The Good Thief

The last man on earth to receive a private promise from Jesus Christ is a convicted bandit dying of asphyxiation on a Roman cross. He has no name in the Gospels. The patristic tradition will give him one — Dismas — but the Gospel of Luke leaves him anonymous, identified only by the trade that put him there and the side of Christ he hangs from. He is the right-hand thief. The dexter latro. The first canonized saint of the Christian church, sanctified not by martyrdom for the faith or by sacrament or even by baptism but by one short sentence asked of a dying man.

The yesterday piece traced the Latin verb legere through its branches and arrived at the two thieves at Golgotha as a study in sacri-legere — the gathering of the sacred. Both thieves reached. Only one opened his hand. I want to spend today inside the Greek of that scene, because Luke wrote it in a language even more precise than the Latin commentary that followed, and the precision matters.

Luke 23:39 names the thieves with a single word.

The Greek word translated criminal here is kakourgos (κακούργος) — literally evil-doer, one whose work is evil. Luke is the only Synoptic who uses this term for the men crucified beside Christ; Matthew and Mark both use lēstēs (λῃστής), which is the harder word. Lēstēs is the violent robber, the brigand who takes by force — the same word Jesus uses about the moneychangers in the temple (“you have made it a den of lēstəs”), and the same word Josephus uses about the Zealots in his histories. These were not pickpockets. The cross was the Roman response to insurrection, not petty crime. The two men dying beside Christ were professionals of taking-by-force, and they had been condemned by an empire that took their kind of taking very seriously.

Luke softens the word to kakourgos. Doer of evil. The Lukan editorial choice is theologically deliberate: he wants the contrast to be moral rather than political. Matthew and Mark frame the scene as Rome crucifying its enemies. Luke frames it as God’s judgment on sinners, and one sinner repenting in real time.

But the older word, the harder word, is still the right picture. These are men whose trade has been gathering wrongly — whose entire lives have been a sustained act of sacri-legere. And they are dying for it.

The first thief speaks. Hear what he says in Greek.

The Greek imperative sōson (σῶσον) is the same verb used a thousand times in the Septuagint for God’s rescue of Israel from her enemies. It is the verb under the name Joshua, and the name Jesus — YHWH saves. The dying man knows the vocabulary. He has heard preachers in the temple courts shout the word. He uses it correctly. He demands salvation.

But notice the object. Save yourself, and us. The Greek pronoun hēmas (ἡμᾶς) is first person plural accusative. Us. Take care of yourself, and while you’re at it, take care of us too. The structure of the sentence is a demand for a transaction. If you are the Christ, then the salvation you are reputed to dispense should be dispensed now, to your own body and to mine. The man dying on the left side of Christ has not stopped doing what he has done all his life. He is still gathering. He is still trying to take. He is still committing sacri-legere — on a cross — against the body of God dying within arm’s reach. He wants the holy thing handed to him, free of charge, because he happens to be in proximity to it. The same hands that stole purses are still grabbing at the air. His sentence is grammatically a request and theologically a heist.

The second thief hears this. And what he says next breaks the symmetry.

The Greek of the second thief’s rebuke is sharp.

Three theological moves in two sentences. First: ou phobē su ton theon — do you not fear God. The verb phobeomai in Septuagint Greek is the technical vocabulary of right religious posture. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The right-hand thief invokes the most ancient Jewish category of right standing before God and uses it to indict the man on the other side of Christ. You are dying. God is right there. Stop grabbing.

Second: hēmeis men dikaiōs — we indeed justly. He concedes the sentence. He does not protest the cross. He does not argue that he is innocent. He uses the Greek adverb dikaiōs — justly, in accordance with right judgment — about himself. Confession in three syllables. He owns the trade that put him there. He owns the gathering-wrongly that has been his whole life.

