A meditation on Luke 23.39-43.

He hung on a cross on Friday of Passover week. The romans had nailed him there after a trial that he knew he was going to lose. He had been put there as an example, a public and vulgar display of power the Roman empire wielded. The message was clear: if you resist, this will be your fate. He knew he was destined for the cross long before the first nail pierced his skin. After all, he was an insurrectionist.

The two criminals hung to the right and left of Jesus on that first Good Friday weren’t simple thieves, as I was taught as a child. No, they were threats to political stability and the balance of power between Rome and Judea. They were insurrectionists, rebels, zealots. They were being executed for violently standing against Rome, against the empire.

They were being executed on a cross as a public spectacle, a piece of grotesque performance art of violence and fear. In the display of their tortured, dying bodies, there was a message. Rome was sending a letter to Judea carved in human flesh: if you resist, if you fight, if you rise up, this will be your fate. Rome was telling the Jewish people that the empire held their lives in its hands, and the threat of extreme, swift, profound violence was what kept the people there.

There was no hope of killing the empire, but the empire could crucify you at its pleasure.

In the middle of a crucifixion, amid the declaration that empire was stronger than anything else, Jesus makes his own declaration. To an insurrectionist who probably had blood on his hands, Jesus says, “Today, you’ll be with me in paradise.”

Let’s sit with this for a moment.

This was a man who had a hope for Israel, that Rome could be overthrown, and Israel could rise in power. His hope had been shattered, a literal death nail put into him. He knew what he deserved for his crimes, the blood the empire demanded of him for daring to act on his hope.

Into this hopeless life comes the person of Jesus. The criminal had probably heard rumors and stories about this man from Galilee. He may have heard of Jesus’ teachings of non-violence and revolutionary actions like loving your enemies and praying for those who oppress you. Compared with his ideas, Jesus’ teachings might have been shrugged off, laughed away. Why would we pray for Rome? Why would we love Ceaser?

But now, hanging here in death, the criminal realizes that Jesus is here unjustly. He is paying for his crimes; Jesus is being wrongly executed. When the other criminal begins to deride and mock Jesus, this criminal speaks up. “You and I, we are paying the price for our insurrection, for the blood we spilled. We are here because of our crimes. But Jesus? He’s innocently hanging here. He has done nothing wrong.”

But the man goes one step further than just defending the innocence of a man on a cross. This criminal Turns to Jesus and asks to be remembered when Jesus comes into his kingdom. That kingdom of God that Jesus spoke of wasn’t what this criminal had shed blood for. This man had committed atrocities in the name of an earthly kingdom, attempting to stand against Rome and hope that Israel could rise in glorious power. Jesus never spoke of the kingdom of God like this.

But when the man’s hope had been taken away and shattered, when he knew that his idea of kingdom would never come to pass, he began to believe in Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of heaven. And, hanging on that cross, he knew Jesus’s vision of a kingdom of God was going to come to pass.

This dying criminal turned to a dying Christ and said in essence, “Jesus, when you sit on the throne, remember me.”

But Jesus was dying. Jesus was crucified as well. What throne could Jesus possibly ever sit on? How was a dead man supposed to come into his kingdom and be crowned king?

The criminal understood something that we have forgotten over the years.

The cross itself is the coronation of Jesus as King.

Th cross is the throne of the kingdom of God. It is on the cross that we see the fullness of God’s glory revealed in Jesus. On the cross, we truly see Jesus as king.

See, on the cross love is made visible. On the cross, we see the true nature of God, and that nature never capitulated to the rules of Empire. In fact, the empire, the systems of oppression that rule this world, threw everything it had at God in order to get God to react in kind, and God refused to change or play that game.

Jesus shows us that God doesn’t avoid suffering, but enters it, joining with the suffering, becoming one of the suffering. Jesus entered fully into the whole experience of humanity, including the oppression and suffering that so many of us experience on a daily basis. And it is in that very suffering that the nature of God refuses to be changed but rather transforms that suffering within Godself.

Suffering isn’t good. It’s not something that we seek out, that we crave. It is pain and woundedness and anguish. But God transforms that into a display of Jesus’ love for us by entering fully into our suffering and remaining with us in the middle of our suffering. God stays with us. God doesn’t turn away from our suffering or have pity on us from afar. On the cross we see the full nature of God revealed, and that nature is love, and that love will remain with us, sharing in our suffering, our oppression, our hurt.

Christ is the wounded one, and that woundedness is the door by which we enter into the life of God and are transformed to share in the nature of the divine. Jesus became us, entered into our suffering so that we could become like him, entering fully into the life of God.

This theosis is open to all, just as it was to the criminal who saw hope in a dying God. The man wasn’t purified or forgiven or washed first. He was accepted as he was, welcomed into the wound of Jesus and into the life of God that very day.

And we are welcomed as well, now, as we are. We are invited into the wound of Jesus that we might experience the fire of love.

Love that sits with us in suffering is a raging fire. It’s not something small, something that extinguishes when things get too raw, too wounded, too honest. No, the love of God is a consuming fire that transforms us to be like Jesus.

See, today we are welcomed into paradise with Jesus. We are welcome into the garden of God alight with the fire of love and the light of glory. As we enter into theosis, into sharing that divine nature, we begin to burn with the love of God. We begin to embody that love.

Being fully alive, burning bright with the love of God that doesn’t consume but transforms, is a radical thing. Living this out is nothing short of revolutionary. It’s telling the empires of this world that they are wrong about power and glory. It’s telling the machine of oppression that it cannot change who we are and what we do because our king is already crowned with wounds, and those wounds are the way glory breaks into this broken world.

We don’t need to pretend any more. We don’t need to perform any more. None of us is beyond mercy, to wounded to be saved. We all can begin to embody this fire of love and in doing so spread this hope of entering into paradise today, entering into the love of God and being refined by the love that transforms us into the people that hold space for pain, that love unconditionally, that aren’t changed by the systems of power and oppression that rear their heads in this word.

People are still crucified today. Capital punishment still exists. People are warehoused in prisons, many for resisting or surviving. Systems crucify the poor, the mentally ill, people of color, queer people, the immigrant. The empire still sends messages in human flesh. But the empire is wrong. The empire of the United States, it’s fascist leanings, and its partner, Christian nationalism, are still putting the image of God on the cross in so many ways.

To all who hang on the crosses of empire, Jesus says, “Today, you’ll be with me in paradise.” That lands like a bomb in hospital rooms, gravesides, prison cells, and everywhere we find suffering because not only do we find Jesus, but it’s in these places we have the opportunity to show and receive the divine fire of love, the fire that burns away the false self, kills the ego, and purifies us to share in that divine nature that we are all first created in.

Paradise is open.

Today, you’ll be with me.

Come, through the wounds of Christ, past the throne of the cross, come into the holy of holies where Godself is waiting to envelop you in love that we all can embody to each other.

You’ll be with me, and I’ll be with you.

Together, we will burn so bright.