A Look at the Thief Who Repented on the Cross

The eye gladly rests, and the heart, aching from the sorrowful spectacle of the Passion and the wild unreason of Jesus’s inhuman enemies, finds some relief, in the moving act of the thief who repents and preaches repentance from the cross.

Jesus Christ is in the deepest humiliation: He is mocked, slandered, nailed to the cross, abandoned even by those who had witnessed His great deeds; His own disciples and kinsmen look upon His cross—the symbol of God’s curse and wrath—with trembling; and yet, in these terrible moments, the criminal crucified at His right hand rises in thought above every scandal surrounding Jesus’s cross, and finds more greatness in the Righteous One’s humiliation than in the chief priests’ shameful triumph; before everyone, he confesses His innocence and his own wretchedness. More than this, the repentant man’s faith reaches beyond everything visible: the One who suffers torment beside him, who stands near death, he acknowledges as Lord of heaven and earth, Master of paradise and of hell; he no longer sees Jesus’s cross, but sees only His eternal kingdom, and begs to be granted a place in it!.. Such faith is truly faith in the crucified Jesus!..

How can one not ask, at this: from where did such greatness of spirit, such dignity of character, come in this thief?

Who had been his preacher and teacher of such wisdom?

It is usually supposed that the repentant man had not, before his cross, been a robber and murderer in the strict sense of those words, and there is no reason to picture his character as wholly corrupted. Do we know what first drove him to crime—the number of his offenses, and the circumstances under which they were committed? How easily can even a man without an evil heart sometimes fall into the gravest transgressions? What might not a sudden fit of violent anger produce, for instance, in a single moment? What terrible events are not caused, at times, by other stormy passions, which nevertheless sometimes coexist with a cast of mind and feeling otherwise praiseworthy? What might not the repentant man, among other things, have been driven to by bad companions—like the other crucified man, who reviled the Lord? It may be that none of these causes had any bearing on the crimes of the crucified man; but how many other causes might there have been, which we cannot picture, but which would explain how he came to be on the cross, capable, all the same, of earning paradise!

We have already said, however, that the repentant man was, in all likelihood, not a robber in the strict sense of the word, but belonged to the company of Barabbas, who not long before had raised a popular revolt; and so there is no reason to suppose him a common thief and murderer. «All the worse—someone will say—a disturber of the public peace is worse than any common thief or murderer». True enough! But let us remember that Roman rule over Judea was the rule of conquerors, and unlawful ones at that, who acted not by arms and victory, but by deceit and cunning. In such a state of affairs, when even the sect of the Zealots, and the Pharisees themselves, preached that God’s people ought not to live in bondage to pagans, it was easy even for a good man to be carried away by true or false patriotic zeal, and to raise a revolt in the very name of Moses and the God of Israel. Jewish history, especially before the destruction of Jerusalem, offers no shortage of such examples. In general, if one judges the Zealots and the Sicarii, who could not bear Roman rule, even from Josephus’s own account alone, one may suppose in some of them a great many praiseworthy qualities. The apostle Paul himself, before his conversion to Christianity, was closely associated with the Zealots, and, for all the purity of his own intentions and character, took part with them in the killing of the protomartyr Stephen (Act 7:58). This example alone shows plainly enough how a man can be good at heart, and yet evil in his deeds! Why, then, should we not suppose the same of the criminal who repented on the cross?..

The crucified man’s own admission, that he was justly condemned, does not overturn this supposition. Having disturbed the public peace, having become the cause of killings, he had indeed earned execution; but his heart was free of any habitual bent toward evil, of that hardening which befalls men who have long lived by open crime, accustomed not merely to trample on the rights of others, but to find pleasure and glory in doing so. On the contrary, the rebuke the repentant man gave his companion reveals, in the one rebuking, a sensitive conscience, a heart not estranged from the fear of God, firmly believing in rewards for the righteous and punishment for the wicked after death.

For such a man, imprisonment could not fail to have some beneficial effect. His illusions scattered, his conscience awoke, reason came into its own again; and what had once seemed a matter of prudence or necessity now appeared the fruit of passion and unreason. Knowing the temper of Roman rule, an enemy of Rome could expect no pardon; and so his days in prison were, at the same time, days of preparation for death—a fresh spur to repentance! The mere thought of death stops many a man on the path of lawlessness: what cannot the nearness of death itself work upon a sinner’s heart! In such moments even hearts of stone soften; is it any wonder that a sensitive heart should prove especially apt for repentance?

On the other hand, it may be stated with confidence that the repentant man, before his imprisonment, had witnessed some of Jesus Christ’s miracles, and perhaps had even heard Him teach, and shared with others the conviction that a Man who taught and worked wonders in this way must be sent from God (this is the first thought that arises of itself in the mind, from the words he spoke from the cross). His solitary confinement, then, vividly recalled to him Jesus Christ’s own words, so moving for repentant sinners. «Jesus preached freedom, but did not approve of uprisings: His freedom is the freedom of truth and virtue. Ah, if only it were possible now to follow this teaching. If only, at least, to hear the divine Teacher once more! To receive from Him forgiveness of sins!» The hour of execution arrives—and the repentant criminal suddenly finds himself beside Jesus, and learns that he and the Prophet of Galilee must suffer the very same death!.. A sorrowful spectacle—to see a righteous man condemned to a shameful execution—yet, for the repenting sinner, in a certain way a comforting one! For who would not find comfort in dying together with a righteous man, in passing with him through the darkness of the grave, and appearing before the Heavenly Judge? And the repenting heart is confirmed all the more firmly in its holy feelings, and grows still more drawn to Jesus. And how could it not be drawn! His gentle composure and freedom from malice, His striking words to the women and daughters of Jerusalem, the magnanimity with which He refused the mind-dulling drink, His purest prayer for His own crucifiers—all this could move anyone who had ears to hear and a heart to feel.

