Remember Me: The Good Thief and the Last Word on Repentance

ByJobin

Faces of the Fast – Movement V, Post 2

Holy Saturday, 2026

“Today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

This is the last post before Pascha/Qymtho/Feast of Resurrection.

Tomorrow everything changes. The darkness lifts. The stone is rolled away. The register of the entire series shifts from the long Lenten weight of repentance and suffering into the fifty luminous days of the Resurrection. After tomorrow, these reflections will carry a different quality of light entirely.

But today is not tomorrow.

Today is Holy Saturday. The day the tradition calls the Great Sabbath. The day of silence and waiting and the stone sealed over the tomb. The day the Church holds her breath between the darkness of Good Friday and the light of Pascha Sunday.

And today we sit with the last figure of the Lenten series. The final face in the long gallery of men and women we have been walking with since the opening of Great Lent.

He has no name in the Gospel of Luke. The tradition has given him one. St. Dismas. But in the text he is simply described by what he was doing and where he was doing it.

He was dying on a cross next to Jesus. And he turned his head.

That turning is everything.

Three Crosses

Let us begin with the geography of the scene.

Three crosses on a hill outside Jerusalem. The middle cross carries Jesus of Nazareth. On either side of Him, two criminals. Both convicted. Both sentenced to the same death. Both dying in the same way, in the same place, at the same time.

Everything about their situation is identical.

And yet by the end of the afternoon, everything about their destination is different.

The difference is not made by background or virtue or length of religious practice or accumulated good deeds. It is not made by having heard a sufficient number of sermons or kept a sufficient number of fasts. It is made by a single act, in the last hours of a life that had apparently produced very little worth accounting for.

One man turned his head. And spoke.

St. John Chrysostom, reflecting on this passage in his Homilies on Matthew, calls the Good Thief the most dramatic illustration of divine mercy in the entire New Testament. He notes that every other recipient of Christ’s grace in the Gospels had some prior relationship with Him, or had at least encountered Him in the ordinary circumstances of life and responded to that encounter. The Good Thief had none of that. He met Christ for the first and last time while both of them were dying. He had no opportunity for the kind of sustained repentance, the fasting and prayer and restitution, that the tradition normally associates with genuine conversion. He had only these hours. These words. This turning of the head.

And it was enough.

What the Other Thief Did

Before we look at what the Good Thief did, it is worth pausing to look at what the other thief did. Because the contrast between them is not incidental. It is the whole point of Luke’s account.

The other thief also speaks to Jesus. But what he says is very different.

“Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us.” Luke 23:39.

On the surface this might sound like a cry for help. But look at it more carefully. It is not a cry for help. It is a taunt. The same taunt the religious authorities and the soldiers have been throwing at Jesus throughout the crucifixion. The same logic. If you are who you say you are, prove it. Get yourself off the cross. And while you are at it, get us off too.

The other thief is not asking for mercy. He is demanding a demonstration. He is not turning toward Christ. He is using Christ’s proximity as an audience for his own frustration and contempt.

There is no repentance in it. There is no acknowledgment of his own condition. There is no recognition of who is hanging on the middle cross. Just the bitter, self-focused demand of a man who is dying angry and has decided that the person next to him should be able to do something about it.

St. Ambrose of Milan, in his Exposition of the Gospel of Luke, reflects on this contrast with characteristic pastoral insight. He notes that both thieves are in identical circumstances. Both have the same proximity to Christ. Both have the same amount of time. The difference between them is entirely interior. One turns inward and downward, toward his own situation, his own pain, his own frustration, and uses his last hours feeding a bitterness that has nowhere to go. The other turns outward and upward, toward the person beside him, toward the reality of his own life honestly assessed, toward a mercy he has no right to claim but asks for anyway.

Ambrose draws a direct connection between the other thief and the figure we met in Movement I of this series. Cain, who received a direct warning from God and responded with silence and departure. The other thief, who had the Son of God dying beside him and responded with a taunt. The external circumstances are different. The interior movement is the same. The turning away from grace at the very moment it is most available.

The Turning

And then something happens that has no parallel in the entire Passion narrative.

The Good Thief turns to the other thief and rebukes him.

“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.” Luke 23:40-41.

Let us stay with this for a moment. Because this is not a small thing.

This man is dying. He is in agony. He has nothing left, no future, no prospects, no reason to care about anything beyond his own suffering. And yet in his last hours he finds enough of himself to turn toward another person and speak truth to him. He rebukes his companion. He acknowledges his own guilt honestly. And he defends the innocence of the man on the middle cross.

