Mark 12:24-28: in context

The Sadducees, who deny the resurrection, have tried to trap Jesus with a riddle about a woman married to seven brothers in turn: whose wife will she be in the resurrection? Jesus tells them they are mistaken on two counts, because they know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. In the resurrection, he says, people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels. Then his proof that the dead are raised: God told Moses at the bush, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, present tense, and he is not the God of the dead but of the living. A scribe, impressed, then asks which commandment is the greatest.

Jesus roots the resurrection in a single word of tense. God said to Moses, long after the patriarchs had died, I am, not I was, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If God still calls himself their God in the present, then in some real sense they still live to him; he is not the God of the dead but of the living. The whole hope of resurrection hangs, Jesus says, on the kind of God who bound himself to these people by covenant, a God who does not let his relationship with those he loves be ended by their death. He named himself their God, and he does not become the God of corpses. That is a striking argument: the promise of resurrection is written into the very name God took for himself. And Jesus locates the Sadducees' error precisely, they do not know the scriptures nor the power of God, underestimating both what is written and what God is able to do. To limit God to what we can imagine, a God whose relationships die when people do, is to know neither his word nor his power.

Do I underestimate both the scriptures and the power of God, imagining a God whose love for me could be ended by death, when he calls himself the God of the living?