NOTES for Mar 12:18-27

One of the main problems for a person seeking the Kingdom is that he cannot imagine what it is like. He cannot, and yet he tries with all his strength to do so, extending the laws of the fallen world to the Kingdom and then being surprised at the picture he has drawn for himself. Opponents of any revelation then present such humanly drawn pictures of the Kingdom as an argument against those who believe in revelation. This is understandable: for the most part the pictures turn out very strange, at times even absurd, so that no reasonable person will believe in them. Such pictures are easy and convenient to criticize; no one can argue with that criticism, even if he wants to, so the critic can feel like the winner. True, the arguments put forward by the critics usually have nothing to do with the reality of revelation, and in particular with the revelation of the Kingdom, but in the heat of disputes and discussions even the defenders of divinely revealed truths sometimes forget this.

So it was in the Gospel era in the traditional disputes between Pharisees and Sadducees about the resurrection. The Sadducees did not believe in the general resurrection, and they put forward arguments to the Pharisees like the one they presented to Jesus. What we have here is a scheme that came from relationships among people in the fallen world, transferred to an entirely different world and different relationships, to the relationships of the Kingdom. It is no accident that Jesus tells the Sadducees that they know neither "the Scriptures nor the power of God." The point is not that the Sadducees knew the sacred texts poorly; the texts themselves were in fact well known to them.

They did not understand something else: the logic of God's action and the logic of the Kingdom, insofar as it is even possible to speak here of logic in the usual sense of the word. In the Kingdom everything is different. People there do not return to the former life of the fallen world with its laws, but receive a new quality, becoming more like angels than like fallen people. This new life does not fit into theological schemes created on the basis of knowledge drawn from the fallen world. That is what the Savior is trying to explain to the people listening to Him.

Every day we manage to talk about everything. We manage to talk with a neighbor, a colleague, relatives; we manage to share our opinion, to argue. And behind the abundance of noise that fills each day, we do not even have time to think properly about the meaning of what we say. If we pay attention, we will see that on almost every question where our opinion is required, we answer based on our principles and ideas. We easily decide what must be done, what must be answered. But we do not always even manage to understand the substance of the question. We trust ourselves very much. And we often make mistakes.

The experience of constant prayer to which Christ calls us is precisely the experience of pauses, the skill of giving God time to say something important at that very moment. And the voice of Christ is precisely the voice of meekness, the voice of infinite patience and mercy. By letting Christ into our life, we acquire reverence before His presence. Through us Christ can answer a person. He can say something more important than the answer itself. We need to learn to have time to pray before giving an important answer, and we will see what meekness He will give us. We will see how, in this brief prayer, He helps us rely on Him and answer a person with His love and His attention.

The Pharisees could not catch Christ in His answers because He always prayed in His heart and stood before the Father. And He answered meekly in such a way as to show the person who asked what mattered most. They could not catch Christ in His answers because in His words there is always a call to look at the works of God. There is always a call to pray and ask for the gift of meekness.

The Sadducees described in Mark's Gospel, by doubting the resurrection of the dead, thereby doubt, as Jesus shows in His answer, the very "power of God," His Kingdom. In response to the purely speculative form of the Sadducees' question, Jesus simply points out that the question has been framed incorrectly, and that projecting onto the world to come our earthly social institutions connected with death is absurd. "He is not God of the dead, but God of the living."

The Scriptural text that God is not God of the dead but of the living is cited by Jesus as proof of the inevitability of the general resurrection, and not only His own. If we consider this verse in its immediate meaning, we will find nothing of the kind in it: it means only that God is the God of life, not the God of death, and that He leads a person by the path of life, delivering him from death.

Usually this was understood in the context of a person's earthly life: it was assumed that God could, for example, deliver a righteous person from a deadly danger threatening him, including in order to demonstrate to skeptics that He is truly ready to intervene in events and support His witness.

At the same time, however, it was taken for granted that all people are mortal, and even a righteous person who has been granted a happy and long life will still one day die. Such a death was and is called "natural," and although in fact few receive it, in the Old Testament books it was considered the standard, so to speak, the "ideal death": a person lived the life of a righteous man and departed peacefully, leaving an inheritance to his children, whom he had, of course, already had time to raise as righteous as he himself was. Later the righteous awaited resurrection, but this was an event separate from their earthly life.

Jesus, however, says that death is not natural by definition: for God is the source of life and life itself. He did not create death; it became the consequence of the fall, which distorted creation. Against such a background, resurrection is not something accidental, not an ordinary miracle of God that nevertheless might not have happened. It is part of that plan of universal salvation and transformation of creation whose culmination was the coming of the Messiah.

