Faces of Our Faith: The Penitent Thief | Luke 23:32-43 | 8.9.26

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is a gift to be with you this morning as we continue our summer series, which will be with us until the end of this month, where we're remembering the faces of our faith.

Last week we remembered how Jesus' disciples all deserted him in his last moments.

And we reflected particularly on the character of Judas, his betrayer.

And this morning we'll spend some time with one person who could not leave Jesus' side if he wanted to.

That is the unnamed man who hung with Jesus and yet who recognized his innocence.

He's become known as the penitent thief or the good thief.

But before we read that story together, let's pray and ask God to bless our time in the scripture this morning.

Will you pray with me?

Holy God, we open ourselves to your spirit, that by your word we might grow more in love, deeper in faith, and bolder in our action for your beloved community on earth as it is in heaven.

In the name of your word and our Lord Jesus Christ, we pray.

Amen.

Our reading today is from the 23rd chapter of Luke's Gospel, verses 32 through 43.

It's normally a Good Friday reading, so it might feel a little odd this time of year.

I think it's going to be a good spot for us to start.

Let's read together.

Luke 23, verses 32 through 43.

Luke 23:32–43

Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him.

That is Jesus.

When they came to the place that is called the skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.

Then Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

And they cast lots to divide his clothing.

And the people stood by watching.

And the leaders scoffed at him, saying, He saved others.

Let him save himself, if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one.

The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.

One of the criminals who was hanged there kept deriding him and saying, Are you not the Messiah?

Save yourself and us.

But the other rebuked him, saying, Do you not fear God?

Since you are under the same sentence of condemnation.

And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserved for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.

Then he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Jesus replied, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

The Toze community in France is an international monastic community.

People live there for long periods of time, and it's that community has been known for producing a peaceful and contemplative style of worship.

They use short, repeated scriptural chants and quiet reflection and candlelight to unite people, pilgrims who journey there to worship in that place from all over the world and from many different Christian denominations.

And I want to teach you one of my favorite um Toze hymns this morning, if you would.

I'm just gonna sing through it once.

It's two lines, but it's just the same line repeated twice, and so I think you'll pick it up quickly.

Um but I'll sing it through once and then you can sing it back with me.

Uh it goes like this.

Remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Amen.

Thank y'all.

Um my thoughts this morning are deeply indebted to uh a preacher who I got to hear in February when Lauren and I were at Columbia Seminary's uh alumni reunion event.

Um her name uh is the Reverend Dr.

Melva Sampson, and she's the assistant teaching professor uh of preaching and pastoral theology at Wake Forest Divinity School, and she has a powerful Good Friday commentary on this text, wherein she suggests that for our scripture today, quote, the question is not, are we bad people?

The question is, what kind of world crucifies someone and calls it justice?

You see, too often those of us raised in American forms of Christianity are very quick to jump to an individualistic reading of the text.

This is not bad.

This is a reading, right?

But we jump straight to it often as our first instinct, right?

Am I good?

Am I bad?

Am I saved?

What must I do to inherit eternal life?

We ask along with the rich young ruler.

Yet she points out all that although uh different Latin and Orthodox traditions uh later give this man, this penitent man, a name, Luke intentionally leaves him unnamed.

He doesn't have a name in the story.

And he doesn't have a specific crime in Luke's telling either.

Uh he's not called a robber or an insurgent like he is in other gospels.

Uh he's called here just the more generic term criminal or wrongdoer.

And for Luke, this move allows us to see not only uh ourselves uh in the men who are hung with Jesus, but also all sorts of people who empires criminalize and discard.

And who the empires use to tell their own narrative.

And so by the Spirit, through this scripture, we are invited to ask what kind of kingdom crucifies people and calls it justice.

Remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Sing with me.

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

One of the men from his own cross joins in the litany of mockery that we read in this text.

It flows from the the officials mock, the soldiers mock, the crowd mocks, and then this man who is almost literally in the exact same position as Jesus joins in the mockery, and honestly, who could blame him?

