Are You the Good Thief or the Bad Thief?

 

'Stories of life and passion of Christ,' Gaudenzio Ferrari, 1513,
from a fresco in Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Varallo Sesia, Italy.

Who can escape the experience of the cross in their life? The richest man to the poorest, the celebrity to the average-Joe, the old to the young. Pains in mind and body, aches and heartbreak, let-downs and cutting words, stubbed toes and severe illnesses, grief and sorrow. Some get dealt harder sufferings in life, others less, but no one can escape the cross.

In this fallen world, life then is a pilgrimage from Jerusalem to Calvary. A process of moving away from comfortable ideals and preferred experiences, to some other state far from romantically rosy. It’s the way marked out for us from the beginning—from cosy womb to cold tomb. From idealised plans to reality. A reality that is sometimes severely harsh. The words of Jesus to Peter are applicable to us all in some way or other, whether read literally or figuratively:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.” (Jn 21:18)

It is easy to forget that this is basically what life is—a trek along the way of the cross to Calvary. We distract ourselves with little oases along the way, brief pauses and day-breaks, trying our hardest to pretend the cross isn’t there in our lives. We cover its splintery beams over with satin cloths. All under the impression that a meaningful and happy life is one which glosses over suffering, represses the rough jagged cross and calls it a sweet tangerine tree.

We also tend to refuse to look up at the eternal horizon that waits us past Calvary’s daunting peak where our death rests certain, preferring to pretend that day will never come as we look only to where our feet are planted in the present. A fine thing, but not when we forget the destination, nor ready ourselves for when we get there.

Thus when the weight of the cross seems to crash down upon us—and it invariably will, and more than once—forcing us to accept its reality and to trudge through life weighed down by its testing immensity, how do we cope? How will we cope? It’s not a matter to judge others on, but a considerations for ourselves. Will we cope alone? Will we cope with the help of others? What if others aren't enough? Maybe we will not cope, but Jesus will somehow get us through, as softer, kinder people at the other end who can help others in the future.

The way of the cross is inevitable, every human being must walk it. As born sinners, fallible from the get go, there are two ways we can walk through life, either as a bad thief apart from Christ, or a good thief in Christ. Thief is an appropriate symbol of our sinfulness—we steal glory from God and steal love that belongs to our neighbours and keep it to ourselves. Yet are we bad thieves, hardened sinners bent on living life on our own terms, or good thieves, redeemed sinners, trying our best to follow our God-given conscience?

Recall that Jesus was crucified with a condemned criminal on either side of him. The traditionally labelled ‘bad thief’ mocked Jesus and refused to repent, while the ‘good thief’ rebuked his fellow, exclaiming,

“Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” (Lk 23:40-42)

What was it that marked out the good thief from the bad, that led to such a difference in attitude and perspective? Externally the experience of both men was the same. They were shoved along the way of the cross, jostled out of Jerusalem, slammed onto the crucifix, nailed and left hanging in agony.

If we look at the bad thief and examine his words, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” (Lk 23:39) we see that he resented and hated his cross. He did not accept nor embrace the reality to which he was pinned to. As a result, the bad thief is angry at life, disturbed and restless, unable to come to gracious terms with his death and so he curses God and mocks Jesus, He who said, “I am… the Life.” The bad thief cannot see any redeeming light to his cross, convicted of his own rights he cannot and will not accept his powerlessness in the situation and so he refuses to let Jesus into his heart. The bad thief thus condemns himself to suffer the cross and eventual death apart from Jesus. He agonises and dies without the benefit of divine love and grace to transform his pain into meaning ripe for eternal life.

This is how we can act in life—as bad thieves. Refusing to accept on some level, any level, the reality of suffering in our life and our creaturely powerlessness to ‘save ourselves’. When the suffering is great we do not have the luxury of being able to hide from the hard reality of our pain. Some people know this terribly so. In either case, in pride, and understandably so on a human level given the profundity of certain crosses, we refuse to let God into our heart, cursing the situation and cursing the God who didn’t spare us from it. Yet Jesus didn’t crucify the bad thief, and nor does God cause us to suffer. Suffering is a part of post-Eden life. Who can adequately explain why so many bad and terrible things happen? We cannot. We only know that God is Love, and God only permits so many terrible things because He foreknows in His all-seeingness, beholding every possibility, and the interconnection between every choice and human existence and act, that in a world where the cross of everyone was obliterated except Christ's, hardly anyone, at least far fewer would come to be saved, and that in the chain of events, by the power of Christ, one person's cross can become another person's salvation.

