When I was in college in
Plattsburgh, I became friends with a local family who attended the same church
I did. The father of the family happened
to be an Episcopal priest who was the protestant chaplain at Dannemora State
Prison (yes, the prison that was in the news not long ago).
On the grounds of the
prison is a very beautiful chapel dedicated to St. Dismas, the good thief. Early Christianity was fascinated with the
two criminals who were crucified with Jesus, and gave them names: Dismas, the good thief, and Gestas, the bad
one.
These names are taken
from the fourth century apocryphal gospel, the Gospel of Nicodemus. In that apocryphal gospel, after Jesus has
died, Dismas goes on to accompany Christ on his journey to Hell to redeem the
dead. This occurs between his death and the resurrection. It is what is referred to when we say the
Apostles’ Creed, “he descended to the dead,” or, in more traditional language,
“he descended into hell.”
Luke’s story of Dismas
and Gestas seems obvious. It seems like
a picture of the choice before each one of us.
Be like Dismas and associate yourself with Christ or be like Gestas and
reject him. If you accept him you will
join him in paradise. If you reject him
you will be left hanging.
There is a saying attributed
to St. Augustine (although no one has ever been able to find it in his
writings) about the two thieves that is intriguing and may open up another
possibility:
Do not despair one of the thieves was
saved.
Do not presume one of the thieves was
damned.[1]
Now what these two lines
mean depend on where you put the punctuation. The oldest Latin forms of it that
exist do not have any punctuation. One
assumes there should be a semi-colon after despair in the first line: “Do not
despair; one of the thieves was saved.” It doesn’t make sense any other way.
If you put a parallel
semi-colon after “presume” in the second line, the line becomes a warning: “Do not presume; one of the thieves was
damned.” But if there is no semi-colon it
means an entirely different thing: “Do not presume one of the thieves was
damned.”
What if that is what is
being said? What happened to Gestas, the
“unrepentant thief?” The Bible is actually silent. We assume that he went to hell. We have
always assumed he went to hell. But do
we need to reserve judgment?
Can the news be this
good?
I spoke earlier of the
Gospel of Nicodemus’ story that Dismas, the good thief, accompanied Jesus to
hell to preach the good news to those trapped there. That story rose up among the first followers
of Jesus after the resurrection. The First Letter of Peter refers twice to the
story (3:18-20 & 4:6). It seemed to
answer a question that troubled early believers. What happened to all those who
had died before Jesus was raised from the dead?
There was a special concern for Adam and Eve and for those who died in
the great flood when God had destroyed the earth.
So the story was told of
what Jesus did between his death and resurrection. It is sometimes called “the Harrowing of
Hell.” I mentioned its sneaking into the
Apostles’ Creed, but it also plays a part in Christian art—especially Orthodox
icons. Orthodox icons of the
resurrection do not show an empty tomb with a triumphant Jesus. No, Orthodox icons of the resurrection are
really icons of the harrowing of hell. The icons show the results of this visit to
the dead, show Jesus standing on the broken gates of hell. He is hauling up Adam with one hand and Eve
with the other.
Our eyes might role at
the quaintness of the story of Jesus’ entering hell, but the image is a
powerful one, and its meaning even more so.
No place and no one is out of reach of the love of God in Christ
Jesus. That, of course, would mean Gestas
too, and, by the way, you and me.
A writer in The Christian Century a few years ago,
David Cunningham, commented on the story of the two thieves this way:
While we are busy dividing up the world
into the saved and the damned, God is at work on an entirely different project:
reconciling the world—the whole world—to one another and to God’s own self.[2]
The good news of the
cross is this good: do not presume
one of the thieves was damned. Do not presume that Gestas was left hanging.
As Luke tells the
passion story we are meant to appreciate the words of the good thief and reject
those of the bad. But who among us has
never asked his question in some form or another:
If you are God, why don’t you do
something to get me out of this mess?
[1] I
found this in an article in The Christian
Century by David Cunningham: “The Fate of the Other Thief: “Do not
presume,” March 23, 2010, p. 30. The
idea for this sermon came from that article.
[2]
Ibid., p. 33. Cunningham teaches religion and directs the CrossRoads Project at
Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
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