_His Words to the Thief_.
"_And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To-day shall thou
be with Me in Paradise_."
The crucifixion of the two robbers with Jesus was a sort of topstone of
obloquy and disgrace contrived by His murderers with the double object of
further humiliating Him in the eyes of the people, and of adding poignancy
to His own agony. The vulgarity and shamefulness of it were the last touch
of their contempt, and the last stroke of His humiliation. There was a
kind of devilish ingenuity in this circumstantial way of branding Him as a
malefactor. And yet in the presence of this extremity of human wickedness
and cruelty, Jesus found an opportunity of working a wondrous work of God;
a work which reveals Him as the Saviour, strong to save, both by His
infinite mercy and by His infinite confidence in the efficacy of His own
sacrifice.
"_To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise_." Eyes and heart for the
_sorrowful_ He had, as we see; and now ears, and hope nigh at hand,
for the _sinful_. No word of resentment; no sense of distance or
separation between the spotlessness and perfection of His character and
this poor lonely convict--but a strange and wonderful nearness, now and to
come. "_With Me_," He says--"_With Me in Paradise_." Ah! this is
the secret of much in the life of the Son of God--this intimate, constant,
conscious nearness to sinners and to sin! He had sounded the depth of
evil, and, knowing it, He pitied, with an infinite compassion, its
victims; He got as near as He could to them in their misery, and died to
save them from it.
That heart-nearness to the thief had nothing to do with the nearness of
the crosses. Every one knows what a gulf may be between people who are
very near together--father and son--husband and wife! No, it was the
nearness of a heart deliberately trained to seek it; a heart delighting in
mercy, and deliberately surrendering all other delights for it; hungering
and thirsting for the love of the lost and ruined.
The hart panteth after the waters,
The dying for life that departs,
The Lord in His glory for sinners
For the love of rebellious hearts.
And so He is quite ready, at once, to share His heaven with this poor
defiled creature, the first trophy of the cross. Again--what a lesson of
love!--how different, all this, from the common inclination to shrink away
from contact and intercourse with the vile! Oh, shame, that there can ever
have been such a shrinking in our poor guilty hearts! The servant is not
above his Lord. He came to sinners. Let us go to them with Him!