Sacred Neighbor. Sacred Self. Part 6

I love the simplicity of the story of the two thieves on the cross, as recorded by Luke. When Jesus was crucified, He was suspended between two criminals whose actions had landed them on the negative end of the Roman legal system. While their names are not recorded in Protestant canonized scripture, tradition suggests that Gestas hung to Jesus’ left, while his accomplice Dismas hung to Jesus’ right.

Gestas, who apparently did not appreciate what rock-bottom looked like, joined the onlookers and religious leaders in their heckling and hurling of insults. He used the very last of his breaths to ridicule his fellow criminal. At the end of his life, the plague of pride was stronger than his body was weak. This is why pride is the most dangerous of all our dreadful human conditions. If not put in its place as often as needed, the disease of pride will outlast our final breath.

Dismas, however, was more in tune with his own brokenness. He had accepted his own darkness and adjusted his heart accordingly. After chiding his old friend Gestas for joining in the mockery, Dismas turned toward the unknown man in the middle and simply asked that he be remembered when Jesus entered into His Kingdom that day.

This was all the thief had to contribute toward his own salvation—a simple, “Remember me, Lord.” It apparently was not a lot more complicated than that. He had nothing else to offer. After spending his life stealing and evading the criminal justice system, he spent his final hours naked, bound to a cross. He was forced to live out the literal words of the hymnist Augustus Toplady, who wrote:

Nothing in my hands I bring,

  Simply to the cross I cling.

 Naked, come to thee for dress,

 Helpless, looking to thee for grace.

Dismas must have looked at Jesus the way a vulnerable child looks at his mother. Words failed him. He had no understanding of what words to even try to assemble. What are words anyway, but a series of sounds and grunts and occasional spittle? All Dismas had was the posture of his heart—a broken and contrite spirit which spoke, “I know I have little to offer you. Look at me. I am naked. I am broken. I am vulnerable. I am flawed and confused. But please… please don’t reject me… Please accept me, despite myself… Please make me your own.”

A great mother recognizes that look and would never reject a child who offered it to her… nor would God. As George MacDonald wrote, “Every pain and every fear, yes, every doubt is a cry after God. What mother refuses to go to her child because he is only crying, not calling her by name?” When my boy fell and scraped his knee, I didn’t wait to ensure he knew everything he had done wrong to cause the accident… No. Dad heard his tears and came running with ointment.

The thief knew nothing of Jesus nor His teachings. He had nothing to hang any sort of pride or self-reliance on. He had no church to join nor any next steps to take. He had no bread to receive nor any wine to take, no doctrines to sign. He had no money to tithe nor any water in which to be baptized. He couldn’t raise his hands and repeat a prayer. He didn’t even have the chance not to be a thief. All the incarcerated man had to offer was his own brokenness… and his brokenness sufficed.

He became a depleted child and simply cast his dependence on the unknown man in the middle. If his hands were not bound to a cross, he may have touched his fingertips to his chest and asked, “Do you… Do you accept people like me?”

Jesus recognized the broken posture of the thief’s heart, and to his simplistic request, Jesus warmly responded “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

We often make God much more complicated than need be…

From the cells of his Gestapo prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “God is weak and powerless in this world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which God can be with us and help us… It is not by his omnipotence that Christ helps us, but by his weakness and suffering.”

That’s where each of us can meet God today, if one is not afraid of such brokenness. There He awaits us, quietly in the cruelest places that life has to offer, in the slums of the streets and in the slums of our souls. Christ is never found on the frontlines, waving a flag or brandishing a weapon. No. Christ is always found in the medical tents, soothing the wounds of soldiers from both sides of the battle—never in the triumph of the winner’s platform, but in the trenches of a broken humanity.

One can make many observations about the cross and the life of Jesus, but one thing that must be a takeaway is that the cross, and indeed the entire ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, was offered toward the poor and the poor in spirit, the depressed, the marginalized and the meek, the powerless, the orphan, the promiscuous, the voiceless, the widow, the disoriented, the immoral, the incarcerated, the migrant, the forgotten. In short, the wretched yet beautiful cross was always for The Other.

The same remains true today for those not afraid of such brokenness…