Matthew 27:37-44

   Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, ‘This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.’   Then two bandits were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” 
   In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God’s Son.’” The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way.

They were not remorseful, those two thieves, at least not as Matthew tells it.  They are described in all four of the gospels, one on either side of Jesus, all three hung as common criminals on instruments of first century torture and capital punishment.  Luke alone among the four gospels pictures one as repentant.  Later accounts have given them the names Gestas and Dysmas.  Dysmas, according to the tales, was the one to whom Jesus said “Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” 

But here, in Matthew, both are unrepentant to the end.  These were thieves who had loved their work and been proud of every token of their success.  These were not the kind of robbers who worked by stealth, not like cat burglars who snuck around at night and left no fingerprints so no one would know they’d been there.  No, these were bold thieves, public thieves, thieves who defiantly looked their targets in the eye and smiled while they did their work.  They were, most likely, insurrectionists, young men from the underside of society who took every opportunity to make the oppressors’ lives as difficult as possible.  They had taken property, taken lives, taken chances.  These were public takers…perhaps because they had so little to call their own: no land, no country, no identity, no power.  And so these were thieves who wanted the world to know who they were, who were glad to make the evening news headlines, who enjoyed their notoriety. 

Except that now their notoriety had caught up with them.  They had trespassed and overstepped their boundaries one too many times, and they had been caught.  So the government did what the government always did with the troublesome, the inconvenient, the ones who wouldn’t stay in their place: they made a public example of them.  They nailed them to a cross and put them up along the public roadways for all to see.  The first century orator Quintillian wrote: "Whenever we crucify criminals, very crowded highways are chosen, so that many shall see it and may be moved by fear of it, because all punishment does not pertain so much to revenge as to example.”   “See,” those crosses said to the passers-by, “see what happens when you don’t obey, when you step out of line, when you forget who you are and who is really in charge?”  Above their heads was hung a sign with the charges against them: Thief. 

Even approaching death, those two wore their title proudly.  You could hear them rasping to each other as the crowds passed by: “We did what we could to stick it to the man.  We’re all dead men anyway, in this oppressive system.  At least we kept fighting.  We made a difference.  We took those Romans down a peg or too.  We brought some color and some hope to all those others living under Rome’s thumb.  We didn’t give up.”

In between those two was another.  He didn’t speak.  The title over his head was a joke: Jesus, King of the Jews.  The two thieves on either side scoffed.  Some king he was.  They’d done more than he to give their fellow oppressed Jews something to sink their teeth into.  What good had he done?  Flash-in-the-pan preacher was all he amounted to.  Son of God?  Hardly.  Son of some poor carpenter from up north was what they’d heard.  Fed his followers on crumbs of foolishness and impossibilities.  Blessed are the poor?  Love your neighbor?  Don’t hide your light under a basket?  Well, there was no hiding under a basket out on this public highway.  And what light shone from him now?   The thieves on either side of him, bent on taking even as the life drained out of them, took what pride they could in belittling further the impotent king in the center.

At the foot of those crosses stood the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders.  The prominent.  The ones of high position.  Like the men on the crosses they were Jews: the story of the Passover ran in their blood; they too had dipped the bitter herbs in salted water and remembered God’s promise of freedom to their people year after year.  Beyond that history, though, those who stood on the ground saw little else that they had in common with the ones nailed above.  

And yet, if you looked beneath their robes, beneath their well-kept beards, beneath the prayer shawls with their long and showy fringes, if you looked into the depths of their eyes and hearts, you could see in them an uncanny resemblance to the thieves who hung above.  Well-dressed as they were, in their naked fear of keeping their place in the political order, they too wanted to distance themselves from “The King of the Jews” as far as possible.  And so, like cowardly schoolboys, they mocked and taunted him with as little regard for him as the bystanders, and with as great contempt for him as the public thieves displayed.  They did their damnedest with their barbed words to take the last shred of dignity from the one who hung, silent, on that center cross. 

What would he have said, if he had spoken to those thieves?  There was no repentant Dismas there to bless with the promise of Paradise.  There were only defiant, fearful takers, beside him, below him, passing by. 

Perhaps his silent witness was Word enough, speaking to those on every side of him, and in every generation, who have, in fact, forgotten who they were and who was really in charge.  To all who have, out of fear, or pride, or anger, or despair, lived their lives as thieves – taking, taking, taking, whatever, whenever, wherever they could – the silent Word says this: Look.  Look.  Look.  The way to life is not to take what you can get.  The way to Life is 
To give and give, and give again,
What God hath given thee;
To spend thyself nor count the cost;
To serve right gloriously
The God who gave all worlds that are,
And all that are to be.

To thieves on every side of the Cross, then and now, comes Jesus’ word: For God so loved the world that he gave…and gave…and gave…

Amen.