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.