I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
All Commentaries on Matthew 22:32 Go To Matthew 22
George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
He is not the God of the dead. Jesus Christ here proves the resurrection of the body by the immortality of the soul; because in effect these two tenets are inseparable. The soul being immortal, ought necessarily to be one day reunited to the body, to receive therein the recompense or punishment which it has merited in this same body, when it was clothed with it.
By this text St. Jerome refutes the heretic Vigilantius, and in him many of modern date, who to diminish the honour Catholics pay to the saints, call them designedly dead men. But the Almighty is not the God of the dead; of consequence these patriarchs, dead as they are in our eyes as to their bodies, are still alive in the eyes of God as to their souls, which he has created immortal, and which he will undoubtedly have the power of reuniting to their bodies.
The Sadducees were a profane sect, who denied the resurrection of the body, and the existence of angels and spirits, and any future state in another world: (see Acts xxiii. 8.) nor did they receive any books but the five books of Moses. Christ therefore, from a passage Exodus iii. 15, showed them that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, had still a being; because God, 200 years after the death of the last, said thus to Moses, I am the God of Abraham He did not say, (as St. Chrysostom takes notice) I was the God of Abraham Therefore these souls had a being: for the Lord would not call himself the God of those who were not at all: no one calling himself lord or king of those who are no more. (Witham)
