Pilate has a sign nailed to the Cross proclaiming Jesus "King of the Jews." The Jewish authorities want the sign to say that Jesus merely claimed to be King of the Jews. Pilate says that the sign will remain as it is--though if it is not held that the Jewish authorities (or at least those among them who wanted to curry an intellectual kinship with Pilate) could have claimed that "of course" their friend Pilate intended the unaltered sign ironically, then precious little of the theologians' fancies about any biblical statement might stand. It is the job of theologians to act as though scriptural statements are meant as transcendent truths that carry their implications in terms of still other maxims--as though the organic whole of Jesus' teachings might be reduced to a collection of placards, sorted and stacked in terms of each denomination's philosophy.
An example of this can be found in some theologians' analyses of the statements of Jesus to the Rich Young Ruler. Jesus says that the requirement for the young man to attain eternal life is to follow the Commandments and--with particular emphasis in the case of the young man--to forsake worldly goods. Jesus follows this by telling his disciples how hard it is for a rich person to be saved. Theologians, of course, can be found who will maintain that (in their favorite sortings of the placards of faith) "of course" what Jesus means is that the Rich Young Ruler, like all of humanity, must be saved by God's sovereign will exerted through the bestowal of unmerited salvation--"of course" any efforts of the young man to forsake worldly goods will either reflect a prerequisite "saving faith," or will be understood to constitute efforts toward securing post-salvation "rewards" (or both). What the theologians in such instances will not do is treat the biblical persons in question as though they were complete human beings--the young man in such twisted analysis is not a complete person (like all of humanity) who will have competing and countervailing tendencies manifested in moods and moments of consciousness. Nothing is more to be expected than that a person trying to do the will of God will alternate between moments of greater or lesser despair or assurance in achieving this or that, and also moments of greater or lesser despair or assurance in the nearness of God's mercy--yet an entire industry is built on sacerdotal dispensings of mercy that are, in the presentations of the denominations, as untenable in themselves as they are incompatible with each other.
This business of the horror-comedy of the theologians' stacking of "placards" is a business to be understood in contrast to the organic process I have described, a process by which our existences unfold in arcs, or more properly as tendrils, or more properly as seedpods, or more distinctly as seedpods ripe for bursting. This "plant" conceptualization is, I will admit, as much as anything a conceptualization arising from my fitful wonderings. We occupy, in ever-transmuting fashions, time and place--while yet we are tantalized by the prospect of relation to a divinity that transcends time and place. Such a prospect--if a perfect scheme of analogies were ever to be known--might be better considered as something other than the twistings of a plant, yet I will not fail to note that Jesus stands with his disciples in a place where (to them) salvation is scarcely to be found, at a time when (to them) salvation is scarcely to be found, and tells them that the fields are "white, ready for harvest."
We are ourselves, in complexity and unfolding permutations, fields unto ourselves, vast rippling prospects of rising and falling--swelling and bursting and withering in our manifold parts in turn or (as our agonizing proclivity to almost-sense the timeless and infinite will impose upon us) "out of turn" as our self-conceptions would have it. We want to be different than we are, or we are untrue to ourselves. We want to have our existences on our own terms, or we are untrue to ourselves. Most importantly, we aspire to that which is beyond ourselves, and are confronted with puzzles that are beyond our understandings. The worst thing that we can do--and yet the commonest thing we do--is to hold that truth can be known to us in terms of statements. And then another moment comes, and the way that we succumb--plant-like rooted to inescapable soil and bathed in inescapable atmosphere and infused with inescapable impulses--drives us to entwining ourselves with yet another statement, and then yet another statement, and so on.
Even then on Calvary again we are faced with this phenomenon. We will never know, in the theological interpreter's sense, the least iota of The Good Thief. Unavoidably, the Gospel testimony is mixed, and in a distinctly disquieting fashion. Mark merely describes the crucified "thieves" as present, though some texts appear to have been tampered with, by the addition of the Old Testament theme that the sufferer will be counted among the wicked. Matthew describes both of the criminals as abusing Jesus, and throughout the Gospel accounts the crucifixion is described in terms of the throwing-about of "son of God" in such loose fashion as to preclude the idea that discernable theology is at issue. The only thing that the theological interpreter knows about the story of The Good Thief is that a story is told in the Gospel of Luke about The Good Thief.
What might have been the past, or the many and varied experiences, of The Good Thief? This is not an empty question, because we can approach it with what little we do know about the man. Somewhere The Good Thief came to understand the idea of guilt, and from somewhere he obtained the ability to pronounce guilt upon himself and to see persons as guilty in the eyes of God. So much as this cannot be attributed to delusion, or to mistake, or to any particular theological view of Jesus' divinity or no. That a Jew (or at least a person who knew the milieu of Judaism) would look to the Messiah as a portal to salvation is virtually a given, and in all times and places a yearning for attachment to figures of courage and rectitude has served--particularly in times of extremity and agitation--to satisfy in sufficient measure people's desire to feel themselves bound for salvation. Jesus gave the man the assurance he sought (while also, apparently, giving him the assurance that the crucifixion experience would be over by sundown.) That is all we know.
If, however, in the broad stretch of Church history, a theology were built upon what can be known about The Good Thief, it would be a theology of being afraid of God's displeasure, a theology of acknowledging personal guilt, a theology of Jesus being above condemnation, and a theology of seeking Jesus' remembrance when he comes into his kingdom. This is all well and good, but it would differ in no important substance from someone asking the one of the Apostles to remember him or her when the apostle mounted one of the thrones of a tribe of Israel. If the theology of The Good Thief were presented in stark and impersonal terms to the prevalent denominations of history, it would be roundly excoriated as home-made, presumptuous, and futile.
In short, there is not a theology of The Good Thief, only a story of The Good Thief. The person in question was as varied and as permutable as any of us. The person in question, grown to adulthood and involved in as many things as necessary to be condemned (rightly) as a criminal, was the product and the producer of virtually innumerable moods and moments. A follower of Jesus will believe that The Good Thief was assured (rightly) of salvation by Jesus. What a follower of Jesus will also believe, however, is that salvation is a matter not merely of pursuing that which cannot be understood, but also of being borne aloft by equally mystifying tendencies to grasp for that which cannot be understood--in short, works and faith in their organic states. This is as close as we might come to telling the story of The Good Thief in theological terms, since no other criteria are provided to us.
Jesus tells us of a kingdom that is as point-oriented as the finding of a rare pearl, as pervasive as the infusion of yeast, and as ineffable as the growing by night and by day of seed. The basis of salvation is not the labeling by explanatory placards of a described Creation, but rather the embracing of God's transcendence as seen (or sensed, as the moment provides) in a Creation that even in its limitations is beyond our grasp and yet which grasps us. This, as much as the story provides, and as much as the Four Gospels present, is the simplest of descriptions of the milieu to which The Good Thief responds appropriately. The inappropriate response, by contrast, is that of Jesus' detractors, who more than anything decided what the labels "son of God" and "kingdom" meant, and proceeded to demand that Jesus satisfy the expectations upon which they had decided.
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