Today with Me

By Debie Thomas

The following is a reflection I gave at my church on Good Friday, looking at the two thieves who were crucified alongside Jesus. 

           What happens when a dream dies?  When something you've longed for, and pursued in good faith, fails to materialize?  A meaningful career, maybe. Physical or mental healing, a nourishing marriage, a certain kind of intimacy with God. What happens when you're forced to let these go?

           This is a story of two crushed dreams. Two thieves, guilty of the same crime, condemned by the same Empire, and facing the same death. Two thieves looking at Jesus through the filter of the same crushed hope, but seeing very different things.

           According to tradition, the thief who hung to the right of Jesus — the one who defended him — was named Dismas. The thief to the left — the one who insulted Jesus — was named Gestas. We don't know specific details about their crimes, but the fact that they died by crucifixion in first-century Jerusalem tells us enough.

           The Romans reserved crucifixion for the most extreme political crimes. Jesus was crucified because he called out the injustice of the Roman Empire, and proclaimed God's counter-kingdom.  If Dismas and Gestas were condemned to the same type of death, it's because they were revolutionaries.  Freedom fighters. Traitors. Like the thorn-crowned man dying between them, they dared to dream of a better world.

           Though we don't know the specifics, we do know that their particular dream — whatever it entailed and whatever crimes it led them to commit — didn't survive the Roman crosses of that first Good Friday. Whatever change they'd longed for with all their hearts failed to come.

           The first voice in the story is the voice of Gestas, the thief on the left. "Aren't you the Christ?" he mocks Jesus in a voice calculated to humiliate.  "Save yourself and us!"

           It isn't hard to distance myself from this voice. Indeed, Christian tradition makes it too easy: we call Gestas the "bad" or the "unrepentant" thief.  But if I'm honest, I have to confess that I know Gestas' voice rather well. I know what it's like to mock what I don't understand. I know what it's like to mask my vulnerability with contempt.

           Gestas' voice is the voice of bitterness.  Gnarled and dessicated — it's the voice that speaks when hope dies and our hearts harden, making it impossible for new life to take seed and grow.

           We've been there, most of us. We've looked to our Messiah to behave in ways we recognize, only to have him appall us with his strangeness.  We've asked him to enact particular kinds of salvation on our behalf, and received silence in return.  Like Gestas, we've faced disillusionment, and in our anger, we've turned on Jesus: "You're not the God I thought you were. You must be no God at all."

           The second voice in the story belongs to Dismas, the thief on the right.  He, too, struggles with disillusionment.  His dream, too, has been nailed to a cross. But unlike Gestas, who refuses to surrender his dream, Dismas allows his to die. He admits that the kingdom he was striving for was an illusion, so he turns to Jesus and asks the only thing left to ask: "Remember me when you come into your kingdom."

           Remember me. Not, "Get me down from this cross." Not, "Fix my life."  Remember me.  Hold my story in your heart, so it won't be lost. Allow me to live on in you. Consider that I also dreamed of a kingdom; I just didn't know until this moment that the aching heart of my dream was you.

           One reason I cherish this story is because it's big enough for both voices. Both Gestas and Dismas get their say, and Jesus, who hangs between them, hears them both. He tolerates the terrible tension between despair and hope, absorbing both into his heart, as he still does, today. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, "One cross makes a crucifix. Three crosses make a church."

           The other reason I love this story is because its third voice — the voice of Jesus — offers a hope so paradoxical, it transforms our suffering, and changes our lives: "Today," Jesus says to Dismas, "You will be with me in Paradise."

           In the Bible, paradise is depicted as a garden, a place of ancient wisdom and ceaseless beginnings. A place where seeds fall into the earth and die only to live again, a thousand times over. A place of sweet, uninhibited  communion with God.

           What does it mean to enter paradise while hanging on a cross?  In his powerful book, Tattoos on the Heart, Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle notes that ancient monastics — when faced with hopelessness and despair — would recite Jesus' promise as a mantra: "Today…with me… Paradise." As if to say, God's kingdom is far more than a promise for the distant future.  It's also here, now, within  and among us.

           He's not the God we thought he was. But he's a God who remembers us. A God whose kingdom is a fragrant, life-giving garden. We can entrust ourselves to the God he is.

           Today. With Me. Paradise.