God of our journey, you lead us through the green pastures of Palm Sunday’s hopeful celebration when all is joyful and well–being assured. You also lead through the valley of the shadow of Good Friday when loss casts a fearful shadow of pain and despair. You rode the colt of peace and hung on a cross of sacrifice to demonstrate the power of love. May we be transformed by that cross, to follow you faithfully in days of hope and nights of loss, for you lead us as the God of peace Whose love has won all. AMEN.
Growing up I remember one particular show, it seemed like our TV was always tuned to it on the weekends – ABCs Wild World of Sports – the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat…
We all love the thrill of victory. That’s how Palm Sunday starts.
Jesus entering Jerusalem riding on a colt. Crowds waving, praising God, spreading their clocks on the ground before him.
The thrill of hope was there.
"Teacher, order your disciples to stop." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out."
It almost seemed like the stones were shouting that day.
But then, hope turned to tragedy, days later in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is arrested. Brought to trial. A new crowd shouts to crucify him and he is led to his death on the cross.
What looked like victory seemed to end in the agony of defeat. Some disciples scattered, save for the women disciples and Joseph of Arimathea.
But even with this shift from joy to fear, even at the worst of moments, the Gospel of Luke gives a surprising voice (like the Good Samaritan, Prodigal Son and other stories…), criminal #2 in our passion story. The so called Good Thief who responds to Jesus hanging next to him.
One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding Jesus and saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." He replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise."
Imagine hearing the Passion Story of Jesus from the thief himself, the criminal who hung with Jesus on the cross. (The award-winning religion writer and reporter Peter Steinfels imagines such a conversation in an essay in Commonweal [March 28, 2008]): Is the story true? The author imagines the good thief’s reply:
“And so I was—and so I am [in Paradise]. Luke may have patched my grammar and improved my wording. Nonetheless, he had the story right. That’s what I said, that’s what Jesus said. Believe me, I’m not complaining.
But I still feel uncomfortable about the misunderstanding of exactly what I did there, hanging on that cross, just minutes—it seemed like centuries—before dying.
I’m not talking about all the fanciful legends woven around my fifteen seconds of fame. Going down in history, for instance, as the Good Thief, when thief was hardly the word for it. We didn’t just rob. We assaulted, we murdered. We weren’t just thieves. We were bandits, brigands, outlaws, and cutthroats. Revolutionaries, too—or so we liked to think. When your country is occupied, you can justify about anything.
Being whitewashed as a Good Thief was the least of it. Imaginative folks eventually made up names for me, Joathas or Dismas, the good guy on the right, and Maggatras or Gestas for the bad guy on the left. They concocted stories. It was told that as adults or maybe even as children we had crossed paths with Jesus.
But none of that had anything to do with what was written in the Gospels and especially in Luke. As I said, he had the words more or less right. It’s the interpretation that’s a problem.
Get the picture, please. We’re beaten, bloodied, and gasping for breath. People are jeering at this guy in the middle. It seems he has called himself the messiah or savior or king of the Jews, something like that. They put an inscription, “King of the Jews,” over his head. So show your stuff, they shout. Then my fellow outlaw joins in.
I tell you the truth. I had never heard of Jesus. Of messiahs, of restored kingdoms, of Davidic kings—that was different. All my life, I had heard such talk. But Jesus? He must have created a stir, gained a following, angered the authorities. Why else would he be bleeding and choking to death here between us? Beyond that, I knew nothing.
Was he the messiah, was he king of the Jews, did he have a kingdom? Or was he a poor fool? Did it matter?
When my mother was dying, I knelt next to her. She would close and open her eyes. “I see Elisha,” she would say. “I see a chariot without a horse. I see streams of water.”
“Yes, mother,” I would answer. “I think Elisha is coming. Yes, there is a horse. Yes, there are streams of water.” Did it matter?
So when the crowds jeered at this dying man and the soldiers did, too, and my comrade in crime thinks he is honoring his last minutes by adding to their taunts, well, I just couldn’t help myself.
“Jesus,” I said, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Maybe that would comfort him, dull the pain, combat the despair. Really, I didn’t know.
People have thought that I was making a great confession of faith. They have said that I knew in a flash all that this man I’d never seen before had been endlessly preaching and explaining to his followers. It wasn’t like that at all.
Read Luke’s words carefully and you’ll see. It was no act of faith. It was just a bit of decency. It won me paradise all the same.”
In an act of simple decency in the middle of horror & agony, in speaking for justice and mercy among the merciless, in seeing light in the darkness of hate, Paradise opens on that Friday afternoon — the kingdom of God that Jesus reveals in both his life and in his death takes hold.
The “good thief” is one of the saints of Luke’s Gospel: the poor, the marginalized, the unimportant who possess the openness of heart to recognize the love of God in their midst. In imitating Christ’s mercy, in taking up his work of reconciliation, in struggling to be salt for the earth and light for the world, we profess our belief that Paradise not only exists in the future but exists now, hidden in the present — and Jesus promises to be with us in Paradise, not just after our own deaths, but today, in this very moment, in the Paradise we open up in own time and place through our own bits of decency.
May Jesus remember you and me when we give our bits of decency & mercy in the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat in the events of our lives today. Amen.
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