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A WORD OF ASSURANCE

Echoes from Calvary, Part 2

LUKE 23:35-43

March 4, 2007 – Second Sunday in Lent

Pastor Bob Sanders

 (audio coming soon)

On this second Sunday in Lent, as we prepare to come to the Lord’s Table, we continue in our series of messages entitled “Echoes from Calvary: The Seven Last Words of Christ.”  During Lent we gather at the foot of the cross, and listen to the final words of the One who hangs there, our crucified Lord and Savior.  We began last week with Jesus’ word of pardon, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they’re doing.”  This week we hear a word of assurance.  Our Scripture reading is Luke 23, beginning at verse 35:

Luke 23:35-43

35And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” 36The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, 37and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” 38There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.” 39One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 40But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Three Crosses

If we want to hear what the stories of the Bible are saying, we have to hear them not as stories that happened long ago to other people, but as stories about us.  We have to imagine ourselves into them.  Last week we tried to imagine ourselves into the people who nailed Jesus to the cross – the brutal soldiers, the callous religious leaders, the frightened disciples – the “them” Jesus had in mind when he prayed, “Father, forgive them…”  And the words of that old spiritual took on new meaning as we sang, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” 

Yes, we were there. 

This morning I want us to put ourselves into the shoes of this unnamed criminal, this “good thief” (as he’s sometimes called).  Hanging from his own cross under the blazing sun, he says to the One who is dying beside him, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  And unless I miss my guess, I’d say that’s pretty much what you and I are saying at the heart of every real prayer we’ve ever prayed or ever will pray: “Remember me, Jesus.  Remember me.”

There were three crosses on Golgotha that day.  Luke doesn’t name the other two who died there with Jesus, but according to an early tradition, their names were Dismas and Gestas.  We know why Jesus was there – they’d hung a sign over him that said, “The King of the Jews.”  And that drew a lot of verbal abuse from the religious leaders and the Roman soldiers.  Normally they wouldn’t be caught dead together, but now they joined in a chorus of taunts and jeers to this “king” on the cross in the middle. 

There were no signs over the other two, so we don’t know their crimes.  According to Matthew and Mark they were robbers, but Luke just calls them “criminals.”  They could have been rebels or runaway slaves, murderers or thieves (like the ones who robbed the man in the story of the Good Samaritan and left him half-dead).  Whatever they did, one of them didn’t think it was bad enough to deserve this, and he decided to take it out on Jesus.  Lifting himself up to get a breath and grimacing with pain the one named Gestas sneered:

Aren’t you the Messiah?  That’s what the sign says, doesn’t it?  Well, if you’re Him, if you’re the One, why don’tyou get us out of here?

His voice was raspy, but loud enough for Dismas, the criminal over on the other side of Jesus to hear him.  He found the strength to snap back: “Do you not fear God?” he said, defending the dying man between them.  “We are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.”

Even on the cross, Jesus was surrounded by conflict – attacked from one side and defended from the other by two men as different as they could be.  One of my favorite preachers is Barbara Brown Taylor, and she points out something I’ve noticed and maybe you have, too.  She says that people who are dying “become more who they are than they have ever been.”  Whatever they were in their earlier life – caring or crabby, hopeful or hateful, enjoyable or irritable – they become more intensely so as life nears its end.  She writes:

The approach of death seems to sap the strength they once had for pretending.  Their disguises fall away along with their defenses, until all that is left is this condensed version of themselves, in which the core of the human being is laid bare.  Some people become meaner than water moccasins, while others become almost luminous, and it is not always easy to tell ahead of time who will turn out to be whom.

Judging from Gestas’ behavior on the cross you’d have to guess he’d been a pretty bitter guy most of his life.  Maybe he’d learned early on that hoping for anything was a fool’s game, since in the end whatever he really loved would be taken from him.  Maybe he became a thief in order to steal back what had been stolen from him.  Whatever it was, he didn’t blame himself.  He couldn’t handle that kind of pain, so he blamed other people for what they had done or failed to do that made him who he was.

His death sentence was no great surprise to him.  He’d probably been expecting it most of his life.  But when it came he took no responsibility for it.  In his mind, it wasn’t his fault.  It was the judge’s fault, the arresting officer’s fault, God’s fault.  It was the fault of the man hanging beside him who, if he really was the Messiah, should have been able to get them out of this mess.

Dismas, on the other hand, seemed to know what he had done to wind up where he was.  “We are getting what we deserve for our deeds,” he said.  He had a sense of justice, even if that justice had come down pretty hard on him, and he owned up to his guilt.  You don’t see that very often, then or now – the courage to take responsibility for one’s actions.  So while Gestas spends his final moments blaming and cursing everything in sight, Dismas opens his arms and accepts the consequences. 

But first, he turns to the One hanging next to him, and asks for a small favor:

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 

Not, Save me and get me down from here!  Not even, Take me to heaven with you, Jesus.  Just, “Remember me.”