One difficulty remained to be overcome—to recognize the Messiah in a crucified man drawing near to death. But since it was overcome, we may boldly suppose that the repentant man had already, before this, been freer than others from the general prejudice about the Messiah’s undying earthly reign, and had some notion of His sufferings. And why, indeed, should such a supposition be impossible? If history does not greatly favor it, neither does it rule it out entirely. Soon after Jesus Christ’s earthly life, a belief arose among the Jews in two Messiahs, one glorious and one suffering, worked out in full detail. The law of historical continuity tells us that the beginnings of such a way of thinking lie in earlier times. And did the Jews not have before their eyes a great many prophecies in which the Messiah is described as suffering and dying? That these prophecies referred to the Messiah even before Jesus Christ is vouched for by the whole New Testament. It is beyond dispute, besides, that the best of the Jews expected from the Messiah a cleansing of the sins of God’s people (Lk 1:7, 2:30); they believed that His appearing would therefore be bound up with many calamities, that He Himself would be rejected by many (Lk 2:34). But is the step from such a way of thinking to the belief that the Messiah would undergo suffering and death to redeem sin really so great? Even had not a single Jew expected a suffering Messiah, John the Baptist alone, who had presented Jesus Christ as the Messiah and, at the same time, as the «Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world», could have planted in many Jews a belief in a suffering Messiah. This same belief could have arisen in many, too, from Jesus Christ’s own words, who had more than once testified publicly that the Son of Man must suffer, «that He might enter into His glory». In general, one must suppose that the preaching of John the Baptist and of Jesus Christ had greatly weakened the prejudice of an earthly kingdom of the Messiah; otherwise Jesus’s cross would have produced in His followers far more horror and shock than we now see.

Weighing all this, it is not hard to see how one of the two criminals crucified with Jesus Christ suddenly turns out to be, in the Fathers’ own phrase, a martyr, an evangelist, and a prophet. Keenly feeling his own unworthiness, and preparing for death, he sees before him eternity, and the Judge of the living and the dead.

A terrible spectacle! «Oh, what if the Righteous One, suffering beside me, were the Messiah? Yes—it truly is He! In His humiliation, judgment was taken away from Him; He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb He did not open His mouth—He, who raised the dead with a single word! In vain do His enemies count Him ’stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted’. He bears our sins and grieves for us; He suffers for our iniquities: ’the punishment that brings us peace was laid on Him’ (Is 53:1-40). A thought comforting to a conscience wounded by repentance; and the repenting sinner, in a rush of holy feeling, hastens to embrace in faith the cross of the One in whom he sees his Redeemer and Judge: ’Remember me, Lord, when You come into Your kingdom!’»

Yet the repentant thief’s faith is, in any case, worthy of wonder; and whoever possessed it deserved to enter paradise together with the Author and Finisher of faith. Suppose he had known of Jesus Christ’s teaching and miracles—who, among those now mocking Him, did not know of it too? Suppose circumstances had helped bring about his conversion—was the other crucified man not in similar circumstances? Yet we see in him an unrepentant man. The repentant thief did what many, many others, in his place, might perhaps not have done… «Of him—Gregory the Great reasons—only heart and lips remained free; and he offered God as a gift all that he had: «with the heart he believed unto righteousness, and with the mouth he confessed unto salvation»». «I do not know—Blessed Augustine confesses—what this faith could have lacked: truly, Jesus Christ found none like it in the whole Jewish nation, nor even in the whole world». St. Chrysostom noted, further, in the repentant man, a lofty trait of love for his neighbor, which moved him to plead first for his companion’s salvation, and only then to ask the Lord for his own. All the more inexcusable, then, when sinners, abusing the example of the thief who repented on the cross, imagine that, having spent their whole lives in sin, they will manage to reform themselves just before death, and win, by a moment’s repentance, a whole eternity of blessedness. Without denying the comforting truth, arising from the very essence of Christianity, that even the latest repentance, through the power of faith in the Redeemer’s merits, can be genuine—without denying, I say, this truth, which nevertheless, by the very spirit of the Christian religion, requires many qualifications, and whose actual fulfillment in any sinner is known to God alone—it must be said that the example of the thief who repented on the cross is, by its very nature, no less capable of provoking fear than hope. To apply this example to oneself, one must imagine oneself in the thief’s terrible position, and, at the same time, possessed of a faith such as, in Augustine’s words, was found nowhere else in the whole world. After that, everyone will feel what it costs to be granted paradise, seemingly for a single word!

St. Dimitri of Rostov reasoned about the thief who repented on the cross in a similar way, supposing that he was shown mercy, among other things, for certain earlier good qualities and deeds of his, and that sinners, therefore, ought not to abuse this thief’s example by putting off their own repentance until death. «Not all—the hierarch writes—receive this (forgiveness of sins), nor many, but only a certain few, only those who, in their life, sinful though it was, had some good deeds worthy of the Lord’s remembrance and mercy, as is related also of the thief: for when the most pure Mother of God, with her Son and with St. Joseph her betrothed, fleeing from Herod, journeyed into Egypt, robbers somewhere in a desert place fell upon them and wished to take away the donkey on which they carried their small necessities, and on which, at times, the Mother rode with the Child; but one of these robbers, seeing the Child exceedingly fair, and marveling at His unusual beauty, said: were God to take upon Himself a human body, He would be no fairer than this Child—and, having said this, forbade his companions to harm these travelers. That robber was later crucified with our Lord. Hear, then, what manner of repentance and forgiveness is granted at the end of life!» (Works of St. Dimitri, Part 2, 1818 ed., pp. 421-422.)