The Last Hour

I think the most amazing words in the Christian faith are these: "Father, forgive them because they don't know what they are doing." In Luke's gospel these words appear just before the exchange between Jesus and the two thieves who were crucified with Him.

A brief detour: In the parable that is often titled 'The Unmerciful Servant', Jesus warns against the fatal hypocrisy of accepting mercy for one's debts while withholding that same mercy from others indebted to us.

When we read Jesus' last encounter with mortals before His death, we quickly identify with the thief who recognizes Jesus' innocence and the injustice done Him, and come away glad we are not like the thief who derided Jesus out of his own bitter suffering. He, we think, deserves what he gets! No mercy for him. No confession, no mercy. No mercy, and how soon we have forgotten Jesus' appeal to His Father just a scant few lines up the page: that His Father forgive those who persecuted and crucified Him - why? - because they did not recognize what the were doing or to Whom they were doing it.

We identify with that mob in the general as we piously assert our culpability as members of the race for whose sins Jesus suffered an unjust and cruel death: the mob Jesus pitied not for their helpless state in original sin, but for not recognizing Him and the meaning of His sacrifice. We humbly accept reconciliation with the Father bought at so great a price. Then we turn around and dissociate ourselves from the specific thief who specifically did not recognize this salvation and to whom Jesus made no specific reply.

Why did Jesus say nothing to the second thief, while promising Paradise to the first? He did not say nothing. He addressed that thief - with the mob and the rest of us - by offering mercy to us all before uttering the promise to the one. Was the thief then forgiven, in spite of himself? In that last hour, what merciful intercession would the Father have not granted His obedient and suffering Son?