NOTES for Luk 21:2-4

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.

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, 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?

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.