Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.
The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.” The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar, and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”
There was written notice above him, which read: This IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.
One of the criminals who hung their hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”
Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” Luke 23:32-43
There were three crosses on Calvary.
Few took notice of it on that day, the day Jesus was crucified. But there were three crosses.
In InnerCHANGE, we want to take notice of those other two crosses because we will meet the people who hung on them over and over throughout the poor communities of our world. Today we take those three crosses as a symbol of the work God is doing in us and through us.
Take a moment to read Luke 23:32-43 carefully. Perhaps it is an unusually somber passage for our induction but it is one that sets out the context from which we have taken the symbol, three crosses.
The day Jesus was crucified, those who stood at the foot of His cross gazed up at Him with intensity—the intensity of frenzied hate, or the intensity of frantic pain. They came to hurl abuse, or they came to weep.
Those who came to weep stood a little way off from the crowd. They must have stared at that silhouette of the cross and wondered, “How did it all come down to this? How did all the pictures we were drawing in our hopes and dreams come to be reduced to two simple lines….”
Jesus’ followers had been drawing mental pictures for days—extravagant pictures, fantastic pictures; pictures of religious revival, of political justice, of a powerful kingdom. Some saw themselves leading armies, throwing off the Roman yoke, turning back time to the glory years of David. Still others drew pictures of themselves ushering in a brave new world.
None of them were drawing pictures of the cross.
And yet, those two simple lines that come together in the cross form the intersection of all that is redemptive in history. Thus the cross has become a symbol the church has taken to represent the pinnacle expression of Christ’s glory.
The day Jesus was crucified, John, the disciple, was in that crowd. You can be sure that it was not his expectation that love would drive Jesus to the cross. Nor was it his expectation that in that moment of Jesus’ great glory, the men who shared the right and left positions at his side—the very positions he and his brother James had coveted only days before on the road to Jerusalem–would be occupied by two common thieves.
But it is unlikely that John was reflecting on those things. He hadn’t come to Calvary to witness the crucifixion of the other two.
No one came for the other two. But they were there….there were three crosses on Calvary.
Long before a crowd gathered at Calvary, there were those two. They were the “transgressors” pictured with Christ in God’s word, centuries before. In a snapshot from Isaiah we see:
Because He poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors, yet He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors. Isaiah 53:12
Consider this: it was God’s plan that His Son be born cradled in a common manger and die on the cross, cradled between two common thieves.
Who were those thieves? No one knew their names that day. No one ever does.
They were two men from the depths of society, hauled out to be crucified with Jesus. Whether they were from the bottom of society originally we cannot tell. What we can be certain of is that they had “hit bottom.” We know this because Pilate, in his impulsive bitterness sought out the lowest of the low to accompany Jesus in order to strike back at the Jewish leaders who had manipulated him. For their part, the Jewish leaders were just as content to have two thieves crucified with Christ because their presence further discredited Jesus.
However the thieves were used that day, we can say this—they were not put up with Christ to be known, but to be displayed—to be displayed as thieves.
It is ironic that the day Jesus died was a day rich in recorded details. Characters who played only bit parts in the tragedy all have names and descriptions. We have Simon the Cyrene who shouldered Jesus’ cross; Barrabas the Zealot, the murderer who was released in place of Jesus. We have Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the High Council who helped to bury Jesus. In contrast, we have no details about the thieves. No one remembered their names or where they came from—only that there were two of them.
Isn’t that always the way it is with those on the bottom? The poor are commonly numbered, but rarely named. It seems we know an awful lot about poverty; it’s poor people we don’t know.
But thankfully, man’s ways are not God’s ways. From God’s perspective, two men only He remembered went to the cross and came face to face with the Son of the Living God. Who would have guessed that two common thieves, without names, without distinction, should distinguish themselves for all time by stealing precious moments in Jesus’ last few hours?
Credit it to the upside-down Kingdom that these two thieves be-came the recipients of Jesus’ final evangelism. Credit it to God’s faithfulness to His word that “many who are last will be first.”
Again, who were these men? They had no names, no histories. What can we infer about them? And finally, why do we lift them up as a symbol for InnerCHANGE?
