A reflection on Luke 23:32-43

Hanging on the cross, tortured, almost dead, a convicted rebel asks Jesus for an invitation to God’s paradise: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Crucifixion isn’t a form of punishment for an ordinary thief or criminal. Only special people get killed on crosses. To crucify someone takes a lot of work, and it’s costly. It’s a torturous death reserved for people the Roman authorities consider subversives or revolutionaries, enemies of the state, threats to national security, sectarian radicals or freedom fighters.

Crucifixion was a state-sponsored act that told the story, explains N.T. Wright, “of the uselessness of rebel recalcitrance and the ruthlessness of imperial power. It said, in particular: This is what happens to rebel leaders” (Jesus and the Victory of God, 1996).

In today’s language, the people who ended up on crosses would be called terrorists, recalcitrant rebels involved in subversive conspiracies against the state. The scandal for Christians through the ages has been that Jesus, though wrongfully convicted, ends up hanging on the cross between two violent subversives.

For the people passing by, Jesus would appear to be just one more radical, sectarian freedom-fighter. “Jesus was executed as a rebel against Rome,” argues Wright, “the general impression in Jerusalem that day must have been that he was one more in a long line of would-be, but failed, Messiahs” (Jesus and the Victory of God).

The torture and killing of Jesus is a public humiliation. Rome has done it before and they’ll do it again. The authorities try to make an example out of him, as they did to other Jews who claimed to be messiahs, liberators of Israel. The Romans put a sign on his cross: “This is the king of the Jews.”

In other words, the sign says, this is what happens to your messiahs. It’s a public deterrent. All the other wannabe radicals will hear the news of the crucifixion and learn what happens when Jewish peasants talk too much about the promise of a kingdom other than Caesar’s. Too much kingdom-talk will get you nailed to a cross. “Crucifixion was and remained a political and military punishment,” writes Martin Hengel. “The chief reason for its use was its allegedly supreme efficacy as a deterrent” (Crucifixion, 1977).

In this story the guilty man who hangs beside the innocent Jesus is the one who speaks the truth. The convict sees Jesus for who he really is. He calls Jesus a king: “this man has done nothing wrong.” Jesus is innocent, he says, a casualty of people who are drunk on power.

After speaking the truth that no one else is willing to speak, the convicted rebel says to Jesus: “Jesus, remember me when you enter into your kingdom.” And Jesus says: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

The crucifixion story from Luke 23 unnerves me because Jesus invites one of them into paradise to be his companion forever. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “today you will be with me in paradise.” It’s crazy enough for Jesus, with the thorns of death digging into his soul, to forgive his torturers and killers: “Father, forgive them,” he prays from the cross, “for they know not what they do.”

That prayer for grace is shocking enough. Can you imagine a power of forgiveness that would enable you to forgive your killers as they are torturing you? That seems unimaginable, but we recognize it as good news, as a powerful display of God’s grace.

But that Jesus invites the rebel into God’s heavenly kingdom disturbs me. I’m unsettled by Jesus’ invitation because that place is my hope, too. Jesus invites the violent subversive next to him to the same eternal party he promised us. Are we sure we want to hang out in God’s paradise with an enemy like him for eternity?

The encounter on the crosses reveals the mysteries of God’s peace. Jesus invites a convicted insurrectionist into paradise, with all the rest of the people God chooses, to an eternal life of working out the meaning of forgiveness and reconciliation, the meaning of the work of peace.

To be drawn into God’s eternal paradise is an invitation into the work of peace, which is the work of forgiveness, as we encounter people we have hurt and who have hurt us, as we sit together at the heavenly banquet, with friends and enemies, all God’s guests, even the ones we didn’t expect, even the ones we never wanted to see again, even the ones we don’t think belong at the feast.

Isaac S. Villegas is pastor of Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Fellowship. This reflection is adapted from a chapter of his book, co-authored with Alex Sider, Presence: Giving and Receiving God (Cascade, 2010).