It took being nailed to the cross for the 'good' thief to finally repent and thus be saved.

This is where we marvel at the power of grace, the gift of faith, and the unique spirit of strength and courage which is imparted by Jesus to the good thief. Here is a man who has suffered in the same way as the bad thief. He too is about to die. Yet instead of cursing life, the world, and joining in with the mighty throng who look at the cross as an emblem of shame and aversion, something to be thrown away, this criminal looks at Jesus nailed to the cross, and sees an innocent man suffering, a man filled with a love he’d never witnessed. On the cross of Jesus, from the perspective of his own cross, he beholds a love eager to forgive enemies, gentle and strong, silent and radiant—so powerful that he recognises the man crucified beside him as no mere man, but the Almighty God.

The good thief rebukes the mocking thief, accepts the suffering he is undergoing as a reality that has befallen him because of sin, and opens his heart to Jesus, desperate and confident in His forgiveness. At that point Jesus while remaining on the cross, enters the heart of the good thief, and the good thief no longer suffers on his own, but with Jesus, in Jesus, through Jesus. It is only fitting that the good thief, after letting Jesus into his sinful home, made pure by grace, asks in turn for Jesus to let him into His eternal home in heaven. Jesus is in incredible pain but is thrilled at this victory of love over a soul. The good thief let Him into his heart, and so Jesus replies, “Of course I will let you enter into my abode with me, for you let me enter yours, truly, ‘today you will be with me in paradise.’” (Lk 23:43).

What an example to follow. What a testimony to the strange and terrible beauty of suffering—which comes no matter what we do—when united with Jesus, given to Jesus, transformed in Jesus. The bad thief curses from his pain, the good thief blesses. The bad thief from the angle of his cross looks down on Jesus and resents Him for not delivering him from this suffering. The good thief looks up at Jesus from his own cross and falls in love with the One who suffers in love for him. The bad thief suffers the same physical pains as the good thief, but look at the difference between them based on their relationship with Jesus.

No matter what the nature of our cross or crosses are in life, whether a direct result of sins we have committed, or the loss of a loved one, or simply the hand that mother nature dealt us, or another tragic, even horrific event beyond our control—we walk the path of Calvary in this life, either as a bad thief or a good thief, without Jesus or with Jesus.

It is true, even non-believers can live and die as good thieves—suffering, but not bitter on the world or their situation, but tender and loving, and having the possibility of eternal salvation. It is a harder, less sure, inferior way and rarer occurrence, because nothing can compare to the explicit aid of Jesus accessed through faith, but there are examples. Such persons have implicitly accepted Jesus and the mystery of the cross in their lives through humble acceptance of their creaturely finitude and surrender to the goodness that hangs within their conscience—it’s a silhouette of the Good Lord.

Yet happy are we who truly believe in Jesus. In ourselves, we're no better than those who don't believe, in fact, often we're worse! But we have it better, we have the explicit help of grace that can help us transcend our natural default.

It doesn’t matter who, what or why we suffer, even if it’s the most heinous evil—once such suffering has come, it has come, nothing can take it away. It's a trite and condescending thing to speak otherwise. No, not even time will heal many wounds. Some wounds we will carry throughout life. We can only decide to keep it to ourselves, spitting at it and resenting our situation, becoming envious, resentful of others around us, letting our ‘nailed hands’ suffer on their own apart from divine aid; or we can decide to share our sufferings with Jesus, seeing His crucified form present within our situation and letting our ‘nailed hands’ join and meet with His. This will make us good thieves who live life like everyone else—with sufferings, but not suffering in vain and without meaning and hope, but suffering in love with purpose and the consolation of eternal bliss on our minds, where we shall meet God, and all those in heaven, face to face.

