Today in our gospel passage we witness the final miracle of Jesus during his life as a human being on this earth.
Three men hang in front of the people, dying slow deaths by crucifixion.
Luke tells us that the people stand by, watching Jesus on the cross.
After all, they have followed him all over Galilee, listening to him, and now they want to see what will happen. What will the end of this story be?
They are the ones who have heard him say, “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you,”
and they have witnessed for themselves the healings, the blind regaining their sight, the lame leaping for joy, sinners being forgiven, demons being cast out.
They have heard Jesus teach and they have puzzled over his words that upend the world order.
“Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”
And now, in the end, it seems as if his words are only words.
Nothing has changed. The poor are still poor, the hungry are still hungry, and the enemies still have the upper hand—and they are putting Jesus to death.
The people watching who had wanted to believe and waited to see what would happen must be suffering from doubt. How could this dying man be the Messiah, God’s chosen one?
And the people who believed in him, who thought he was the one who would save them, they must have suffered from anger and a deep sense of betrayal.
How could our Messiah be dying like this? Powerless? Why would God allow this horrible event to take place?
How can this God forsaken scene have anything to do with the kingdom of God being in the midst of us?
How can this man be a king?
At least the people see that Jesus is true to his word to the bitter end. They hear him forgive his enemies even as those enemies have driven the nails into his hands and feet.
Jesus, who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” refuses to use violence to save himself from certain death.
The people listen to the leaders and the soldiers as they shout and jeer at Jesus– “Come on down now, King of the Jews! Save yourself!”
“You saved others, come on, save yourself.”
Even one of the criminals, hanging on a cross next to Jesus, manages to shout out as he gasps for breath, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”
And then the people hear the criminal on the other side of Jesus tell the first criminal off. “We indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong!”
And then the people standing by hear this second criminal say to Jesus,
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
A simple address—this thief does not address Jesus as one with power—he does not call Jesus the Messiah, or the King of the Jews, or God’s chosen one.
He simply calls on Jesus, Jesus the human being, Jesus, who is suffering just as much as he is.
“Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”
Sooner or later in each of our lives, we come into a place of suffering, of grief. We look death in the eye, realize that we are mortal, feel our mortality in our own suffering bodies, or witness the suffering of ones we love.
It is in these times of suffering that this story of the two criminals can give us guidance.
We are like those two criminals on either side of Jesus.
When we suffer, we can call out to God in anger like the first criminal.
“Aren’t you God? Then save me!”
“Save me from whatever it is that is making me suffer.”
Every one of us in this room has almost certainly prayed that prayer at some point or another in our lives.
And most of us have tried to live good lives. So we add to this prayer—“Aren’t you God? Didn’t I try to live the way you asked me to live? Aren’t you all powerful? Then save me!”
And this prayer is a natural way to respond to suffering. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who spent many years working with the dying, and exploring the stages of grief, identifies this angry, why me prayer as one of the five stages of grief.
Maybe someone here knew David Bailey, a local man who recently died at the age of forty-four. He was a good Christian, whose parents were missionaries. He and his wife were Presbyterians. They lived in Stafford County. When David’s headaches started fourteen years ago, he and his wife had two young children. He was in the prime of his life.
His headaches quickly became so horrible that he passed out. The doctors found and removed a cancerous brain tumor the size of a baseball. In just a few months, another tumor grew.
The doctors told David to get his affairs in order.
And David described his prayer at this time.
He got angry at God.
He shouted, “Why me, God? Why me?”
David’s prayer was similar to the angry prayer of the first criminal.
“Aren’t you God? Then save me!”
But David realized that ultimately, this angry prayer changed nothing.
So David’s prayer changed from a “Why me?” prayer, to a “What now?” prayer.
Instead of asking God to save him from the suffering, he asked God to carry him, to carry him through whatever was ahead.
“Carry me, God.”
And God did carry David through fourteen more years of life.
David described it this way. “Cancer showed me how precious the gift of time is. It forced me to overcome some fears and pursue my passion for music. It drove me to want to make a difference in the world by sharing hope.”
David’s prayer of anger became the prayer of the second criminal, a prayer of hope.
The second criminal sees before his very eyes that Jesus himself knows what it is to suffer.
He can see Jesus suffering in front of his eyes, experiencing his pain, taking his same agonizing breaths. By his very suffering, Jesus was helping me this dying man to live through his own time of suffering.
And because Jesus was present to him in his time of suffering, the dying man could pray this prayer of
hope–
“Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”
Not save me—but remember me. Remember me.
I love this word—remember.
For me it implies being brought back into wholeness, being made one again. Having been torn apart, into many pieces, through the suffering and the tragedies and sins of life, being shattered, being divided into many members, into many fleeting memories, I am no longer whole. But to remember brings everything back into a whole again. To be remembered by God restores me.
No wonder the criminal prays—“Jesus, remember me.”
“Jesus, put me back together, restore me, bring me back into wholeness.”
And now we witness the last miracle in his life as a human being on earth as we hear Jesus speak these words from the cross.
“Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
In the 21st century, we have come to understand Paradise as something that we will experience only after death, being in the presence of God and the saints.
But John Shea tells us that Jesus, a Jew, understood paradise as Jews would have understood it in the first century. Paradise, unlike our broken world, is a condition of wholeness and unity, “unity among God, humans, animals, and the earth.”
So when Jesus hears the prayer of this dying man, and says to him, “Truly, today you will be with me in Paradise,” Jesus restores this man to wholeness and unity.
At this very moment, the criminal enters into Paradise, as his consciousness shifts from a place of fear into hope, as he is remembered into unity with God, restored in unity with those he has sinned against, and brought again into wholeness with all the earth.
For us, the miracle of the cross is its place in time.
Jesus, dying on the cross, stands forever at the center of time.
As Jesus dies, he restores to life all that has been broken, dismembered, and torn asunder by our sins.
As violence reigns, and Jesus dies, he absorbs that violence, and in doing so, he reaches into the past, and gathers into himself all that has been lost, and redeems it.
And even as Jesus dies and reaches back into the past, and restores Paradise, at the same time he reaches into the future, making Paradise, wholeness, the unity of all of creation possible, not only as a future dream but as a present reality, if we choose to stand in the light of the cross.
He remembers us, he restores us, he “brings us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”
In the end, we really are saved, because now we have the potential to live in the now of God’s kingdom, even as we wait for Jesus to come again in glory.
The writer of Colossians has the last word.
“God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins……for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.”
So today, and in every day on this earth that we are granted, until we come to dwell with our King of Kings and Lord of Lords at last in his heavenly kingdom, let this be our prayer.
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Amen