holy Scripture. They tended to view the prophetic books, which were part of Scripture for the Synagogue, instead as part of Tradition: interesting in some respects, but carrying little authority. Since almost everything the Bible says about resurrection is connected with the prophetic tradition, resurrection itself came to be regarded in priestly circles as an ingenious but highly questionable idea. The question the ‘Sadducees’ put to Jesus (vv. 28–33) was evidently one of the polemical questions that opponents of the teaching about resurrection would ask its supporters.

Jesus answers in a completely unexpected way, pointing to features of the Kingdom's nature that perhaps no one had considered within the ideas current at the time. Indeed, if one understands the Kingdom as a religious and political reality, and therefore as existing according to the laws of our as yet untransformed world, the question really is insoluble. Jesus points out to his questioners that the Kingdom's nature is entirely different: it is transfigured creation, of which transfigured humanity also becomes a part, and the laws of the untransformed world no longer apply to it (vv. 34–36).

This answer was apparently wholly unexpected for the ‘Sadducees’; meanwhile, Jesus offered them another argument, this time from the Pentateuch, whose authority they could not possibly contest (vv. 37–38): for God there are no dead. This assertion becomes intelligible in the context of the religious ideas traditional in the Gospel period, which included no developed concepts relating to the immortality of the soul. The afterlife was viewed rather pessimistically then, as in previous centuries: in dying, a person disappeared for ever; their shade went to the realm of shades, Sheol, sometimes called ‘hell’ in the Gospel in Greek—or, more precisely, ‘Hades’, which in Greek usage meant the same as ‘Sheol’ in Hebrew. Those in Sheol retained no memory either of the world of the living or of God; their only hope was resurrection at the end of time, in which, however, the ‘Sadducees’ did not believe. By pointing to the expression ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’, Jesus emphasises that for God there are no dead, that the Kingdom is not Sheol: in Sheol one can find only a pale semblance of life, whereas in the Kingdom there is life in all its fullness, beside which our untransformed world would seem a realm of shades.

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...

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.