In our daily trials and the agonies of life, we can either curse or bless, be cursed or be blessed. Cursing God for not helping us—pushing Him away when it is He who suffers in us, with us, beside us; and condemning ourselves to a hell of pointless pain. Or blessing God by confessing His goodness and asking Him to remember us, to be with us, to help us in our pains. We will be delivered from writhing on the cross of life that promises no resurrection, and shall be admitted to suffer with and in Christ on His Cross that guarantees resurrection unto bliss.

We may waver between the two roles, sometimes playing the bad thief, other times the good, that's understandable given our human weakness and the weight of so many crosses, but in continual repentance and a heart that earnestly seeks to embrace the outstretched wounded hand of God’s Will in the trials of our life, we shall be walking the path of the good thief, even if in the meantime we struggle to stop grumbles escaping our lips. Once the jagged cross of Christ is kissed, venerated with the lips of the soul—a will that says, “Yes, I will pick up my daily cross and follow you”— it says in return to the soul of every good thief: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

If such a soul is us, and by God’s grace may it be, then we shall have to wait for heaven when we die, following our final agonies. Then and only then will the veil to bliss be torn. However, “today” is today—through faith, by grace, we can somehow live out paradise here below even as the crucified Lord, by virtue of His divine nature, beheld the beatific vision while He was dying on the cross.

To live out our paradise in advance is to drag the joy of the Father’s love for us in His Son, poured out as Holy Spirit, into the wounds of our pains below. Such wounds, touched by the Cross—bridge to the Trinitarian mystery—are touched with divine love and will seem hardly any different while we trudge through life down here, but when we enter heaven—praised be God, let it be—such wounds, kissed by the likeness of Christ’s, shall form the ecstasies of the angels and shall be an accidental cause of greater joy on our part forevermore.

So yes, in faith, is not our Lord saying, “Tomorrow you will be with me in paradise, because today you already are.”

How the Snatcher Got Snatched

'The Good Thief,' Titian.

The Good Thief. Sure he was converted, but at what point during the crucifixion? The answer teaches us something profound that only Jesus Christ crucified can teach us.

The Gospels are clear. Jesus was crucified between two criminals, one on his left, the other on his right. It is well known that one of the thieves insulted Jesus saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” while the other thief—termed the good and penitent thief—rebuked him saying how they deserved what they got, but “this man [Jesus] has done nothing wrong”.

The penitent thief then turned his head towards Jesus and humbly and confidently made a request, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

This is a profound expression of faith not only in the Divinity of Jesus, believing Him to be the Son of God and Saviour of the human race, but in the mercy of God to which he wholly entrusts himself by yielding to the love of Jesus—crucified beside him. It is then that Jesus replies in the affirmative, but not just saying that He will remember this man, but that He will bring him with Him to heaven. "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."

Character Profile

According to tradition the name of the Good Thief is Dismas, who is honoured as a Saint in the Roman Martyrology on March 25.[1] The name of the bad thief is supposedly Gestas.

On a side note—to whet the interest into the character of the two thieves, the apocryphal text, The Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea describes the impenitent thief Gestas as follows:

[He used to] put travellers to death, murdering them with the sword, and others he exposed naked. And he hung up women by the heels, head down, and cut off their breasts, and drank the blood of infants’ limbs, never having known God, not obeying the laws, being violent from the beginning, and doing such deeds.

The old ways of the penitent thief are a little ‘less heavy’ although they shy away from being saintly…

[He] kept an inn [and]… made attacks upon the rich, but was good to the poor — a thief like Tobit, for he buried the bodies of the poor. And he set his hand to robbing the multitude of the Jews, and stole the law itself in Jerusalem, and stripped naked the daughter of Caiaphas, who was priestess of the sanctuary, and took away from its place the mysterious deposit itself placed there by Solomon. Such were his doings.

We shouldn’t spurn such apocryphal texts, but we must take such accounts with a grain of salt. Regardless the Good Thief was a thief, hardly the model citizen.

