It was still Tuesday of Passion Week — the most crowded day on the calendar of Jesus’ final week — and one group of challengers was left standing on the Temple Mount. The chief priests, the scribes, the elders, the Pharisees, the Herodians had all taken their swing and missed. Now the Sadducees stepped up, confident they’d saved the best for last. They walked away corrected. But right behind them came a very different kind of man, and to him Jesus said some of the most hopeful — and most sobering — words in the Gospel: “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
A convenient theology
The Sadducees were few in number but large in reputation — wealthy, influential, and famously arrogant. They held to only the first five books of the Bible, and they denied the resurrection. No afterlife, no judgment, no rewards, no penalties. And if that sounds bleak, notice how convenient it is: if there’s no accountability to come, then you can love God with your spirit and do whatever you want with your body. It’s a 2,000-year-old idea that still preaches at lunch tables today — “I love the Lord, it’ll all work out” — while life goes a direction that never bows to Him.
Here’s the gentle correction underneath the whole passage: God’s grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. He meets you exactly where you are — in any philosophy, any religion, any season — but He loves you too much to leave you there.
The resurrection is real
The Sadducees came with a riddle they’d clearly used to win debates: a woman married seven brothers, one after another; in the resurrection, whose wife will she be? Jesus’ answer is bracketed on both ends by one word — “mistaken.” You started mistaken and you’re ending mistaken. “You are mistaken,” He said, “because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God.”
Then He took them back to a story every Jewish child knew — the burning bush — and showed them something they should have seen the whole time. God said to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Not “I was.” By then those men had been dead for centuries — and God still called Himself, in the present tense, their God. “He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.” The resurrection isn’t a late idea tacked onto the New Testament; it’s woven into the oldest pages of Scripture.
And the life to come isn’t just this one continued. Paul says our mortal bodies will “put on immortality” — changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, into something that never wears out. How kind of God not to take us as-is, still bound for the heart attack or the cancer or the slow fade. We’ll know each other; we’ll have conversations and adventures on a new earth. Even our relationships are transformed: Jesus said we’ll be “like the angels,” belonging fully to the Lord. The great mistake is thinking the next life will be just like this one. The greater mistake is thinking this life won’t affect the next one at all.
The one thing that matters most
One scribe had been listening — really listening. He’d watched Jesus knock every challenge out of the park, and instead of another trap he asked an honest question: of all the commandments, which is first? Jesus answered with the words Israel recited every morning and every night: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Then He added a second, inseparable from the first: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Two questions fall out of that. Not just “is God important to you?” — most of us would say yes — but “how important?” All your heart, or some of it, with the rest quietly given to things you love too much? And then the harder half: your neighbor. Scripture uses the same word for loving people that it uses for loving God — to welcome them, care for them, hold them dear. Not just the easy people; even sinners love those. The neighbor is whoever is near you: the cashier, the server, the person in your seat. You cannot say you love God and refuse to love people. “He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” In fact, love fulfills the whole law — if you truly love someone, you won’t murder, steal, covet, or betray them. You won’t have to think about the rules; love keeps them for you.
Close isn’t in
The scribe answered wisely, and Jesus told him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” What an encouragement. And what a caution. Because close isn’t in. Your feet can be right on the threshold of eternity and you’re still outside. It’s possible, as one writer put it, to be within an inch of heaven and go to hell.
It’s one thing to agree with God; it’s something else to receive from Him. You can admire Jesus, out-argue your friends about theology, even nod along to every word here — and still never have crossed over. The good news is that crossing over was never about being smart enough or good enough. You cannot outsmart Jesus; everyone on the Temple Mount tried and failed. You cannot out-Scripture Him. And you cannot out-sacrifice Him — which is exactly why you don’t have to. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The kingdom isn’t earned by works; it’s received by faith in what He has already done.
So the question the whole passage leaves in your hands is simple and searching: not are you close, but are you in? Have you received the gift of God, which is eternal life? Don’t settle for near.
This article is drawn from the message “Close But Not Quite” (Mark 12:18-34), part of our study through the Gospel of Mark at Calvary Chapel Star. Watch the full message on our YouTube channel.
