II.
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!