In Matthew, what is rendered “the robbers” who were crucified beside Jesus (Mt 27:44) is the Greek word λῃστής which bears the connotations of booty, and refers to not just any robber, but a bandit, a brigand or plunderer who steals out in the open by way of violence.[2] In a way the Good Thief, whose account above makes him sort of seem like a Robin Hood figure, was the Ancient Israelite equivalent of an Australian bush ranger.

            Luke simply calls them “criminals”.

Haters' Gonna Hate...Well, until They Don't

Yet what is often forgotten or unnoticed about the figure of the Good Thief is that this thief wasn’t made into a saint from the moment he was crucified. No, for in fact the Gospels’ of Matthew and Mark clearly state that “the robbers”—in the plural— “who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way” as the crowd who ridiculed him (Mt 27:44, see also Mk 15:32b). There are no more than two people crucified with Jesus, and both are thieves (Mt 27:38; Mk 15:27; Jn 19:18). This means that during the crucifixion both thieves are having it out over Jesus—insulting Him just like everyone else.

Luke’s account is the only account that puts the Good Thief in a good light. This account of the penitent thief isn’t contradictory to the other Gospels because all Luke is doing is recording the words of a man who has been profoundly touched and converted: instantaneously and miraculously. His soul snatched with the swiftness of a thief from the clutches of the devil. A man who beforehand had been jeering at Jesus too. Yet once the Good Thief was converted he repented within, rebuked his fellow criminal for insulting Jesus—itself an act of love, defending his Lord whom he now served, and then professed his faith in Him.

The Church Father St. Ephraim (306-373 A.D.) commentates on Luke 23, stating how Jesus could have easily yielded to the request of the impenitent thief, to come down from the cross and save Himself and the two thieves. “It would have been easy for him to use a miracle to conquer anyone as a disciple. [Yet] he produced a more powerful miracle when he forced the scoffer of truth to adore him.”[3] The scoffer being the Good Thief who was converted from scoffer to adorer.

When Was Dismas Snatched?

Relying on Scripture alone, it is not possible to pinpoint with accuracy an exact moment or trigger that brought about the conversion of the Good Thief. Yet we can work out the period during which it occurred. [Tip: Skip to the next heading if you're not a fan of detailed 'why reasoning' and want to get straight to the punch].

One thing for certain is that it took place sometime after the soldiers cast lots for Jesus’ garments and after Jesus’ words: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”; and before the final words, “It is finished” and “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” (Jn 19:30; Lk 23:46).

The narrative in John flows sequentially from the moment Jesus entrusts Mary and John to each other, to the words “I thirst,” and the drinking of the vinegar which immediately precedes his final words and death. Indicating that these events happened one after the other, and in this order leading immediately up to the moment of Jesus’ death.

In Matthew Jesus’ cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou abandoned me” (27:46) also takes place in these last moments. For having said this “at once [someone] ran and took a sponge, filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink.” (Mt 27:48). Keeping in mind Jesus’ drinking of the vinegar took place just before he died.

Based on a cross-Gospel analysis what is apparent is that the Good Thief was ‘made good’ and converted sometime after Jesus said, “Father forgive them…” and before the beautiful scene where Jesus entrusts His Mother to His beloved disciple John, and vice versa.

The Sound of Silence

Thus, the conversion takes place after Jesus’ first word on the Cross, but before all of his other words. The conversion also takes place sometime after Jesus says, “Father forgive them,” and not immediately after it, because these words seem to be spoken in the first moments of Jesus’ crucifixion; and Luke gives the impression that it is after this that the barrage of insults come, and hence even after these words we can assume the ‘good’ thief remained a scoffer.

This is significant because what it shows is that the Good Thief was not necessarily converted as a direct result of Jesus’ words spoken—although those first words must have had their effect, sooner or later—but that the Good Thief was converted during a period when Jesus was silent, when “he did not open his mouth” (Is 53:7). A time when Jesus the Incarnate Word was speaking louder than speech by way of profound example: patient, meek, without a harsh word thrown back at his deriders; naked, bruised and bloody. His wounds were doing the talking, and their message was God’s love.

