The thief ended up in Paradise

A reflection by Steven Robinson

"Most of the people who were saved in the Gospels were not hesychasts, masters of nepsis, seekers of the right phronema, keepers of ascetical disciplines by Mosaic canonical standards. Some weren't even decent, moral people. All were rejects. And they all were simply desperate.

When a thief asked a stranger to remember him, he ended up in Paradise.

When an unclean woman anonymously crawled on the ground, underfoot of true believers to touch the dirty hem of His garment she was healed.

When a blind man yelled loud and long enough to be annoying to the security guards and gate-keepers of healing, he got his sight.

When the whore crashed the "Members Only" reception for the Celebrity Prophet and instead of making a show of kissing his a** in public she kissed his feet, she was moved to the head of the table.

Salvation was as simple as that.

The Gospels show that God looks upon great desperation as great faith. Salvation is as simple and as difficult as that.

The Good Thief had the "luxury" of meeting Jesus on his deathbed/cross. But the reality is, most of us don’t have a life and death encounter with God while sitting in an electric chair confronting the consequences and spiritual reality of our personal “death sentence sin”, throw a Hail Mary prayer six feet to our left, and then die without having to live the rest of our lives making amends, bearing the guilt and shame, and living under scrutiny and rejection.

For most of us a more fitting metaphor for our “salvation” is found in our commonplace, ordinary existence: We live a middle class life and grow up committing venial, middle-class, cowardly, playground sins. We grow up and discover God and we date Jesus. We get engaged, married, have kids, a career and when the marriage and job gets old and tough, we’re tempted to bail out. But we hang on to our spiritual ideals and we try our moral damndest to be just mid-life crisis emotional flirts, not completely give up on church and Jesus, and not end up being spiritual adulterers or divorced total failures. We tough out the years of empty drudgery because it’s the right thing to do.

So, the metaphorical reality of salvation for most of us is more like the work of preserving a 50 year marriage relationship than casting a last ditch, desperate prayer toward the ceiling on your deathbed because you have no other hope or alternative... and you wake up and discover that by the grace of God, He heard it.

In the Gospels both the long marriage and the “Hail Mary” are honored by God. But, as an “all day from the first hour in the heat of the day laborer” I gotta say, sometimes I tend to be jealous of the last ditch death bed conversion and them getting the full day’s pay for the least amount of work done in the cool of the evening hour. (Which is probably why Jesus told that parable.)

In the end salvation is as simple (and as hard) as this: Learning the humility to accept the love of God as a gift whether it takes 50 years of tedious, monotonous, repetitive, uninspiring existence or a dramatic, revelatory, tragic moment of desperation.

And if we learn true humility perhaps we will see both as a unique grace and give glory to God for both our own salvation and the salvation of ALL whom He accepts whether or not I can, or do.

“Help me to see my own sins and not to judge my brother” is just the “on-ramp” to gratitude and the joy of our salvation. This is what Lent is preparing us for: to understand Holy Friday, that “through the Cross joy has come to all the world”.

For all."