The text for this evening’s message comes from the Gospel of Luke, the twenty-third chapter:
One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”Thus far the text.
Dear Friends in Christ,
Today with me you will hear about Jesus. Today with me you will hear about the cross. Today with me you will hear about repentance and forgiveness and the eternal life that Jesus Himself gives. Today, today, you will be with me, and today you will be with Jesus, in paradise.
Jesus says an amazing thing on the cross. It’s easily missed and easily misunderstood. That’s because we often miss the importance of the cross. Now, certainly, the cross is important to us Christians. For sure. we often say that we Lutherans are Christ-centered and cross-focused. That means that we look to Christ and Him alone as the atoner, the revealer of God, the propitiation of our sins, and we do that by seeing exactly what God intended, from the foundation of the earth, for His Son to do, which is to die on a cross.
But, why the cross? Why did Jesus have to die in such a way? Many people say that it could be another way, another manner. But I, and so many others, say that the cross is the only way that Jesus could die. Let’s explore that.
Jesus was sent into the world at a very specific time. It was the first time and last of all time in all of human history that Jesus could come, at least according to human standards. Jerusalem was still standing at that time, having been taken over by a bloodthirsty Roman empire. Jerusalem, the city of peace, would soon be razed to the ground by the rebellion of the Jewish people against the Romans, so any later and Jesus would have missed being able to be in the city itself. And Jerusalem was important. It’s the center of the worship of God in the Temple, where the Jewish people had been worshipping for the last 500 years. It is the city that we Christians know will be recreated in the new earth to come and will be the center for all the world. It was prophesied that the Messiah would reign from that city and will reign from that city, and reign Jesus did, only… it didn’t look like He was reigning at all when you saw Him on that cross. But I digress.
The Jews were also hungry for the Messiah. They had been taken over by the Romans and were anxiously awaiting the coming Messiah. They thought He would be a military ruler, they thought He would cast out the foreign rulers. They thought wrong…
Roads, which we often take for granted, were a new invention of the time, making safe paths on which a person could travel for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles between cities and countries. Never before had international travel been so easy. For this, we must thank the Romans. Roads would make the Gospel of Jesus easily spread throughout the world, from Jerusalem to Antioch to Asia Minor to India to China to Ethiopia to Spain to France to Britain to all the ends of the earth. The Apostles did their jobs of spreading the Gospel well after Jesus ascended into heaven.
Why else was this the perfect timing of God? It was the safest time to travel, too. With roads came garrisons of troops to defend against robbers and insurrectionists. With roads came hotels and taverns. With roads came taxes like driving down the interstate and paying your toll. This meant that only “richer” people could travel and they were well-protected, well-fed, and well-defended.
Koine Greek, the language that the New Testament was written in, became a universal language. If you wanted to do business in this world, you had to know Koine Greek. It made it easy. I remember once while I was on vacation with my family in Florida trying to badly converse with a German-speaking family about the dangers of stepping into the Gulf waters because there was a large influx of jellyfish and Horseshoe Crabs. You step on either one and your feet would kill you. You really needed to wear beach shoes in the water. I was awful at it. I made hand signals, I tried to pantomime the pain, I tried to remember all my grade school German, I was awful and I failed. But in Jesus’ time, if you wanted to converse, everyone knew Greek. It was universal. It made it very easy to tell people in the same language the Gospel of Christ.
It was the perfect time for Jesus to come. These are the earthly reasons it was the fulfillment of God’s timing. But there is a theological reason, too. You see, Jesus Christ came to this earth to identify with sinners. Moreover, He came to earth to live a perfect life and die a sinner’s death in order that you, and me, the chief of sinners, might be granted Christ’s righteousness through His death and be forgiven. And the only way to do this, the only way to truly take on the sinners’ burdens would be to take on the worst death imaginable, the worst punishment ever devised.
You see, at this time, the cross was the worst way to die. It could take hours or it could take days. If you were crucified, you literally hung on a cross, drowning. Your lungs would fill with fluid. Your heart would become enlarged. The pain from the nails was overwhelming. If you didn’t die fast enough, your legs would be broken. The pain of bringing yourself up to breathe would be worse than hanging and suffocating. For the Jews, for the Romans, for anyone who saw the cross up on a hill, it was a torture worse than hell itself.