He is a few hours from the end of everything, and here is a man who is rumored to have raised the dead, hanging within arm's reach.

If you're who you say you are, he says, then get us out of this.

Save us.

It's not an unreasonable request, and maybe it's the only sane thing to say to God when you're dying, and God is right there.

The irony is not lost on me, of course, that when he asks Jesus to save both of them, that that is precisely what Jesus is doing.

He is saving them.

But what a regular person cannot imagine, what I can sometimes barely imagine, is that we would be saved from death by a dying man and not by armies of angels.

And yet there is another man condemned.

A foil for this criminal who is so convinced of the Empire's narrative that he joins in on the empire's mockery, even as he dies.

But there's another criminal, and this other criminal does something nobody else has done on that hill that day.

He tells the truth.

He doesn't ask to be saved.

He doesn't ask to join Jesus in paradise.

He just tells the truth.

He says, We are getting what comes to us, he says, not to excuse Rome, but because he refuses to lie his way out even now.

Now this man has done nothing, he says.

He sees the truth, he sees the innocence in Jesus.

And then having said the truest thing that anyone says in this whole chapter, he asks for the smallest thing, perhaps, that anyone else asks for.

He says, Remember me.

He doesn't even ask for forgiveness, by the way.

He doesn't say, Lord, forgive me for the bad thing that I did that ended me up here.

He just says, Jesus, remember me.

As if that were a small thing.

As if anyone ever has really believed that it was.

Uh however harmful their actions might have been, but how do we remember them?

Dr.

Sampson puts it this way: Quote, Empire says, you are what you did.

Jesus says, you are who I remember you to be.

We will sit with that for a second because it is not a comforting platitude.

Uh it's a different courtroom that Jesus sits in from all the rest of us.

The empire has already rendered its verdict on this man.

It nailed the charge above his head.

It had decided permanently that criminal is the last true thing anyone will ever say about him.

And he begs for Jesus to remember something more than that.

And Jesus, from the cross next to him, overrules it.

This is what makes the man's request so remarkable.

He doesn't ask Jesus to get him down or to reverse the sentence or even to stop the pain.

He asks to be remembered.

Because he understands something that I think maybe I'm still learning, and that is that the truest thing about a person isn't the worst thing they've ever done.

And it's certainly not what the state decided to do to them in response.

The truest thing about a person is who holds their story after the world is done with it.

And that's God.

This kind of remembering isn't accidental.

It's not the same as simply not forgetting.

It's work.

It's done in community, it's done together.

It's Moses on the mountaintop telling the people, remember, you were slaves in Egypt, right?

Remember that you were, even when they weren't there, they're really remembering something that belonged to their ancestors, but they're asked to remember.

It's something we we continue to do, and I've seen what it looks like when someone refuses to accept uh the Empire's verdict as final and refuses to let criminal be the last word.

Uh back in 2019, when I was at a church in Anderson, uh, I got to take some folks from that church I was serving to see the true story of Brian Stevenson, a young lawyer fresh out of Harvard, uh, whose story was told in a movie called Just Mercy.

There's a book by the same name that he wrote.

Uh, and he went to visit.

He went to visit and see men that the state had already decided were beyond remembering.

People who were on death row and who were awaiting their own executions.

And one of those people that he met was a man named Walter Macmillan.

He became convinced of his innocence.

But it didn't matter.

The verdict had already been rendered, the file was closed.

And I remember sitting in that dark theater thinking about this story: a man on a cross, out of appeals and out of time, asking for one thing to be remembered.

Stevenson never stopped that work, by the way, and he founded an organization called the Equal Justice Initiative that developed something called the Community Remembrance Project.

And I'm gonna be honest, when I first heard about the Community Remembrance Project, I thought, well, how performative that they're just remembering.

But what they do is almost absurdly simple.

They go to the crossroads and to the courthouse lawns across our country where uh where black men and women were lynched in our history, and they put up a little marker and they collect some soil and they put that soil in a jar with that person's name on it.

And then they ask the communities, uh, they invite people out to this little ceremony where they say, uh, these people were killed here, these are their names.