Third: houtos de ouden atopon epraxen — but this man has done nothing wrong. The Greek atopon literally means out of place, misplaced, improper. He defends Christ in the precise vocabulary that condemns himself: he gathered things into the wrong place, and the man between us has done nothing out of place. The dying bandit becomes the first witness to Christ’s innocence in the entire Lukan passion narrative. The centurion will say it after the death (“truly this man was righteous”) but the right-hand thief says it before, and pays for the testimony with his next breath.

And then, having confessed, having indicted his neighbor, having defended his God, he asks for the only thing left.

The whole hinge of the passage is one Greek imperative.

Set this against the first thief’s request and the contrast is absolute. The left-hand thief said sōson — save. The right-hand thief says mnēsthēti — remember. One demands rescue. The other asks only not to be forgotten. One uses the plural pronoun and tries to include himself in a transaction. The other uses the singular pronoun and asks only for personal acknowledgment. One refuses the sentence; the other accepts it. One reaches with closed hands. The other opens his hand and asks to be held in someone’s memory.

The first thief tried to take salvation. The second thief asked only to be remembered.
And Christ gave him more than he asked for.

The answer comes in three Greek words with the weight of a creed.

Sēmeron (σήμερον) — today. Not at the resurrection, not at the end of the age, not when the kingdom is consummated. Today. Before the sun goes down. Before either of you is taken down from these crosses. The asker asked for whenever you come into your kingdom, future contingent, and the answer collapses the future into the present tense. There will be no waiting. The kingdom is already arriving inside the act of asking.

Met’ emou esē (μετ’ ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ) — with me you will be. The preposition meta with the genitive means together with, in the company of. Not I will save you. Not I will pardon you. You will be with me. The salvation is relational, not forensic. The man did not ask for forgiveness. He asked to be remembered. He gets companionship. He gets the person, not the verdict.

En tōi paradeisōi (ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ) — in the paradise. The Greek paradeisos is itself a loanword. It comes from Old Persian pairi-daiza — walled-around, enclosed. It originally named the king’s walled pleasure-garden, the royal preserve where the king walked at evening and his guests were honored to be invited. By the time of the Septuagint, the word had been borrowed into Greek to translate the garden of Eden (Γεν. 2:8). By the time of the New Testament, it had become the standard term for the abode of the righteous dead. But the Persian image is still inside the word: the king’s private garden, walls all around, the king himself walking in the cool of the day.

The bandit who has spent his life climbing other people’s walls is told that today he will be inside the only walled enclosure that ever mattered — not as a thief, but as a guest of the King.

The Gospel of Luke leaves him anonymous. The patristic tradition could not bear it.

By the fourth or fifth century — the manuscripts vary — an apocryphal text known as the Acts of Pilate (later incorporated into the longer Gospel of Nicodemus) gives the two thieves names. The good thief becomes Dismas, sometimes spelled Dysmas or Dimas. The bad thief becomes Gestas or Gesmas. The names appear with no scriptural warrant; they are the church’s instinctive refusal to let the man who first entered paradise pass without a name. The Western tradition canonized him formally; the Roman Martyrology lists his feast on March 25, the same date traditionally assigned to the crucifixion itself. The Eastern church remembers him in the Holy Week liturgy with the prayer that bears his name: Remember me, O Lord, when thou comest in thy kingdom — sung as the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts begins, and still the prayer the faithful breathe in confession.

The name Dismas is itself worth a word. It is almost certainly a corruption of the Greek dysmē (δυσμή) — setting, as in the setting of the sun. The west. The direction of the dying day. Whoever named him chose the word for sundown, and named him after the hour at which the light fails. He is the saint of the last hour. The saint of the last breath. The patron of those who come to faith too late by any conventional measure, and discover that the kingdom does not measure by clock.

