Paradise. What sort of place is it? What sights lie before your eyes? Which scents enter your nostrils? What sorts of sounds greet your ears? Which tastes linger on your tongue? How does the ground beneath your feet feel? How does the air moving around your body feel? How does your heart feel in this place? And, last but not least, who is in paradise with you?
Jesus promises paradise to a man who acknowledges that he is far from it. The word used in this promise – Παραδείσῳ (Paradeisō) – indicates an enclosed garden, the sort of well-arranged, verdant, and pleasant park through which God walks in the cool of the evening in the first chapters of Genesis. Eden is the original paradise for humanity.
The man to whom Jesus spoke the promise did not ask for paradise, however. All he asked was to be remembered by Jesus when Jesus entered his kingdom. Jesus exceeds this request not only with the assurance of paradise but also with a paradise where he, Jesus, is with the dying man today in it. In effect, Jesus promised himself to the man, because paradise is in reality not a particular place but instead a particular relationship. It is living in full, free communion with God in the now that knows no end or beginning. It is letting ourselves be fully known, embraced, and transformed by the Father, Son, and Spirit. It is walking with God in the cool of the evening, the heat of midday, and beyond all time.
In this sense of paradise, the man at Jesus’ side was promised exactly what he asked for: to be remembered by Jesus, seen fully for what he was and not despised for it but rather integrated back into the community, the body. This was not an easy request to make. Adam and Eve had done the very opposite, attempting to hide the shameful parts of themselves from each other and God and disrupting the relationship that gave them life. To have Jesus – God – remember us is to have our sins and our failures recorded alongside our virtues and victories. I, for one, would like to imitate Adam and Eve and obscure some – some days a lot – of me, all of the ways I’ve wounded people, including myself, through betrayal and selfishness, through apathy and cowardice. I’d also like to have God forget all the times I’ve put everything but God at the center of my life and devotion. The good thief, as we call him in tradition, knew and accepted that his sins were clear before God, and still he asked to be remembered with these as part of his human complexity. I pray to have the courage to do the same.
The saying goes that hell is other people, but really hell is our selves isolated. We may not want our fragility, our wounds, and our wounding recorded, but that is because we think God is tallying up our wins and losses for a prize or punishment after we die. When we seek to hide these shameful parts is hell. Hell is wherever, whenever, however we are cut off or cut ourselves off from relationship with God, from being with Jesus in the Spirit today, here, now.
Christ being present in each one of us, it is also hell when we turn away from relationships of trust, care, and honesty with one another and ourselves, when we fail to truly remember who we are and whose we are. My spouse, my sibling, my parent, my friend, my coworker, my neighborhood’s impoverished people, my fellow human beings suffering bombing, starvation, imprisonment, or expulsion: how am I remembering them, extending to them today the love Jesus has shown me? And how are we as a church, as Christ’s body gathered around and fed by Christ’s Body and Blood, nourishing the many people hungering for food, shelter, recognition, justice, and tenderness in our world this moment? As we remember the Last Supper, the crucifixion, and the resurrection, how do we remember and proclaim Jesus’ promise that we will be with him in his kin-dom, that buds and blossoms of paradise will poke through wherever we gather in his name and love one another as he loved and loves us?
Our journey to God’s reign is a journey of remembering, of accepting the invitation to transformative relationship with God. In paradise, the wounds of the good thief remain just as Jesus’ did after his resurrection. Those wounds will not define him, nor will his sins. His relationship with Jesus will mark him as one who is with God and thus in paradise. If we wish to join him there, we can make a start today by repeating his words in earnest, in honesty, in love.
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
And may we trust the promise given in return. “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Amen.
The Catholic Errant 