We remember.

And it's not a small thing, right?

Empire, uh, Rome then and every empire since uh doesn't need you to forget, they just need you to remember their version of the story.

They just need you to accept their verdict as final.

He was a criminal.

She had it coming.

Every unmarked grave, every case nobody reopens, every person society discards.

We've filed under what they did.

We don't file it under who they are, to God.

And and that's empire's memory at work.

It's designed to quell uh the prophetic imagination.

It's designed to make itself the final word on what gets told and what gets buried uh to it's it's done.

Jesus was crucified, right?

Uh, but not for him.

He was crucified for all the people who were trying to follow him.

The empire is protecting itself by telling a story that instills fear of the state instead of fear of the Lord.

But Jesus remembers.

So when the dying man beside him says, Remember me, he's not asking for a nice thought.

He's asking Jesus to speak a truer word over his life than the one Rome had already spoken.

And so Jesus does.

And he doesn't say, I'll think of you sometime.

He says, Today you will be with me in paradise.

You who have just admitted that you did the thing which you are being killed for, you're with me.

That's active remembrance.

That's right now overturning the collective verdict on the spot.

He looks to Jesus and says, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Here's what I want you to hear.

I want you to hear it today.

Not some bright morning when this life is o'er.

Today.

Not when you've finally gotten your life sorted out enough to believe it.

You are not what you did.

And whatever verdict uh people have nailed over your head, whatever it says, uh, by the world, by your own uh worst voice at three in the morning, by people who decided a long time ago uh who exactly who you were, uh that is not the last word.

And it never will be.

Because on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem, on a hill built for shame and named after death, a man dying next to God said, Remember me.

And God did not say, I'll try.

God said, Today.

Not in paradise someday, eventually, once you've earned it, once you've done something, once you've shown your repentance, once you've asked for forgiveness, once you've said this fancy prayer, once you've believed these specific bricks of truth that I'm going to build into your wall.

He doesn't wait for this man to do something.

He says, Today you are with me in paradise.

The kingdom doesn't wait for anyone to deserve it.

It breaks in right there on the worst day of your life, on the cross that you didn't choose.

And it says, I remember you, not your record, and not your worst hour.

You.

And here is the strange, wonderful hinge of the whole gospel is that that man on the cross, Jesus, Jesus is the last scapegoat.

Every other criminal, every other outcast, every other person that the crowd needed to blame so that they could feel safe and innocent.

Jesus becomes that once and finally and for all, so that it would never happen again.

And yet we know that it does.

Every day it does.

Every day we decide that it is not sin's fault that I'm hurting, it's that guy's fault, or it's her fault, or it's my neighbor's fault, or it's the immigrant's fault, or whoever it is, right?

We're always finding someone to blame our suffering on.

But Jesus was the last one who was to receive our scapegoating, and that's not a metaphor.

It's the old logic of every scapegoat ritual.

Uh, I won't go into Leviticus with you, but it's there.

We could talk about it sometime.

The scapegoating ritual where the crowd needed someone to carry their blame so that we could feel safe and clean.

And Jesus climbs onto that cross and refuses to let it ever need doing again.

The scapegoating was to stop with him.

Which means the empire's whole machine, that one who decides who counts and who doesn't, who gets remembered, who gets filed away, whose stories get told, whose stories get taken off the shelves and tossed in the trash.

That machine has no fuel left to run on.

It's over.

These are its dying gasps.

So hear this church, you are remembered not as what you did, but as the beloved one for whom Jesus died and was raised.

And if that's true of you, it is true of the person you've already decided while I was talking not to think about too hard.

It's true about them too.

Everyone, the neighbor everyone's written off, the name on the news you didn't recognize as a person, the one in your town you would rather forget.

Remembrance is active.

And it was active on that hill, and it is active now, and it's active when we come to worship and we tell these stories year after year because we need to remember.

We cannot forget our active remembrance, it becomes active every time we choose to see someone the way God saw that dying man.

Not as what they did, but as who they are.

So go and remember somebody today.

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.