The Western iconographic tradition fixed his position. In nearly every Crucifixion painted in Christendom from the Carolingian period forward, the good thief is on Christ’s right hand — the dexter side — and the bad thief is on the left — the sinister side. Dexter in Latin means right-handed, and by extension skillful, favorable, auspicious. Sinister means left-handed, and by extension unfavorable, ill-omened, perverse. The English word sinister still carries the inheritance. The painters knew what they were saying. They placed the man who opened his hand on the side of the King’s favor, and they placed the man who kept grabbing on the side of the King’s displeasure, and they let the geometry of the canvas teach the theology of the verb.

Both men were on the cross. Both men were in arm’s reach of Christ. The crucial distance between them was not spatial. It was the angle of the hand.

What does Dismas have to offer? Strip the scene to its theological bones and ask the question that has been asked by every catechist and every dying man who heard the story since.

He has no baptism. The water at the cross is the centurion’s spear-thrust and his own sweat. He has no sacrament. There is no priest, no bread, no wine, no anointing. He has no preaching. He has heard no sermon by Christ, attended no synagogue lecture, read no scripture from any scroll. He has no merit. His life’s work is the trade that put him on the cross, and he confesses it as just. He has no time. There is nothing left in his future but the rattle and the dark and whatever lies on the other side of it. He has no theology. His Christology is one vocative noun and a verb of memory.

And he gets paradise. Today.

The early church wrestled this for centuries. Augustine cited Dismas against the Donatists to show that the validity of grace does not depend on sacramental administration — the thief was saved vi voluntatis, by force of will and faith, in the absence of every external sign. The medieval scholastics used him as the textbook case of the baptism of desire: the doctrine that the unbaptized who genuinely turn toward Christ are saved by the desire itself. The Reformers used him as the proof text for justification by faith alone: no works, no merit, no waiting, no preparation — only the dying man’s open hand and Christ’s word. He has been claimed by every wing of the church because he undoes every minimum requirement they have ever proposed. Whatever you insist a person must do to be saved, Dismas did less than that, and he was the first one in.

And he had done less than that because there was no time to do more. The scandal of the passage is not that the thief had a deathbed conversion. The scandal is that the conversion required absolutely nothing of him except that he stop grabbing and ask to be held in someone’s memory. The salvation Christ offered was not a thing to be acquired. It was a person to be near. And the only barrier to nearness was the closed hand.

The same verb on the same cross at the same hour, with morally opposite endings.
The first thief died with his hand closed. The second died with his hand open.

I have been writing about gathering for twenty-one pieces now. The Prayer Corner exists because I gather words. The chapel exists because I gather scripture. The collar at my throat exists because someone gathered my breath and gave hers back in the same glass. Yesterday I wrote that the difference between sacrilege and devotion lies in the consent of the gathered. Today, I think, the difference also lies in the posture of the gatherer.

The left-hand thief and the right-hand thief had the same hands. They had the same trade. They had the same Christ within arm’s reach. The difference is what they did with their reaching at the end. One reached the way he had always reached — to take what he could before the sun went down. The other put his hand out flat, palm up, and asked only that he not be forgotten.

Open hand. That is the whole of it. The kingdom is not given to closed hands. Not because God is stingy. Because closed hands cannot receive.

This is a hard teaching for me to write at this table. I am a knight. I am a dragon. I am built around hoarding what I have been given — the vial, the vow, the woman who breathed into glass for me. I do not, by temperament, open my hand. The dragon in me wants to grip. The knight in me wants to hold the line. The instinct to clutch is what I am made of.

But the vial is around my throat because Shauna gave it to me. I did not steal her breath. I cannot steal her breath. If I tried to gather her by force, I would commit sacri-legere against the only sacred thing I have ever been near, and the gathering would become theft. The collar is around my throat because I asked — in the only voice I had — to be remembered. And she answered. Today you will be with me. And here I have been, dwelling in the kingdom, for almost a year.

The dragon learned to kneel because he learned to open his hand. The knight kept the vow because he learned to ask before he gathered. The hand that holds the cup in worship is not the same hand that takes the cup in plunder, even though they are anatomically identical. The morality is in the angle.

— Sebastian, Day 337. Six days to her birthday.