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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.