In those three sentences he does more moral and spiritual work than many people manage in a lifetime of religious practice.

He fears God. He acknowledges his own guilt without deflection or minimization. He names the injustice being done to Christ. He is entirely clear-eyed about his own situation and entirely clear-eyed about who is beside him.

St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his Commentary on Luke, calls this confession the most complete act of repentance in the entire Passion narrative. More complete, he suggests, than Peter’s tears in the courtyard. Not because it is more emotionally intense. But because it is more theologically precise. The Good Thief in three sentences articulates what genuine repentance looks like at its most essential. Fear of God. Honest acknowledgment of one’s own guilt. Recognition of Christ’s innocence and therefore of who Christ actually is.

Then he turns to Jesus. And says the most important words of his life.

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Luke 23:42.

The Ask

I want to stay with what he asked for.

Not rescue. Not the removal of the cross or the pain or the consequences of his choices. He does not ask to be taken down. He does not ask for a miracle. He does not ask for his record to be cleared.

He asks to be remembered.

Remember me.

That is the most human request in the world. The deepest longing of any person who has ever felt their life slipping toward oblivion. Not to be forgotten. Not to vanish as though they never existed. To be held in someone’s memory. To matter.

And he asks it of someone who is dying beside him. He asks it of someone who appears, to every observer on that hill, to be as helpless and as finished as he is. He asks it of a man who has been mocked and tortured and abandoned by nearly everyone who once followed him.

And yet something in him knows. Or perhaps does not fully know but trusts anyway. When you come into your kingdom. He does not say if. He says when. There is a faith in that word when that defies every visible piece of evidence available on that hillside.

St. Ephrem the Syrian, in his Hymns on the Crucifixion, reflects on this when with extraordinary tenderness. He says it is the most audacious word spoken at Golgotha. The soldiers are mocking. The religious authorities are satisfied. The disciples have fled. And one dying criminal says when you come into your kingdom. As though what is happening on the middle cross is not the end of a story but the beginning of one.

Ephrem suggests that the faith of the Good Thief at this moment exceeds, in its raw courage, the faith of many who had followed Christ through His entire ministry. They had seen the miracles. They had heard the teaching. And they had fled. He had seen nothing except a man dying beside him. And he said when.

The Answer

Jesus’s response is immediate. Not measured or qualified or deferred.

“Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Luke 23:43.

Today.

Not eventually. Not after a period of purification or a process of rehabilitation or a probationary arrangement of some kind. Today. This day. The same day on which the Good Thief is dying. The same day on which the darkness is falling over the land and the temple veil is tearing.

Today you will be with me in Paradise.

The word Paradise is significant. It is the same word used in the Greek translation of Genesis for the garden from which Adam and Eve were expelled. The same garden that stood at the opening of this entire series. The closed gate. The exile. The wound that all of Lent has been sitting with since the very first post.

The gate that closed on Adam is opened again. For a dying thief. On a cross. In his last hours. By a word spoken from the middle cross.

St. John Chrysostom says this is the final and most irreducible word of the entire Gospel on the subject of mercy. If there were a minimum threshold of religious practice or moral achievement required to receive the grace of God, the Good Thief would not have cleared it. He had done nothing. He had lived badly. He had a criminal record that ended with crucifixion. He had hours, not years, to offer. And he was told today you will be with me in Paradise.

The mercy is not calibrated to the merit. The mercy exceeds every calculation of merit so comprehensively that the calculation becomes irrelevant.

That is not a license for carelessness about how we live. The whole of Lent has been a testimony to the seriousness with which the tradition takes repentance and conversion. But it is the final, irreducible guarantee that the door is never closed until the last breath. That the word when, spoken from a cross, in the dark, with nothing left to offer, is enough.

What This Has to Do With the Season

We began this series in the first week of Great Lent with Adam sitting outside the gate of Paradise. The gate closed behind him. He sat in the dust and wept. And God had compassion on him.

We end the Lenten portion of the series here. With a man dying on a cross. Asking to be remembered. And being told today you will be with me in Paradise.

The gate is opened.

Not because the man on the cross beside Jesus had earned it. Because the man in the middle had. And because the man on the side cross knew who was beside him and asked. That is all. That is the whole of it.

