NOTES for Luk 20:27-21:4

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?

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 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 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.

The question put to Christ in today's reading from Luke's Gospel by the Sadducees, who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead, is not as groundless as it might first appear. Indeed, what answer can be given? What does the resurrection of the dead mean for this life, and how do relationships established here continue in it? But the Lord rejects earthly life as the point of reference, thus exposing the weakness of the Sadducees' position. They regard our present earthly life as primary and try to consider eternal life in relation to it. In that case, eternity looks like a kind of infinite extension of earthly life. The archaic beliefs of the ancient Semites emphatically avoided this idea; for them, the continuation of the family line was the image of eternity. This was the origin of the legal provision to which the Sadducees refer.

In their question, the Sadducees slyly combine their own highly abstract ideas about eternity with a rule of archaic law. They proceed from the unstated assumption that every letter of that law was dictated directly by God and contains the essence of Revelation for all time. Everything here is mistaken, and their sophisticated question therefore collapses before one simple argument from the Lord Jesus. In the parallel passage, the evangelist Matthew records Christ's rebuke: ‘You are mistaken, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.’ It is not like that at all, Christ tells the Sadducees. The main point of His reply is that eternity is not what they imagine. It is not the extension of this earthly life through time; on the contrary, earthly life in certain respects can be a likeness, a reflection of heavenly life. Precisely for this reason, by no means every institution that is necessary and meaningful in particular historical circumstances contains a seed of eternity.

Turning next to God's appearance to Moses at the burning bush, Christ says that the resurrection is real because that is who God is. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, and all are alive to Him. It follows that the source of resurrection for human beings is God Himself, not this or that phenomenon of earthly life. This is the key, central idea in the New Testament's teaching on salvation. Christ invites people to seek first God's Kingdom and His righteousness, to seek God Himself—not in some hypothetical future, but here and now. For Him, eternity is not the continuation of earthly life but the sovereign inbreaking of God's Kingdom into the human heart. This inbreaking of eternity transforms earthly life and subjects its laws to itself, as the example Christ gives shows. By earthly standards, Christ is David's descendant and cannot be greater than David himself. By the standards of eternity, however, He is Lord of all.

Luke’s brief account of Christ’s discussions with the Sadducees contains a number of very important things that the Lord reveals to us all. First of all, He says that the resurrection of the dead is a mystery that cannot be comprehended by rational means alone. Then, by recalling that God Himself calls Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the living, the Lord thereby emphasizes that the very fact of our salvation depends on God’s nature and His will. He said the same thing through Deutero-Isaiah, who insisted that God saves His people for His own sake, not because of human merit. This is important because salvation and resurrection thus appear to us as participation in the divine life, rather than merely the perpetuation of frail human existence. The Lord then reminds His listeners, not by chance, of the mystery of Christ’s divine humanity, which, though veiled, is nevertheless deeply attested by the prophets of the Old Testament. The entire conversation is therefore devoted to theosis, the phenomenon of the utmost importance to patristic theology: the human person’s reunion with the life of the Creator, which infinitely surpasses him.

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 Sadducees propose considering a situation they regard beforehand as implausible in order to mock Christ, who in their eyes is certain to lose. They are “right in their own way” if one proceeds from their own concepts, which take no account of the reality Jesus reveals. In essence, we all risk becoming like the Sadducees when we close ourselves within our habitual notions and cease to trust the Lord, who constantly opens before us the world in its immeasurable richness and diversity.

Life after the resurrection is not what the Sadducees, those ancient rationalists, represent in their parody, and so their constructions were swept away. The key words here are: to Him all are alive. Yes, life with God is unlike earthly life as we know it, but our inability to imagine it does not negate the fact that death will not reign forever. The Resurrection lies ahead precisely because the Lord is the Giver of life.

Even people who have long believed often find it strange to read that we will rise again. We cannot avoid dying, because we sin, and sin cannot enter the Kingdom of God; but we cannot avoid living for ever if we are God’s children, and God is immortal. This means that, like God, we are immortal: we are alive. The living are those who can love, those who are free.

How much hope there is for us in the words, “For to Him all are alive”: if to God we are equally alive whether we live or have died, then perhaps even after death, with God’s help, we will be able to change something in our life and repent. What matters is the vector, the direction of our life here on earth. We know nothing about what will happen to us after death, but probably, if in this life we constantly strove toward evil, it will be difficult for us there to change our direction... Yet a lifelong desire to be with God will surely lead us after death into the Kingdom, to the One toward whom we have striven all our lives. Our freedom matters to God; He waits until we ourselves direct our steps toward Him, until we ourselves turn to Him. Only such love—love that is free—can be called love.

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.

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.

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’...

What, then, does Jesus condemn the Pharisees for? For seeking prominent positions in society? But the Pharisees occupied them by right: their brotherhoods formed the core of the Synagogue in Gospel times, and they really were the most active in preaching, in teaching the Torah to both children and adults, in social service, and in missionary work, which was then experiencing a fresh upsurge. If anyone deserved places of honour, it was they. Then perhaps He condemns them for ‘devouring widows’ houses’ and afterwards engaging in lengthy prayers? Yet it can hardly have been a matter of directly violating the Torah: a deeply and sincerely religious person — as most Pharisees were — would never have dared to do such a thing, although, of course, being formally in the right does not in itself imply mercy. What, then, is the hypocrisy of which the Saviour speaks? Perhaps, strange as it may seem, it lies precisely in religiosity — not some particular religiosity of the Pharisees, but religiosity as such. Certainly, those who received revelation often turned to religious language in order to convey to God’s people what had been revealed to them. And yet the Bible is full of examples of religiosity becoming a barrier to that very revelation. That is why Jesus did not create any new religion during His earthly ministry: there was no need for one. And the Kingdom He brought into the world cannot be contained within the bounds of any religion. That is why the conflict between Christ and the Pharisees, between religion and the Kingdom, is inevitable. It is a conflict of which Jesus considers it necessary to warn everyone who chooses the Kingdom.

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.

Today, even when we have no desire to “catch Jesus” in His words and simply ask Him honestly the questions that trouble us, we still often frame those questions in an “improper” form, sharply, as an “either-or.” Thus the simple question of whether to pay taxes becomes (not for everyone, of course, but for some) the dilemma: “Should I love the state with all my soul or hate it with all my soul?”... And the simple answer that the state may lay claim only to money, never to the soul, turns into the most difficult task of “rendering to God what is God's and to Caesar what is Caesar's.” In the same way, we are ready to construct the most astonishing conjectures about “life after death” and the “state of the departed,” yet cannot understand that for God there is no death and therefore no division between the dead and the living. Why is everything so difficult for us? Perhaps we simply lack experience of God's life and the ability to look at the world through His eyes.