Only twice in my time as a priest did I have someone getting really all upset during Bible study, and one time was while studying the passage of the Gospel we have just heard. This man who got all upset was one of the kindest person I’ve known but, for a reason I couldn’t understand at the time, he couldn’t let go of the fact that this passage of the Gospel must have been inauthentic, that it was all a made up story by Luke. Well, he had a point in the sense that indeed, only Luke tells us about whom we have come to call “the good thief” and his last minute repentance on the cross. Matthew and Mark mention that Jesus was crucified with “other robbers who reviled him”, John does not even talk about any of them. We know though that each Gospel differs a bit from the another, based on the memories and testimonies each evangelist had access to. If you remember from what we talked about in the past months, there are actually a lot of stories that are unique to Luke: For example, the parable of the Good Samaritan, or the parable of the Prodigal Son. Yet I have never heard anyone claiming that Jesus never told these stories, they are actually some of the most beloved. As for the passage we have just heard, we have very good reasons to believe it is authentic: it fits all of the themes of the third Gospel about compassion, forgiveness and justice, and it perfectly fits the character of the Jesus described by Luke who welcomed all the outcasts and promised them that the first would be the last. Even the little details of the story sound very close to real life. For example, when the man tells Jesus: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom”, we should realize that it’s exactly the way convicts talk to each other. When one of two friends is about to be released, the other one would always ask not to be forgotten: Write to me, call me, send me stuff, find me a better lawyer so I too can be freed soon, or just enjoy your life on my behalf so I can have a little taste of freedom through you.
And so indeed this must be exactly how it happened. But as I was reading the story more closely, thinking about my former parishioner, I started to realize that if at the time I thought that this passage was not that difficult to accept, it was probably just because I was not really paying attention, because this is one of the most outrageous, scandalous passages of the Gospel, but again, only if we pay enough attention.
So what is it that’s so shocking about it? When we read this passage on the feast of Christ the King, as we always do during “Year C”, there is of course this startling contrast between what we assume a king must be, what kings have been through the ages, and the kind of kingship Jesus presents to us. I learned at school that the idea when people choose for themselves a king is that they would give him what we call the “legitimate use of violence”, the power to make the rules and enforce them, so the people don’t live in a state of perpetual war, each tribe living by their own rules and whim, or seeking personal revenge against their enemies. Inevitably though, most of the time kings end up using most of their power for themselves and in our first reading, Jeremiah talks about those “shepherds who destroy and scatter”. So when we open Luke’s Gospel, we can be very shocked to find in Jesus a king who, from the beginning to the end, has renounced all power, coming in this world as a woman’s child and dying naked on a cross. Not only don’t we find any violence in him, but he is actually the one who becomes the recipient of all violence: abused by the religious leaders, the Roman soldiers, and even abused by the other criminals. Jesus becomes the perfect victim. His royalty is not to be found in earthly power but in the majesty of his goodness and love, in his obedience and humility. We believe that. And that is shocking enough, right? But I think there is even more to that, at least in this passage of Luke that makes it even more scandalous. In this passage of Luke, Jesus’s royalty is shown in the fact that Jesus gets to decide who has access to the kingdom he taught about throughout all his ministry, and the truth is that we may not always like the decisions Jesus makes.
Let me explain, coming back to the story of the “good thief”.
Well, first of all, it’s surprising we ended up calling the man a “good thief” because it’s really not what the text talks about. In the original Greek, Luke calls the man an “evildoer” in the same way he calls the other thief an evildoer. To my knowledge, there are no “good evildoers”. But we have a tendency to romanticize the characters of the Gospel, the prostitute with a great heart for example, or the nice tax collector (when we talked again and again about the hurt tax collectors inflicted on the poor). So you see the scandal isn’t that Jesus is granting access to the kingdom to people who are not so bad after all, after you scratch the surface, Jesus is granting access to the kingdom to people who are really bad people, people who hurt people, rob people, kill people. And yet like a king of an earthly kingdom, Jesus gets to condemn and he gets to forgive, he gets to have mercy, and in the twinkling of an eye, with just once sentence, Jesus puts behind a whole life of crimes and can invite a criminal into his paradise.
To put it in perspective, think about someone you think is beyond Redemption: To me what comes to mind immediately are the Nazis. Yet not all priests think the same as I do. You may have heard about Henry Gerecke, a Lutheran pastor, who was selected to be a chaplain to the men on trial at the Nuremberg after the war. I saw a picture of the room they used for their religious service, one of them captioned: This is where they held their Christmas service. When I saw that, it literally gave me an upset stomach, thinking about Nazis having a Christmas service. And yet there was a voice inside of me louder than that telling me: if you don‘t think Christmas isfor those kind of people, then you don’t still understand what Christmas is really about. Luke has been telling us again and again that Jesus didn’t come into the world to validate us, to spend a good time with us or to see how great we were doing. Luke tells us again and again that Jesus came to save the sinners, and it is exactly what Jesus is doing and keeps on doing. According to Gerecke, at least six of the Nazis he was ministering to came to Christ, accepting their death sentence as their repentance, coming to the realization of this man we hear about today in the Gospel: And we indeed have been condemned justly, for this is what we deserve for our deeds.
How scandalous, indeed. If this story does not give us a shiver through the spine, it’s because we just don’t get it. But indeed it’s a difficult passages, ans there are three things (at least!) that I think can help us understand better:
The first thing we could understand better is that Jesus gets the right to judge everybody not because he has all the power and it is his whim and he can just forget about every evil, no matter the hurt some have inflicted on others. On the other way around, we believe that Jesus earned this right to judge all because he suffered it all, because as we noticed earlier, he was the perfect victim. We believe, in a mysterious way, that Jesus suffered to the last drop of his blood for each one of us, because of each one of us, he was the first to be hurt by our sins, and therefore he can justly forgive.
The second thing we need to understand is that there are not two kind of people, the good and the bad. Luke looks at the cross and he sees only evildoers in the sense that we all have to enter paradise through the gate of God’s mercy, a mercy we believe as Christians was earned for us through Jesus. No one can look at themselves thinking they don’t belong with the rest of humankind because of their good deeds. We’re in the same boat: religious leaders, soldiers and prostitutes, tax collectors and criminals. This should probably invite us to have more compassion on each other too, which certainly does not mean we don’t have to hold each other accountable. Jesus does not save us from suffering and death, but through suffering and death. The man on the cross accepts his sentence. We all have to repent and make reparations.
The third thing we need to understand is that if humankind is ever divided in two it’s not, again, between the good and the bad but between those who acknowledge, or not, their need of mercy. We see in the Gospel today that Jesus’s will is for all to be forgiven, but only the one asking for forgiveness is promised paradise. We don’t know what happen to the other ones. What we learn is that in the end, we cannot make our salvation happen but it still is our decision to be saved. Jesus is the kind of king who wait for us to choose him as our King. We don’t have to accept Him, but how blessed will we be if we choose Him.