Nothing in His Hands

Three men were led out to be crucified that day, and two of them had earned it.

Luke calls them criminals. Matthew and Mark call them robbers, and tradition has called the one in this book the thief ever since. None of the four Gospels gives their names, their crimes, their towns or their ages. What the record keeps is where they hung. They crucified Him there, along with the criminals, one on His right and the other on His left.

One of them is in this book. The only thing he ever said to Jesus fits on one line, and so does the answer he got.

It was a loud place. Luke lists the voices in order. The people stood and watched. The rulers sneered, He saved others; let Him save Himself. The soldiers mocked him and offered him sour wine. A sign was posted over his head, THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS, and John adds that it was written in three languages. It wasn’t meant kindly.

And the men on either side of him joined in.

Matthew says it flatly. In the same way, even the robbers who were crucified with Him berated Him. Mark says the same: even those who were crucified with Him berated Him. Both of them. So whatever happened on that hill, it didn’t start with a good man hanging next to Jesus. It started with two men dying the worst way the empire knew how to kill anyone, and spending some of their last breath mocking the man between them.

Luke is the one who records a change. He tells it as one criminal against the other, and he doesn’t say what happened in the hours before. Reading the three accounts together, the likeliest picture is that both men mocked him early and one of them stopped. That’s an inference. The text doesn’t narrate the turn. It only shows you the other side of it.

It’s worth sitting with anyway, because one thing Luke does record is what Jesus said as soon as they had crucified him. Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. A man hanging a few feet away would have heard that. Nobody says it was the reason he changed. But he was close enough to hear.

The other criminal kept at it. Are You not the Christ? he said. Save Yourself and us! It’s the same line the soldiers used, with one addition. Get us down too.

And the man on the other side answered him.

Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same judgment? We are punished justly, for we are receiving what our actions deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.

There’s no defense in it. No story about how he ended up there, no bad childhood, no unfair judge. We are punished justly. He had it coming, and he said so, out loud, while it was happening to him. Then he said the one thing about Jesus that the rulers and the soldiers and the crowd had all missed: he hadn’t done anything.

Notice who he said it to. Not to Jesus, and not to the crowd. To the other criminal, the one man on that hill with even less to lose than he had. In Luke’s account, it’s the only time anybody in the whole scene speaks up for Jesus. The rulers didn’t. The soldiers didn’t. The friends were standing a long way off, and Luke doesn’t record a word from them. The one voice raised on his side that afternoon belonged to a condemned man who admitted in the same breath that he deserved to be there.

He had no standing to defend anyone. He did it anyway.

Then he turned his head.

Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”

He called him by his name. Older English Bibles have him say Lord there, following later manuscripts. The earliest ones have the name.

Look at what he didn’t have.

He had no time. Crucifixion was slow, but it only went one direction, and he knew where it was going. Whatever he’d done with his life was finished and on the record.

He had nothing in his hands. They were nailed. He couldn’t give anything, fix anything, pay anything back, or make up for a single day of it.

He had no future to prove himself in. He couldn’t promise to do better. There was no better coming. He’d never be baptized, never stand up in a meeting, never be asked to help with anything, never get a chance to show the change was real.

He didn’t even ask to come down. The other man wanted rescue. This one asked to be remembered. That’s all. When you get there, don’t forget me.

And Jesus, who was dying too, answered him.

Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.

Today. Not after a probation. Not once it had been proven. Not after a lifetime of service he no longer had. The same afternoon.

It’s grace with no time left to earn it. There was nothing he could add, and nothing got added. He came into it with his hands empty and nailed open, and the answer was with me.

The record doesn’t linger. Luke moves straight on to the darkness over the land from the sixth hour to the ninth, and the veil of the temple torn down the middle, and Jesus crying out with a loud voice, Father, into Your hands I commit My Spirit. Then a centurion saying this was a righteous man. Then the people who’d come to watch going home beating their chests. Then his friends, and the women from Galilee, standing at a distance.

The thief isn’t mentioned again. Nobody records his name, or when he died that day, or where he was buried. John adds that the soldiers came and broke the legs of the two men crucified with Jesus, so the bodies would be down before the Sabbath. That’s the last the Bible says about him, and it isn’t even about him. It’s about the timetable.

He left behind one sentence, and one sentence was said back to him. That’s the whole file.

Where this meets your week

The years you can’t make up for. There’s a stretch of your life you’d trade a great deal to have back. Things said, money spent, people let down, time that went to the wrong thing. Some of it can’t be repaired because the people are gone or the moment is. He had a whole life he couldn’t repair, and he didn’t try to. He said we are punished justly and turned his head. Write down the stretch you can’t make up for, in one plain line, without the explanation. Then put the pen down. You’re not balancing an account. You’re telling the truth about it.

The sense that you’d need to get your life together first. Maybe you’ve thought about God, or prayer, or going back to something, and stopped yourself because you’d have to clean things up before it would be honest. Quit the drinking, fix the marriage, become someone steadier. He couldn’t clean up anything. He had the afternoon and a few feet of distance. If you’ve been waiting to be presentable, notice that nobody in this scene was. Don’t wait on it this week.

Someone who’s running out of time. A parent in hospice. A friend whose diagnosis has a number on it. Somebody who’s said they don’t believe much of anything anymore, and doesn’t have the years left to work it out. It’s tempting to think it’s too late for them to be anything but what they were. This man had hours. If there’s somebody like that in your life, go sit with them this week. Don’t bring a speech. Just be close enough to be heard.

The loud place. Some of what you remember about faith is noise. People arguing, people certain, people mocking, a sign on the wall that said one thing while the room did another. He was in the loudest place in the Gospels, and the conversation that mattered was two sentences long. You don’t have to shout over any of it. You can turn your head.

Say the shortest prayer in the book.

Jesus, remember me. That’s it. You don’t have to finish it the way he did if the rest doesn’t fit. You don’t have to believe all the right things first, or know what kingdom means, or be certain who hears it. Say it once, tonight, out loud if you can, and then stop.

Don’t add anything. Don’t promise to do better, don’t explain, don’t make a plan. The whole point of this one is that there’s nothing to add to it.

The list of everyone standing around the cross that day is a long one: people, rulers, soldiers, a centurion, the crowd going home, friends at a distance. In Luke’s telling, only one person in all that noise got an answer from the cross, and it was the man who brought nothing.

Today you will be with Me. The word Paradise appears once in the four Gospels. It was said to him.