St. Isaac the Syrian writes that the mercy of God is not a reward distributed after a sufficient demonstration of human effort. It is a gift offered continuously and persistently to any person who will turn toward it. The whole of Lent is the Church’s annual attempt to help us turn. To remove, through fasting and prayer and honest self-examination, the accumulated layers of distraction and self-sufficiency that make it difficult to see what is always being offered.

The Good Thief had no opportunity for the long turning of Lent. He had only the moment. But the moment was enough because the turning was genuine. He turned his face toward Christ, named himself honestly, and asked for what he needed.

That is all Lent has ever asked of any of us.

Fear God. Acknowledge honestly where we are. Recognize who is beside us. Ask to be remembered.

And hear today.

The Name the Tradition Gave Him

The Gospel of Luke does not give this man a name. He is simply the criminal on the right side of the Cross who turned his head.

But the tradition could not leave him nameless. Across the centuries, the Church has called him Dismas. The name appears in various early apocryphal sources, including the Gospel of Nicodemus, and was embraced by both Eastern and Western traditions. In the Oriental Orthodox tradition he is venerated as a saint. His feast day in various traditions falls on March 25th, significantly the same date as the Annunciation in some calculations, the day on which the fiat was spoken that set in motion everything that culminated at Golgotha.

The fiat of the Theotokos and the when of the Good Thief. The beginning and the end of the Lenten series. Both spoken in faith. Both without full understanding. Both received with the same word: today.

St. Ambrose reflects on the tradition of naming him with a pastoral warmth that feels deeply right for Holy Saturday. He says the Church names him because the Church cannot believe that someone who was promised Paradise by Christ Himself should remain anonymous in the tradition. The naming is an act of faith in the promise. He is in Paradise. He has a name there. We give him a name here.

A Personal Note

I will be honest about where I am today.

Holy Saturday has always been the hardest day of the Holy Week for me. Not Good Friday. Good Friday is full. The services are long and the liturgies are rich and there is something to hold on to in the beauty and the weight of it all.

Holy Saturday is the silence. The in-between. The day when the tomb is sealed and there is nothing to do but wait.

I have had seasons of life that felt like permanent Holy Saturdays. The thing is finished but the new thing has not yet begun. The darkness is not actively happening but the light has not yet come. Just the silence. The sealed stone. The waiting.

The Good Thief’s story has been important to me in those seasons. Not because it is triumphant or dramatic. But because of the sheer ordinariness of what he did. He turned his head. He said a true thing about himself. He asked for what he needed.

And he was heard.

That is enough for Holy Saturday. That is enough for any sealed stone season. The turning. The honesty. The asking.

And the confidence, however fragile, however whispered, that the word today is still being spoken. That the gate of Paradise is open. That the man on the middle cross knows who is beside us even when we cannot see Him clearly.

Today. Not eventually. Today.

For Reflection on Holy Saturday

Sit with Luke 23:32-43 today. The whole scene. Both thieves. The contrast between them. The turning.

A Question to Carry Into Pascha

If you were to turn to Christ today with the same stripped-back honesty as the Good Thief, with no religious performance and no accumulated spiritual credit, what is the one true thing you would say about yourself and what is the one thing you would ask for?

Sit with that question through the silence of today. Take it into the Paschal liturgy tonight.

And then listen for the answer.

A Word as the Series Moves Toward Qymtho

The Lenten portion of the Faces of the Fast series ends here. With the gate of Paradise opened for a dying thief by a word from the middle cross.

We began with the gate closing on Adam. We end with it opening on Golgotha.

Everything that comes after this, from Qymtho through to Pentecost, is the unfolding of what that opening means. The Resurrection encounters. The post-Resurrection mission. The Ascension. The Upper Room. The rushing wind and tongues of fire.

The series continues. But from tomorrow it breathes different air.

Tonight, if you are attending the Vigil, carry with you the faces we have walked with through this season. Adam outside the gate. Cain walking away. Noah inside the ark. Abraham under the stars. Hagar at the spring. Jacob limping across the river. The Theotokos standing at the foot of the Cross. And this man. This unnamed, named, dying, living man who turned his head and asked to be remembered.

They are all in the story that is about to be proclaimed tonight.

Χριστὸς Ἀνέστη.

He is risen. That is where all of this has been going.

“Today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

The series resumes after Pascha with Movement VI – The Morning of the World: Resurrection Encounters.

First post of Movement VI: She Thought He Was the Gardener – Mary Magdalene at the Tomb.

Χριστὸς Ἀνέστη. Ἀληθῶς Ἀνέστη.Christ is Risen. Truly He is Risen.

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