The “Test” of Christ’s Resurrection in Our Lives
Elia Carrai - In the Syriac Orthodox Church, there is an ancient Dialogue between the Cherub and the Good Thief, which tells how the zealous angel, symbolically placed as guardian of Paradise, refuses to let in the thief forgiven by Jesus. A heated argument ensues, but eventually, the thief persuades the guardian angel, who, moved, allows him to pass: in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, the way to a new and greater familiarity with the Mystery of God has been reopened to man.
This is another reason why the good thief is remembered in the East as the “theologian thief,” who truly and first discovered through his own experience how everything changed in his life and in history with the Passion of Christ. Thus, what for us is “Angel Monday” remains in some Eastern traditions “Good Thief Monday,” because it is precisely by looking at the experience of the good thief that we have the opportunity to “test” the effectiveness, the effective reality, of the Resurrection of Christ in our lives.
What the thief experiences on the cross in his last moments reveals the full significance that encountering the living Christ has for life: so that when we too find ourselves living the experience of the thief, we can recognize that Christ is truly risen, that He remains contemporary to us in history.
The thief, who had done all sorts of things, precisely at the moment of extreme powerlessness, at the moment when the scattered fragments of his “messed up” life passed before his eyes, precisely from within his bewilderment and naked need, in that extreme and final hour of his dying, realizes: he realizes that at that very moment, next to him, on a cross like his, there is someone whose gaze, whose words, whose way of suffering he had never even imagined possible.
It is not that he understood the abysmal depth of the pain of his companion on the cross, of Jesus who, in His desire to embrace all of humanity, accepted to suffer in His very bowels even our desolation and supreme despair: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). The thief, even though he did not understand everything, nevertheless realized the decisive thing and, in doing so, understood the only thing that was truly essential: he saw someone who was suffering like him, but he also saw that the extreme despair in Jesus did not culminate in hopelessness.
In the despair of Jesus, overwhelmed by human evil, the thief is as if he realizes something evil, insults, and mockery cannot touch: in that unjustly condemned man lives an ultimate, unshakable certainty about the good origin and destiny of all things.
Precisely at the hour when human evil and violence seem to abruptly break Jesus’ mission, precisely at the moment when human evil seems to have the last word on history, precisely then, in the person of Christ, in the heart of Christ, the power of a reality even greater than the evil of the world is revealed.
The thief realizes that there is something more tenacious than human violence: the relationship that the Galilean has with the Mystery, according to a familiarity that is true sonship and for which, even in His final hour, He continues to call Him Father. It is from the depth of this relationship between the Son and the Father that a power of mercy and forgiveness manifests itself, which the thief had never seen before, the only true force that has ever shaken history: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Jesus does not reproach anyone, He does not curse anyone, He does not protest anything, He does not reproach anything and forgives everything: this is the true face of God that becomes visible in Christ’s Passover. He does not nail men to their sins as they have nailed Him, but even in their sins, He showers them with an immeasurable tenderness, He clothes them with infinite mercy. And it is in this sharing with the Father to the very end of His absolute passion for the good destiny of men that Jesus thus lives supreme freedom: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
Thus, the “scoundrel theologian,” seeing his companions on the cross—on one side the thief who curses God and the day he was born, on the other Jesus, who, hanging on that wood, forgives and even loves—is moved, realizing the boundless breadth of his desire. On the very edge of life, he intuits the true significance of his own need, of what he has more or less consciously sought and longed for throughout his “messed up” life.
It is not that the thief suddenly becomes “good”; he is still the same thief, yet he is no longer the same because for the first time he finds himself taking seriously that hunger and thirst for good at the root of his being. After all, that man there, Jesus, in that last moment of his life as a thief, introduces something, with His way of forgiving and dying, that finally meets his need as well as his fragility.