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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
For what reason do we believe in God? Why do we confess faith in Jesus? For what purpose do we come to church? Are we looking for earthly blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Good health? A better job? A network of friends? In today’s Gospel Reading (which at first seems at least a little odd for the Last Sunday of the Church Year), St. Luke by Divine‑inspiration uniquely tells us how one of the criminals who were crucified with Jesus joined the scoffing rulers and the mocking soldiers by railing at Jesus, with words that could be taken as a confession of faith and plea for salvation but are described as blaspheming. Perhaps the criminal did not take Jesus’s powers seriously, or perhaps the criminal wanted to use Jesus’s powers for his own purpose: to escape his cross and death, to cheat justice, and to go on living a wicked life. The other criminal, who St. Matthew and St. Mark tell us had also reproached Jesus earlier (Matthew 27:44; Mark 15:32), by this point was of a different kind and so rebuked the first criminal and asked Jesus, not to help him escape death, but to remember him when Jesus came into His Kingdom. And, Jesus said to that second criminal that that very day he would be with Him in paradise. As we this morning reflect on this Gospel Reading, we realize that “Jesus remembers us, and so we will be with Him in Paradise.”
When the Lord spoke to the people in today’s Old Testament Reading (Malachi 3:13‑18), He said their words have been hard against Him. Some of them denied it, but others feared the Lord, and so their names were recorded in a book of remembrance in order for them to be spared in the End. The things the first group said then sound like things that in our time we might hear others say, or that we ourselves might say. “It is vain to serve God.” “What is the profit of our keeping His charge or of walking as in mourning before the Lord of hosts?” The arrogant are called blessed. Evildoers not only prosper but also put God to the test and escape, or at least seem to escape for now. Even if we do not say or think those things, or blasphemously rail at Jesus, as did the first criminal crucified with Jesus, some of our thoughts, words, and deeds nevertheless are “hard against the Lord”. We may complain that our belief, confession, and church attendance do not get us the things we sinfully want. We are sinful by nature, and our sinful nature leads us to commit countless actual sins. Apart from faith in Jesus Christ, we not only deserve death here in time, the same sentence of condemnation that the two criminals crucified with Jesus received as the due reward for their deeds, but we also deserve torment in hell for eternity, if we do not repent.
The first criminal typifies the impenitence that leads to condemnation, and the second criminal typifies the penitence that leads to salvation. Those two attitudes or states divide all people even today and in the End will result in the kind of obvious distinction between the righteous and the wicked that today’s Old Testament Reading mentioned. God seems to have used the events of Jesus’s crucifixion—such as His praying for the forgiveness of those crucifying Him—to change the heart of the second criminal, for he penitently accepted his punishment as just but joined that acceptance with faith that God would not condemn him eternally. God wants likewise to change our hearts to accept our punishment penitently and trust that God will not condemn us eternally. As we repent and believe, “Jesus remembers us, and so we will be with Him in Paradise.”
The scoffing rulers, mocking soldiers, and first, railing criminal all truthfully spoke of Jesus’s being a Savior. The second criminal called Jesus by His Name that means “Savior” (Matthew 1:21). The second criminal believed that the Man being crucified on the cross next to him was in fact God’s anointed Savior, the Messiah, the Christ. The second criminal confessed Jesus as such, and the second criminal sought from Jesus salvation beyond the cross. The second criminal knew that Jesus Himself was sinless but had carried to the cross the sins of the whole world, including the sins of both criminals and also your sins and mine—our blasphemy of Jesus or other hard words against the Lord, or whatever our sins might be. The Man being crucified on the cross next to that second criminal was no mere Man but a man in Whom, as St. Paul put it in today’s Epistle Reading (Colossians 1:13-20), all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Whom God reconciled to Himself all things, making peace by the blood of Jesus’s cross. And so, in Jesus we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
We should not fail to notice that Jesus prayed for the group of those crucifying Him but essentially individually absolved the second criminal who individually confessed his sin. Sacraments such as Baptism, Absolution, and Communion apply the Words of the Gospel and so the forgiveness of sins to us as individuals. The second criminal is usually said to be an exception to the necessity of Baptism and Communion for salvation, but his being such an exception—not because he despised those gifts but because he did not have opportunities to receive them—is said to prove the rule of their necessity for salvation. Likewise we should not fail to notice the “book of remembrance” in today’s Old Testament Reading and the second criminal’s pleading for Jesus to “remember” him. Although we who are baptized are said thereby to have our names written in a book of life, God is not likely to otherwise forget us! We are at greater risk of forgetting Him! So, as the Passover meal and Feast of Unleavened Bread were a “memorial” and “reminder” (Exodus 12:14; 13:9), so in the Sacrament of the Altar, we “remember” Him by invoking Him (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24-25), and He answers by revealing Himself and being present in bread and wine with His Body and Blood, to forgive our sins, and so to give us life and salvation.
The second criminal prayed Jesus to act to save him when Jesus came into His Kingdom, such as in the End, on the Last Day, when, as we heard last week, the Son of Man comes in a cloud of God’s power and great glory (Luke 21:27). Jesus’s answer to that prayer was far better: Jesus said that that very day—not at some indefinite future time, not after lingering for three to four days in agony on a cross, but that very day—the second criminal would be with Him in Paradise. Every time you and I pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are praying both that God’s Kingdom would come by our believing His holy Word and leading godly lives here in time and there in eternity, and that God would deliver us from evil ultimately by taking us from this valley of sorrow to Himself in heaven. Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, or next week, next month, or next year, but such a “today” will come for us also, either with our own deaths or with our Lord’s Final Coming. What was done for the second criminal will at that time also be done for us: we will be with Jesus in Paradise—the perfect fellowship with God that Adam and Eve lost in the Garden will be restored, and He will share with us all good things, including His eternal feast and its great joy.
Even if those who depart in the faith have to wait until the resurrection of the body to fully experience the joys of the renewed sky and earth, immediately after their earthly deaths they have a happy life in God’s presence. Today’s Gospel Reading offers such great comfort as we consider both the state of those who have gone before us in the faith and our own future states! We believe in God, confess faith in Jesus, and come to church precisely for such salvation. We have realized and “remember” that, despite our sins, as we live each day in repentance and faith, “Jesus remembers us, and so we will be with Him in Paradise”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +