Luke 23:35-43
The feast of Christ the King was
created in 1925 by Pope Pius XI – not that long ago in terms of
Church history. And it's interesting to read the words of Pius when
the feast was promulgated: he made the Feast because the people of
the day had “thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their
lives” and “these had no place in public affairs or in politics.”
The pope went on to claim “that as long as individuals and states
refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really
hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.” I guess he
could have written those words today and they would still apply.
But I'd like to focus on today's
gospel, in which the so called Good Thief acknowledges that Jesus is
a king.
The story of the good thief has
captured the imagination of artists and poets down through the ages.
In the fourth century, in the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus, he was
given the name “Dismas” which comes from a Greek word meaning
dark or night – the same root as the word “dismal”. He was
also declared a saint by popular acclamation and is honored as such
today in the Western church on March 25th.
But it's interesting that we only hear
of Dismas in the Gospel of Luke. In Mark and Matthew, we are told
that Jesus was crucified between two other persons – in Mark they
are called “insurgents” or “rebels” and in Matthew,
“robbers”. In John, it says that Jesus was crucified between
two others, but doesn't say anything about them. But it is only in
Luke that we have this story, and it fits with the overriding concern
of Luke – to show that God is merciful and has a special concern
for those who are at the margins, those who are outcasts, those who
have lost all hope.
Dismas was probably in no sense
“good”. He is being crucified; the Romans didn't just crucify
anyone; you had to be guilty of sedition, you had to be a traitor –
that was why Jesus was crucified. Or you had to commit some
horrendous crime or be a habitual criminal. Dismas himself admits
this; he tells the other thief that they deserve what is happening.
If Dismas was a rebel against the Romans, he would certainly not
express that he deserved death for this. Dismas isn't one of these
people that blames society or his parents or his circumstances for
his crimes; he knew what he was doing and he accepted the
consequences once he was caught. Some of the early Fathers of the
Church said that in addition to being a thief he was a murderer. He
knows he's going to die and knows that he deserves to die.
Sometimes we focus on the mercy of
Jesus in this story. But think about how it looked to Dismas. He
knew enough about Christ to proclaim that he was a good man who did
not deserve crucifixion. He probably knew that many people had
recognized Jesus as the Messiah, the one who would save Israel and be
the just ruler who had been expected. He knew about the following
that Jesus had attracted, and the expectations of all those people.
And yet, was this Jesus, dying on a cross, all those hopes and
expectations for nothing. What possible reason did Dismas have to
think that Jesus could do anything for him?
But somehow Dismas calls out,
“Remember me when you come into your kingdom”. To me this is the
most remarkable thing about this story. Dismas did not know that
Jesus was God, that Jesus would rise from the dead – facts that
bolster our own faith. Dismas may have had a vague belief in the
afterlife; if he was on the side of the pharisees he believed in
resurrection of the body; if he was on the side of the Sadducees, he
did not. Most people believed that after you died you lived on in
Sheol, the hebrew name for what the Greeks called Hades. This was a
place underground where you lived in sort of a limited way, ghostly,
without pleasure or pain. And that was not something religion
taught; it was just part of what people in those ages believed,
Jewish or not. Against all evidence, against all reason, Dismas
threw his lot in with Jesus; his one bit of hope in the midst of
hopelessness was that Jesus really was the Messiah, he really was the
one who would be King of Kings and Lord of Lords, as the prophets had
foreseen.
So Dismas seems to be a hero of faith.
And maybe this criminal from 2000 years ago can teach us something.
Because we live in an increasingly secular age, where the
supernatural recedes from us, where science tells us that we can't
say anything about God or life after death because science can't
prove it; our age tells us that it is foolish to believe, and that if
you have to believe, keep it to yourself. And compared to older
times when most people in our country shared certain common beliefs,
it's harder to have real faith, the kind that moves you to go against
the grain, the kind that lives in the knowledge that we are only on
the front porch of the real life awaiting us.
I think Luke tells us the story of
Dismas because he wants us to see the essentials every Christian must
go through; to admit one is a sinner in need of saving; to
acknowledge publicly that Jesus is Lord; and to ask for mercy. And
Luke wants us to see that as long as we can draw a breath, we can
access that Mercy. And once we do this, we too can hear those words,
“Today you will be with me in paradise”.