And Jesus, who is hanging on this hell, who is hanging suspended between the earth and the heavens, is not focused on His own gasping pain, but is focused on paradise.
For so long, Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. He is that Kingdom. Jesus Christ is the Kingdom of God. Jesus Christ is the Kingdom of Heaven. And that Kingdom of God is in a figurative hell and would soon descend, as we confess in the creeds, into the literal hell. The Kingdom of God is at hand and it is a hellish sight.
Isaiah tells us that Jesus in His passion, in His suffering, was so marred, so disfigured, so brutally beaten and whipped and punished that no one wanted to look at Him. There is nothing that would draw us to Him. If fact, we turn away from Jesus. This is no surprise. You see, this is what God intended to do. This is what God desired. This was the wrath of God just beginning to be poured out on Jesus, ultimately culminating in Jesus taking the entire punishment from God for our sins, not for anything He did but for everything we have done. God’s punishment was finished when Jesus died and went straight… to… hell…
And yet, where is Jesus’ focus? It is not on His hell, it is not on His pain, it is not on His punishment. It’s on paradise. “Today, you will be with me in paradise,” Jesus proclaims to His fellow criminal. Today. Today. It’s more than just heaven that Jesus is talking about, because Jesus is heaven on earth. It’s more than just relief. It’s more than just comfort. It is all of that, but it is more. It’s paradise.
And what is paradise? Well, to get to the heart of that, we have to see how else God had used the word “paradise.” And that’s made clear to us in Revelation 2:7, where Jesus says to the Church, “To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” And where was that tree of life? Think back to Genesis. The tree of life is in the garden of Eden. This garden, this perfect place of God’s creation was created for us humans to live in. When we sinned, it was taken away until the full time of Christ had come, when He will make a new heaven and a new earth.
But Jesus says to the criminal that that very day he would be with Jesus in paradise. That means that the criminal would be eating from the tree of life in paradise. Now, we can certainly look to that and say that’s heaven. And that’s true. But, there’s something more there. Something for you. For today, you will be with Christ in paradise and you will be eating from that tree of life. Paradise is at hand, just as the Kingdom of God is at hand, and that is in the very visage, the very image of the crucified Christ, His blood and water and sweat and tears and pain. That is paradise.
It doesn’t look like it, does it? When we think of the crucified Christ, we sure don’t think, “Oh, that looks like a nice place to visit. That’s a pretty picture. That would make a good vacation spot.” And that’s kinda the point. The paradise that is promised to us doesn’t look how we want it. But… the paradise that God intended is found in the bloodied and dead Christ and that cross is the tree of life from which we eat. This is what you and I were baptized into. We were baptized into the death of Christ. Our baptism has covered us in the blood of Christ. Our baptism drowned us just as it drowned Christ. Ultimately, paradise is not just our pretty little places, but it is the forgiveness found in Jesus Christ in His all-atoning sacrifice, His bloody and nasty looking death. And we eat of this tree, this cross, don’t we? We gather around the Lord’s Table and we eat the flesh of Christ, crucified and risen for us, and we drink of His blood, shed and regenerated for us.
No one around Jesus wanted to be a part of His death and His torture, that’s why all the disciples ran away from Jesus. But it’s what God wanted us to be a part of. And why? Because you are a sinner. You are a damnable sinner, worthy of the hell that Jesus experienced and went to. But Jesus, Jesus took your place. Jesus came at the exact right time, the full time of God’s intention, and took your place on the cross. With each pounding of the nails that went into Christ’s body, the echoes of His sacrifice ring back and forth through time, touching each and every person who has lived, who is living, and who will ever live.
Paradise. It’s more than just a place, it is a state of being. You are forgiven. You are in paradise with Christ. You eat of that tree, which for Christ was a tree of death, but for you, is a tree of life. Today, tomorrow, the next day, being in Jesus Christ, clinging to His death and resurrection, you will be with Christ in paradise. Amen.
Now may the peace that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.
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