In their gospels, Matthew and Mark call them “robbers,” a term that suggests they were bandits with a social cause. Scholars have suggested that these two thieves were outlaws against the system, robbing the rich and giving to the poor.
Certainly there was tremendous tension between the rich and the poor in those days. Palestine was a hotbed of counter-culture bands directed against the Jewish ruling class, which was seen to have gone hand-in-glove with the Roman authorities. Over ninety percent of Palestine lived in poverty or at its edge. What drove that poverty was a system of double taxation in which Jews paid heavily to both the temple and the empire.
Certainly there was tremendous tension between the rich and the poor in those days. Palestine was a hotbed of counter-culture bands directed against the Jewish ruling class, which was seen to have gone hand-in-glove with the Roman authorities. Over ninety percent of Palestine lived in poverty or at its edge. What drove that poverty was a system of double taxation in which Jews paid heavily to both the temple and the empire.
One can speculate that these two thieves were Robin Hood figures, victims of injustice, pushed into lives of theft. But perhaps the most reliable information we have about these two thieves comes from their own lips. Both Matthew and Mark record that during the first two hours on the cross, the two thieves “hurled abuse” at Jesus.
As ministers in InnerCHANGE, we’ve seen it a thousand times in our own neighborhoods—the nagging low self-esteem that finds expression in harsh abusive language. When measured against our experience among those at the bottom, these two appear to be tough men in tough times, more thieves than social revolutionaries, men who had responded to the grinding realities of their day by stealing.
The thief who had the change of heart and had the priceless exchange with Jesus confirmed that they were punished for good reason (Luke 23:41). It is unlikely that an idealist, a Robin Hood figure dying a martyr’s death, would be so acutely aware of his own sin.
Whether social bandits or street thieves, these two men were the downtrodden Jesus spoke of when He inaugurated His Kingdom in the temple proclaiming Isaiah 61. These were the sick in need of a physician, the ones we befriend in InnerCHANGE. Notice the continuity here: Jesus began and ended His ministry calling attention to the unfortunate who had slipped through society’s cracks. For this reason we remember the two thieves today, and include their crosses with our Savior’s as a symbol for InnerCHANGE.
In InnerCHANGE, our staff commit to join Jesus in His incarnation to the poor. We will continue to meet the two thieves many times over on this journey. They will have names like Mario, Sergio, Sokny, and Derrick.
In InnerCHANGE, the point is not to celebrate the two thieves, nor to condemn them, but to celebrate Jesus among them. Likewise, it is not our task to justify or excuse those at the bottom of society. We are not primarily in the business of rehabilitating the image of the poor but of redeeming poor men and women.
What further insights can we take away from these two men and their significant encounter with Jesus? Let me share seven I see.
First: we do not incarnate to the poor first because they are best. We go to them first because the world makes them last. The two thieves show us that. They are introduced to us without names, backgrounds. They are only numbers. But God does not know people in this way. He inscribes our names in the palm of His hand. Further-more, those who have been numbers here will be names in the book of Life for all those who have come to know Him.
That brings me to my second point. As in the case of the two thieves, we will find that when we go to those the world makes last, the last are no less lost than the first. John Dawson writes, “People deserve to be damned.” The two thieves did. The two thieves knew it.
People who are not in poverty, who have never been in poverty, often speculate that poverty has its advantages. Some imply that poverty might somehow mysteriously excuse people for not knowing Christ. Let us make no mistake about this: poverty has spiritual merits, but in and of itself it cannot redeem.
This is the urgency, which compels us in InnerCHANGE. The poor and downtrodden consistently remain the least reached people with the only One who has life. This brings me to a third point about life.
Like the disciples envisioning a new world order in the first, exhilarating days of Jerusalem, we have been encouraged to draw pictures of what life in America can and should be. Some of these sketches of the “American dream” have come to cloud our theology. And some of these images creep into our work with the poor.
In the years that I have been alive in America, we have been encouraged to pursue the good life and aspire to a better life for our children. We have been admonished to defend the American way of life at home, while promoting the democratic way of life abroad. In the workplace, we are told to lead a productive life. More recently, with fault lines threatening our consumer society, we are cautioned to measure the quality of life and asked to advance an ecologically sound life.
