Hanging Beside a King
There is a moment that seems to come, sooner or later, in every conversation about salvation. It comes when the questions stop being about ideas and start being about names. Theology slips out of the big words and sits down beside us, wearing the face of someone we love.
“But are they really saved?”
The person in question is almost always a loved one—a close friend or family member who perhaps has made some sort of profession of faith, or been recently baptized, or at least begun attending church regularly, but who has yet to show a life marked by change.
“She gave her life to Christ, but in the months since, there’s been little visible growth. She used to pray and go to church, but now she’s just drifting from God and I’m so worried!”
All of this comes tumbling out in Bible study or a home group. Tangled up in fear, hope, and panic-stricken confusion, someone listening reaches for the story that has soothed a thousand anxious hearts:
“Well, remember the thief on the cross.”
Relief floods the room. The thief. The last-minute miracle. The proof that faith can be simple and the reassurance that God doesn’t require too much of us, especially if the end is near.
No one in the room bothers to go look up the story and read it aloud. They don’t need to. They’ve memorized a one-liner that has stood the test of time: a common criminal, ignorant of God, ignorant of Scripture, ignorant of Jesus—who, in his final moments, whispers a simple “I believe” and slips quietly into paradise.
It’s a good story; gentle, merciful, and comforting to many a worried friend by someone who sincerely wants to help.
But it is almost certainly false.
Not a Clueless Convert
The thief on the cross comes to most Evangelicals as a man with a spiritually blank slate—a random sinner who happened to be in the right place at the right time. “Praise God he heard the gospel and believed before he died!” we say.
Historically, that’s an unlikely scenario. Rome did not crucify pickpockets. Crucifixion was typical for traitors, rebels, and insurrectionists—men who had become a problem for the empire. This sentence was a common one for Zealots, who raised much internal havoc in Israel in the days of Jesus. Whatever else this man was, he was not harmless. More importantly, he was not theologically illiterate.
Listen again to what he actually says:
“We are receiving the due reward of our deeds… but this man has done nothing wrong… Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Luke 23:41-42
Those are loaded words coming from a man who is not grasping at straws in the dark.
· He believes Jesus is a king—and not the sort who merely reigns in hearts, but one whose rule can be entered.
· He believes Jesus will still receive a kingdom, even though he’s dying on the stake right next to him.
· He believes Jesus’ story does not end at death. This man has a category for understanding the impossibility of a life beyond the grave.
· And he believes Jesus has authority to include others in this future.
This is not the content of “simple faith.” This is eschatological, messianic faith.
This man is making a Jewish, hope-soaked confession at the worst possible moment to do so. And he can do this because he is not starting from nothing. The simple-minded thief we cherish actually seems to possess a robust set of expectations about God, kingship, and the future of the world. He already has a framework for these claims.
“Remember me” is Covenant Language
In the Scriptures, God “remembers” when he is about to act to keep his promises, rescue people, or restore order to his world. God remembers Noah. He remembers Abraham. He remembers Israel in Egypt, the prayers of Hannah. To be remembered is to be delivered; to be gathered back into the story when redemption is finally on the brink of occurring.
What this man is really saying is something like: When God vindicates you and your kingdom finally comes, let me be counted as yours.
And notice where he wants to be remembered: in your kingdom.
He does not seem primarily concerned with his own salvation or his destination in the moments following his death. He’s concerned with belonging to a very real and specific future in this world—a kingdom associated with the reign of God finally setting the world right. This is a stubborn faith that says: God is not finished yet. Not with you. Not with Israel. Not with the world. And not with me.
We have no way of knowing this man’s ethnic background for certain, but it is very possible that he was Jewish, or at the very least, someone very familiar with the Jewish hope that was electrifying Israel in those years: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
The backdrop of his crucifixion is Passover in Jerusalem. In that setting, this man…
acknowledges Jesus’ innocence
rebukes the other criminal
publicly aligns himself with a condemned “messianic pretender”
and entrusts himself to Jesus’ future reign.
That is repentance in the deepest biblical sense: a total change of allegiance.
The Courage to Defect
As hard as it is for my worried friends to accept, this is not a story about a man who knows nothing about God or Jesus and stumbles his way to salvation at the last minute.
It is a story about a man who, at the very end of his life, chooses sides—sides he probably had at least some familiarity with long before his crucifixion.
It’s true: he does not have time to make restitution, join a crew of disciples, keep the Torah better, or fix his life.
But he does repent.
While everyone else is mocking or denying Jesus, he does something astonishing: he entrusts himself to a dying king of a not-yet-visible kingdom.
He publicly defects to Jesus’ side when Jesus looks least like a winner—and when he himself has no hope of Jesus fixing anything regarding his current circumstances.
I think, if he had lived, everything suggests that this new allegiance would have recalibrated his entire life.
Somewhere along the way, we turned this story into proof that biblical literacy and repentance don’t really matter. The thief is our evidence that simple faith is what counts most, and living righteously or having some understanding the Jesus we give our lives to doesn’t count much in the end.
“Just believe in Jesus,” we say—without asking what belief in Jesus means, what we think he’s asking of us, or what kind of kingdom we imagine he brings.
I don’t think the thief believed in a vague, generic savior ready to carry him off to heaven. It seems to me he believed in a dying Messiah, a rejected king, and an invisible kingdom that would—against all appearances—still come, in the very city where he was nailed to a stake on a hill.
His faith, it seems, was anchored in that hope.
Stealing from the Thief
The poor thief on the cross.
We have left him there, hanging beside a king, forever enthroning a story about simple faith instead of the identity of the man who died beside him.
We’re afraid of our own shortcomings, worried for the people we love who confess without real allegiance. We’re so desperate to avoid being held accountable to worshipping a God we know, we become thieves ourselves—guilty of stealing the testimony of a repentant rebel and recycling him into a clueless criminal who “got saved” at the last second by a kind king who asks almost nothing.
It’s a retelling that exposes something about the condition of our own hearts.
Maybe we are all just thieves, hanging beside a king on crosses of our own—looking at the crucified man next to us, and deciding what we want him to be.
I usually let these conversations run their course. I save my thoughts for another time, perhaps, when people are less panicked. I’ll try, as gently and honestly as I can, to recover what’s been lost. Maybe they’ll see.
In our doubts and questions, I think we are finally standing where the story has always placed us: at the place of the skull—sifting through the rubble of what we think we know, trying to see who the man in the middle really is.
And just hoping, like the thief, that he will look down from his throne one day and remember us.