The Good Thief was pierced by the lance of the Holy Spirit and was brought to a sudden realisation of who it was that was nailed beside him. First, he would have stopped his scoffing. Next, perhaps he pondered silently within himself midst writhes of pain, as the Spirit changed his heart of stone to one of flesh. Finally, he heard his Lord being insulted, the one whom He previously decried, and at this point he defends Jesus, professes his guilt, and declares his faith.

His Wounds, My Wounds

 The early ecclesiastical writer Maximus of Turin (late 4^th-5^th century) captures well the cause of the Good Thief’s conversion. How it was during a period when Jesus was silently-suffering that grace worked on him until it radically changed him.

Although he sees his [Jesus’] gaping wounds and observes his blood pouring forth, he believes him to be God whom he does not recognise as guilty. He acknowledges him to be righteous whom he does not think of as a sinner. He says to that other complaining thief, “We certainly are receiving what is due our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” He understood that Christ received these blows because of others’ sins. He sustained these wounds because of others’ crimes. The thief knew that the wounds on the body of Christ were not Christ’s wounds but the thief’s; therefore, after he recognised his own wounds on Christ’s body, he began to love all the more.[4]

The same goes for us. Jesus will mean nothing to us, we will push Him out of our lives and may even insult Him and those who follow Him, unless we see in the wounds of Jesus the effect of our sins: not mere wounds that ought to be gasped at, nor wounds caused by Roman soldiers at the bequest of the Jewish authorities. But wounds we caused, which our sins caused, and which our persistence in habits we know to be bad rip open more and more—inflicting in the past on Jesus’ body, what we choose to do today against our conscience.

Yet we mustn’t stop there, for like the Good Thief we must see in the wounds of Jesus the love of a God who let Himself be hurt unto “death, death on a cross” (Phil 2:8) because He wanted to prove to us His love. This is how much He wants our company, our friendship and personality. In Jesus hangs the full weight of the punishment which should be ours because of our fallen nature and sinfulness. “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.” (Is 53:5)

Nothing... Except Jesus Christ and Him Crucified

The Good Thief came to know the love of a God who sacrificed Himself for him—yes, for he a wretched brigand! He only came to know this because of his own crucifixion, his very own sufferings and brokenness which he saw in the light of the Cross: ‘Here is a God who loves me because of my misery!’ And it was nowhere else but in the presence of Jesus Crucified, and no one else but Jesus Crucified, silently loving him, that made him realise this. Such realisation of God's living love for him made him already taste in advance the bliss of paradise in his heart before he even got to heaven.

It is only in silent prayer spent in the belief that we are present with Jesus—in an attitude of total openness to receiving His Love that flows like blood, that we too can be converted again and again, into deeper and higher states of union with Jesus, expanding in love for him as we accept and learn from Him what it means to be crucified.

But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (Gal 6:14).

By the conversion of the Good Thief Jesus is showing us that it’s not “lofty words or wisdom,” (1 Cor 2:1) any book, article, learning, studies or sermon that is going to bring us today into paradise and cleave us in union with God who dwells within. It’s going to be Christ Crucified by means of the Cross; and nothing is going to make us understand this until we find a secret place to be alone, stretch out our hands, accept our brokenness and all our wounds of sin, and cry out in bold faith just as the Good Thief did, on the saving name of Jesus.

Try it. Try it now even. Try it before you sleep tonight.

“Now… tonight, you will be with me in paradise.”

For sure, we might say like St. Paul, I live here and now this mortal life below, but “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal 1:20).

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[1] Other names include, Demas, Titus and Rakh.

[2] Bible Hub, 3027. léstés, http://biblehub.com/greek/3027.htm.

[3] Ephraim as referenced in Arthur A. Just, Jr., and Thomas C. Oden eds. Luke, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsityPress, 2003), 363.

[4] Maximus of Turin, Sermon 74.3., as referenced in Arthur A. Just, Jr., and Thomas C. Oden eds. Luke, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsityPress, 2003), 364.