Stealing Paradise

Desperate Measures

Most of the people who were saved in the Gospels were not monastic hesychasts living in a cave on a Holy Mountain, masters of nepsis, possessors of the right phronema, expositors and defenders of dogmatic correctness, or keepers of strict ascetical disciplines by Mosaic canonical standards. Most of them weren’t even decent, moral people. They were simply desperate.

When a dying crucified incorrigible criminal gathered up all his thieving bold courage and asked to be remembered, he accomplished his last and most profitable heist: He was convicted of “breaking and entering” Paradise by God himself and was canonized as a saint for his audacity.

When a slowly bleeding out, dying, religiously ritually unclean woman anonymously crawled on the ground, trampled underfoot by the crowd of messiah groupies trying to get near him, and touched the dirty hem of his garment she was healed.

When a blind man begging on the sidewalk yelled loud and long enough to be annoying to the security guards and gate-keepers of God’s healing, he got his sight.

When the local whore crashed the black robe, "Members Only" reception for the Celebrity Prophet, and instead of making a show of kissing his a** in public, she kissed his feet. Instead of being shown the door, she was shown the kingdom and was moved to the head of the table. Salvation was as simple as that.

The Gospels show that God looks upon great desperation as great faith. Salvation is as simple and as difficult as that.

St. Dismas (The Good Thief), after a life of stealing others’ hard earned necessities (and possibly their lives), was given the providence of meeting the Good Man called Jesus he’d heard of, both suspended on their wooden deathbeds for different, significant reasons that he understood.

I think we all thank God that Dismas is a saint because we all know, given the right (or wrong) circumstances, we are capable of doing something so evil we could end up hanging between heaven and hell by a prayer. But the reality is, most of us haven’t lived such a senseless, profligate life and we don't do something so evil that we have a life and death encounter with God while sitting in an electric chair confronting the consequences and spiritual reality of our personal "death sentence sin" and then we die without having to live the rest of our lives making amends, bearing the guilt and shame, and living under scrutiny and rejection.

For most of us the last ditch, last minute conversion doesn’t speak to our reality. A more fitting metaphor for our brand of "salvation" is found in our every-day, commonplace, ordinary existence: We’re born into and live an unremarkable middle class life, growing up committing venial middle-class playground cowardly sins. We discover a benign but attractive God that fits our lifestyle, we date Jesus, get engaged, married, have kids, a career and when the marriage and job gets old and tough, we meet a wild, sexy god and we’re tempted to bail out. But we hang on to our conversion/marital ideals, so we try our moral damndest to be just mid-life crisis emotional flirts with sin or another attractive, seductive spirituality and not completely give up on the church and Jesus and end up spiritual adulterers or guilt-ravaged divorced failures.

So, the metaphorical reality of salvation for most of us is more like living out a passionately begun, illusion lost, knuckle down, gut it out, joy and sorrow, love/hate, war and peace, willful, stubborn perseverance of a long haul, daily same-old-same-old, hill and valley, fifty year marriage relationship. That is a lot different "work" than a last ditch, desperate "Hail Mary" when you have no other options but to go for it hell or high water... and by the grace of God he catches your toss and you "win". Then, too boot, you are made a saint by the church for it!

But, in the Gospels both the struggles of a long marriage and the desperate, last gasp "Hail Mary" are honored by God as “faith”. Intellectually I get that’s “Gospel truth”, but as an "all day from the first hour in the heat of the day laborer" I gotta say, sometimes I tend to be jealous of the last ditch death bed conversion and them getting the full day's pay for the least amount of work done in the cool of the evening hour. (Which is probably why Jesus told that Parable. He Gets Us ™)

In the end salvation is as simple (and as hard) as this: Learning humility to accept the love of God as a gift whether it takes fifty years of tedious, monotonous, repetitive, uninspiring existence or a dramatic, revelatory, tragic moment of desperation.

And if we learn true humility perhaps we will see both as a unique grace and give glory to God for both our own salvation and the salvation of all whom He accepts.

In this season of Lent St. Ephraim’s prayer, "Help me to see my own sins and not to judge my brother" ends on Holy Wednesday of Holy Week, the liturgical day of the beginning of the crucifixion because it is the "on-ramp" to gratitude and the joy of the salvation of all, whether thief or faithful servant, revealed fully in the Cross and the Resurrection.