NOTES for Luk 20:27-44
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.