In God's Kingdom there can be no death precisely because it is God's Kingdom, and life, every earthly life, has its foundation in the eternity of this Kingdom. Life can have no natural, physical sources, although it can and does have a natural, physical projection. Life itself is a spiritual process, and what in our world limited by space and time is perceived as a short stretch of time abides in the eternity of the Kingdom as the fullness, revealed to one degree or another depending on the spiritual quality of the life lived, of a concrete person who will remain there forever.

Or will not remain, if there was nothing in that person's life from the Kingdom and from that breath of God with which it is permeated. Resurrection is not simply a return to life, but a return to life in all its fullness, in the fullness of the Kingdom. That is why it can turn out for a person to be either joy or suffering. And what will await him in eternity depends only on the choice the person himself must make here, in this life.

It may seem strange: why does Jesus, knowing that His death is near, enter into apparently unnecessary arguments and disputes, and allow Himself to be provoked? After all, the Pharisees and Herodians were not driven by a thirst to find the truth. Likewise, when the Sadducees asked how the law of levirate marriage, which they had so cleverly interpreted (Deut. 25:5-6), would be reflected in the life to come, they only wanted to laugh at Jesus, since they did not believe in the resurrection. We do not know whether Jesus' answers satisfied the Pharisees and Sadducees, but they undoubtedly made an impression on a scribe standing nearby. The question of the greatest commandment in the law certainly troubled this man, and Jesus' answer drew from him a sympathetic response. Jesus reduces all the commandments of the law (not only the Ten Commandments, but all the rest as well, which the scribes counted as 613 in the Old Testament) to the two most important ones: love for God and love for neighbor. This is also the answer to the previous questions and to every later question throughout Christian history: how should one act rightly in this or that case? Christ answers us with precisely these words. And when, reading the Gospel, we see that here we are on Jesus' side, when we answer with the scribe's words, "Well said, Teacher; You have spoken the truth," that means that Jesus' words apply to us as well: "You are not far from the Kingdom of God."

Today's passage is devoted, as we will soon see, to the theme of Tradition and to how differently different people can make use of it depending on their intentions. This passage consists of three dialogues that the Savior conducts with different interlocutors.

The first of them (vv. 13-17) is plainly provocative in character. The question of whether it was permissible to pay taxes to the Roman authorities, under whose rule Palestine then was, was usually raised by representatives of the most radical part of the Synagogue of that time, whom the Gospel calls "Zealots," that is, "the zealous." These people held views of the Kingdom of God not very different from those that were generally accepted in the times of Joshua and the Judges. For them, the Kingdom of God and Roman power in Palestine were incompatible things. They considered armed struggle against Roman rule a religious duty for every believing Jew, and the payment of taxes to Roman authority a violation of the Law. To all that has been said, one need only add that all who looked at things less radically, even if they were their fellow believers, were considered by the Zealots to be apostates and enemies of the faith, deserving death. The question about taxes, asked of Jesus publicly, in a crowd where both Zealots and secret agents of Roman power were certainly present, placed the One answering in an obviously losing position: to answer "yes" meant bringing upon Himself the wrath of the Zealots; to answer "no" was equivalent to a state crime in the eyes of the Romans, for under Roman laws public calls to refuse payment of taxes to the lawful authority were treated as rebellion.

The second question (vv. 18-27) most of all resembles a problem from a theology textbook, or one of the traditional "hard questions" of its time that opponents of faith in the resurrection used against believers. Of course, to this question, as to all similar questions in all times, there existed an answer, and perhaps more than one, well known to everyone who had received the corresponding education. But what was known about Jesus was precisely that He had not studied theology, and it was all the more interesting to those asking the question what this, as it appeared to them, ignorant man from Galilee would answer.

The third dialogue (vv. 28-34) was caused, evidently, not by a desire to catch the Teacher in His words, but by a real desire to understand what He thought about the Law. Apparently the questioner understood that this astonishing Man truly had to understand something important and central in the Law, and he wanted to learn what it was. And Jesus, in reply, refers him to those traditional answers that were perfectly well known to the questioner himself. It is interesting that in this answer only the first part, speaking of love for God, has a direct correspondence in the text of the Law (Deut. 6:4-5). The second part of the commandment is a formula of rabbinic tradition that in Gospel times had already become generally accepted. And in this case Jesus confirms Tradition by His own authority.

In neither the first nor the second dialogue does He do this. Of course, in these cases too the questioners appeal to Tradition, but here the matter evidently has more to do with abuse of Tradition than with relying on it. This is no surprise: authentic Tradition always reflects the experience of real, living communion with God preserved in the memory of the community. But if the goal turns out not to be communion with God but something else, for example the desire to catch an opponent in his words or to assert oneself at the expense of one's interlocutor, the spirit of Tradition disappears, and only its empty, dead form remains, giving nothing except support for equally empty, dead religiosity and human pride.