Many of these causes are worthy, and in part coincide with the good news of Christ’s life. But we must drop the adjectives and qualifiers when we work on Jesus’ behalf. First and foremost, Jesus wants to give life. Period. We see this in the encounter between Jesus and the thief—there is repentance, then there is the promise of life. No time is spent lamenting class inequality, political systems, dysfunctional backgrounds or anything that tries to cling to life and rob it of its vibrancy.
My fourth point begins as a question: How much theology did it take for Jesus to redeem the thief? The answer, of course, is “none.” When we look back at the communication between the thief and Jesus we see only a sincere plea to enter the kingdom and Jesus’ promise. That’s all. What persuaded the thief to seek and find Jesus was simply His holy and righteous presence.
InnerCHANGE is first and foremost a “presence” ministry. Now please do not read an anti-intellectual bias in this. Ours is Christianity for the streets—not the archives. As we travel among the lost and blind we will be handled. I believe our beauty will in large part be in the handling. We have committed to be the hands and feet of Jesus. Let us remember, as J. Oswald Sanders reminds us, that those hands and feet are nail-pierced.
Fifth: As we take life to the streets, we will not only be handled, but we will often be rejected and reviled by the very people we go to be among. Again, the thieves give evidence to this. The first two gospels say both thieves started out reviling Jesus. Only one definitely came to accept Him. So we must be careful in our expectations among the poor, careful to peg our expectations to Christ who is faithful to His word even when people are not, not to peg them to the poor who may or may not receive us and the One who sends us.
Sixth: As Donald Kraybill writes, “Jesus isn’t the welfare king.” We may, like Jesus was, be tempted to turn stones to bread. Even as Jesus hung on the cross, one thief cruelly and sarcastically tempted Him away from His agenda, saying “save yourself and us.” Let us remember: Jeremiah tells us to take up the cause of the poor. He does not tell us to be co-opted by the poor. We belong to Jesus, not the poor. And Jesus is always first the liberator of the human heart, not first a liberationist.
We must be willing to declare the word, not just what is popular in the word. So don’t accommodate the poor by changing the word. Likewise, don’t accommodate the rich, who would deny the poor, by changing the word. Resist the temptation to airbrush out difficult passages of the word. Humble yourselves, not the word.
Finally: Two-thirds of the world is poor. The numbers literally overwhelm. We may be tempted to fall into guilt or despair. In our guilt, we may work harder—as if it all depends upon us, not God. You see, Satan is still at work peddling original sin. If he cannot tempt us to be like God through pride, he will tempt us to be like God and as-sume His job through guilt and insufficient faith.
There are no easy answers to the numbers dying spiritually and physically in poverty. We are good Samaritans on the road and many people need to be taken to the inn. We have to stop lining up with the smart Pharisees who survey the huge undertaking and say: “Who is my neighbor?…Who do I have to help?” Instead, we must align with the Samaritan and fools for Christ like apostle Paul and humbly ask, “Am I a neighbor?” Then we must be willing to act the neighbor’s part, quickly and quietly, moving into the world of the poor if necessary.
InnerCHANGE is small. We may always be small. We may never get “to the top.” Still we must not grow weary in doing good works as good neighbors even if we cannot read our credits in the “big picture.” One of our signature statements in the early days of InnerCHANGE is just as relevant today as it was then: “Service isn’t the way to the top. It is the top.”
Some of us may be part of small teams that are not growing or may even be shrinking. The human impulse is to react negatively. We cannot always tell why we go through lean seasons. But I can say this, as I go through scripture it appears that the remnant is always enough to do God’s work.
There were three crosses on Calvary. Few took notice of it that day. Few take notice of it now. But we don’t take notice of those other two crosses in our symbol for InnerCHANGE primarily to redress the world’s forgetfulness—though that would be a powerful motive. Nor do we include those two crosses to ascribe a dignity to the two thieves that goes beyond the facts. They were men no better than us—men in need; above all, men who need Jesus.
We take three crosses as a symbol because in this pivotal moment of Jesus’ glory, God demonstrated His priority for the poor by sharing the spotlight with two from the bottom. We do not need to magnify scripture on this point—simply we can let the fact of Christ’s presence among the poor speak for itself. It is that presence we continue to declare.
