A letter from Paradise

A Letter from Paradise

Text:  Luke 23:23-33

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA, 11-20-2016)

Dear Mom and Dad,

I am writing to you from Paradise. You will not locate it on any map for it is a reality not bound by time and space. I hope you will find it soon enough or that it might find you, as it did me.

I have so much to say to you, things that I could never have said before now, but things that must be said. I hurt you more than I can explain and more than I can only hope that you may someday forgive. I can’t imagine the pain you endured watching me nailed to posts of wood and listening to the drunken chants of “Hang ‘em up” coming from a mean and angry crowd.

I wonder if in some ways you did not feel some relief at the end of that miserable day. The pain I put you through, though, started long before as day after day you watched helplessly as I kept company with crooks, with insurrectionists, only soon to become one myself. No child should put parents through such torture and for so long as I did and with little remorse.

Somehow, in Paradise, things are clearer than I could ever manage to see while I was with you. The sky began to clear for me, though, on your side of Paradise. It cleared while I was hanging from the cross and watching the circus of death around me. It is hard not to focus solely on what is happening to you at a the time of an execution, but the focus in that trash heap outside Jerusalem was never on me.

The crowd was not the typical group who never missed a public execution. Yes, there were the usual suspects, families with picnic baskets and bottles of wine, out to celebrate the deaths of crooked criminals, having convinced themselves that one more death would make them feel that much safer. On my own death day, if you noticed, the crowd also included the most powerful religious, political, and military leaders in Jerusalem, people who convict but who rarely spectate at executions.

The Jerusalem leaders came to our field of crosses not so much to make sure I died, but that he died. Of everyone in the crowd, they were the one shouting the loudest. “Save yourself, Messiah!” “If you are the mighty King of the Jews, save us from Mighty Rome.” Even a fellow thief on a nearby cross, used his few breaths to shout, “Save yourself and us, for that matter!”

I thought to myself, “Save us from what?” “Why save us?” was something I also thought. As you are painfully aware, I was guilty. There was no saving me from that hard and ugly truth. Still they shouted:  “Save us!” Most of the shouts were not serious. They were terrible taunts of the one beside me, also bleeding from every pore of his body, a so-called “Savior” who could not manage to even save himself. They shouted their obscenities as if he was getting exactly what he deserved.

I did not join them. I can’t tell you what it was that made me say what I finally said, made me not join in the heated chorus of hate. It wasn’t because I was above their petty, ignorant, chants. I was a criminal. Maybe that was it. Something about a criminal knows another criminal, as if both are wearing an unmistakable badge of dishonor. There was nothing criminal about this man. I even heard him cry out, “Forgive, forgive them, for they have no idea what they are doing.” He prayed for the very ones who were executing him. Trust me, I did not join him.

 To this day, I do not know why I did not join the chorus. How did I know that there was so much more to this man than could be contained by a cross? What I did know is that I was not going to ask him to save me. Save me for what? Save me from what was coming to me until I found myself up here again a few years later? I did not want him to save me. I wanted so much more. So, I asked him. I asked more of him than I had ever asked of anyone. I asked more than I even knew I was asking. 

I asked him to “remember me.” I don’t know if you were close enough at that moment to hear me utter those words. If you were, I can only imagine you thought that the pain had made me lose my mind. Asking another dying man to “remember” must have sounded like asking a sheep to dance.  

As you know, I had never been much of a believer in God. It seemed like a game for simple fools and I may have been a criminal, but I was no fool. I listened to this man hanging next to me and somehow it finally made sense, all this God talk. Somehow I knew that I did not have to go looking for God, God was hanging next to me on a cross. This God was not the powerful tyrant of my childhood. I had left that God behind years ago. No, this God was far more powerful than any tyrant. This God was willing to love and forgive, even the very ones dealing in death.

So, I asked him to “remember me” and he said something that still brings chills to me. He said, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.” And, he kept his word. I did join him but I can no more explain Paradise to you now than I could when he first spoke those words to me. The best I can manage is to say that Paradise is being known by God, God finding us even when do not know that we are lost.

Whatever sense you make of your own lives all these years later and whatever grief over me still grips you, I ask you not to remember that horrible day, but to remember the one who was hanging next to me. He spoke words of forgiveness that only made the crowd laugh that much louder. He meant every word, including his promise for me to join him in Paradise.

Mom and Dad, I do not know if you still pray, but if you do, I commend a simple prayer that opened a new reality to me. I prayed that he remember me someday, when he came into his kingdom. He answered me not “someday” but “today.”

I write you today hoping that you will pray the same words I prayed that dreadful day. Pray “remember me.” When you do, you might well find yourself with one foot already in what is my home, in a place called Paradise.