He knew death was where he was headed and what he deserved.  But he sensed Jesus might be going on further than he would.  And maybe, just maybe, Jesus wouldn’t forget him.  Maybe he could live on in Jesus’ memory.  That’s all he was asking – to be remembered. 

But he was granted a great deal more.  “Truly I tell you,” Jesus said, “today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Today.  Not after a while or one day centuries down the road when God finally brings his kingdom to earth.  Today.  Before the sun goes down.  Jesus is going home.  Back to his heavenly kingdom, to Paradise.  And he’s bringing someone with him.  Not just a memory, but someone who will be alive just as Jesus is alive.  Today, says Jesus.  You and me.  In Paradise.

Three Truths

This story says three very important things to me, and I don’t want you to miss them.  First, it says that even in the worst situations of this life, it’s possible to be with Jesus right here, right now.  What situation in our lives could be worse than hanging on a cross?  But our God is not the kind of God who sits on high, aloof from the struggle and pain.  Our God gets mixed up in the mess of this life as it is here on earth – the sickness and pain, the sorrow and depression, the loneliness and fear.  Our God comes all the way down.  We don’t wait to meet him in some other-worldly Paradise.  Jesus finds us in whatever this-worldly hell we may have fallen into, whatever deserved or undeserved torture we’re enduring, whatever cross we’re nailed up on. 

Another favorite preacher of mine, William Willimon, puts it this way:

With this God, it gets very, very dark, and then we open our eyes and see that God is there, beside us.  With this God, things go from bad to worse, from worse to awful, and then there, next to us, God is hanging with us, on a cross.

When you’re forced because of your faith to hang on some cross, you’ll be hanging with Jesus.  There and then Jesus says to you as he said to the thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Not one day when everything is all better.  But this day when everything is all wrong.  Paradise is being with Jesus – wherever he finds us.

That’s the first thing this story says to me.  The second is this: whatever we have done in our lives, however we have lived, wherever we’ve slept, however we’ve treated people, God’s grace is stronger, God’s mercy is more powerful, and God’s forgiveness reaches out to embrace us. 

There’s so much in this story we don’t know.  We don’t know if this criminal confessed his sin.  We don’t know if he repented.  We don’t know how much he really knew about Jesus.  We don’t know if he prayed the sinner’s prayer or understood the Four Spiritual Laws.  We don’t know anything except that he asked Jesus to remember him if he ever got to his kingdom – and Jesus gave him far more than he asked for or deserved.  Jesus loved him.  Jesus forgave him.  Jesus took him home to meet his Father.  And right now up in heaven there’s this grinning ex-con named Dismas – a guy who knows more about grace than all the preachers and theologians who’ve ever lived.  “No one else would have given him a prayer.  But in the end, that’s all he had.  And in the end, that’s all it took.”

And one more, the third thing.  Imagine we’re watching a movie of this scene.  The camera zooms in and the crowds of people, the shouting leaders and jeering soldiers they all fade out of sight, until all we see is Jesus and this one man.  In the middle of this cosmic battle it’s now strangely quiet – as though nothing else matters to Jesus except this one man, as though the greatest drama of history comes down to just one ordinary, run-of-the mill criminal.

You get the feeling, don’t you, that somehow in all of this Jesus is still in control.  Even on the cross.  Especially on the cross.  It’s like the only thing that matters to Jesus is that the kingdom of God grows by one person.  There on the cross, his hands nailed to wood, Jesus reaches out one more time.  It’s all he cares about, all he’s ever cared about.  You, the leper.  You, the despised tax collector.  You, the one caught in adultery.  The one filled with terror and hopelessness.  You who think you’re not good enough for God to love.  You’re the only one Jesus cares about right now.  “You and me,” Jesus says, “in Paradise together.  Right now.”  Jesus’ whole ministry and mission, his reason for coming to earth and for going to that cross comes down to this: to bring people into the kingdom of God.  Just one more.  Just one more.

Jesus Christ remembers you, remembers me, just as surely as he remembered this criminal, and he welcomes us to his Table not in some impersonal, churchly way.  He welcomes us by name.  Because, believe it or not, he wants us with him.  Because as far as Jesus is concerned, Paradise wouldn’t be the same without Dismas, without you and me, without every last one of us. 

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

This is the word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God. 

Barbara Brown Taylor, Home Another Way (Cowley, 1999), pp.91f.  I’m indebted to her for this and several other insights in this sermon.

William H. Willimon, Thank God It’s Friday (Abingdon, 2006), p.21.

Max Lucado, No Wonder They Call Him the Savior (Multnomah, 1986), p.37.

From a sermon by the Reverend Dan Baumgartner, “…With Me in Paradise,” preached on March 30, 2003 to Bethany Presbyterian Church, Seattle Washington.