The Good Thief

Three crosses, two thieves and three different expressions of suffering. Jesus wanted to be crucified surrounded by sinners, sharing his throne of glory with them. Many saints would have liked to have been there, to change places with one of them, with a holy envy. Three crosses; as Saint Augustine says, one gives salvation, the other receives it and the other despises it. Two thieves; we are represented by these two criminals, and we all deserved to be there. We should be there, but we are still running away from the cross. These two thieves represent two attitudes in front of the cross, two ways of life that can be summarised in every human being: for or against God, with Him or without Him. Three sufferings, one redemptive, another purifying, and the third useless. Which one is mine? Am I with Jesus, accompanying him in his redemption? Or maybe, I am the good thief, waiting for the end of my life to jump into paradise. I hope we are not the bad thief, wasting our lives in useless frustration.

What did the good thief see to believe? It is a very good question, almost impossible to answer. The two thieves were crucified on both sides of Jesus, suffering the same penalty for their crimes. One, whom we call Gestas, was abusing Jesus, asking him, in frustration and pain, to save all of them at the same time, in a very selfish manner. Dismas, the one on his right, rebuked him, telling him that they were there for a just reason, to pay for their actions, a right punishment. But Jesus was innocent and he shouldn’t be there. And he made the best petition a man can make to God: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” We need to repeat these words over and over again, especially when we are suffering.

There were other people at Calvary, and they witnessed the same thing, but only Dismas made this petition. Maybe because he looked at things from the cross, from a higher ground; or maybe because he was suffering the same fate as Jesus, wearing the same shoes. When we suffer we see things with different eyes. What he saw was a man dying in silence, not only accepting his cross, but coming out of himself to meet his suffering, welcoming the pain with open arms, with a reason for his torture, savoring every minute of it. But the Roman centurion also present, only believed after Jesus died, when he felt the earthquake and experienced the darkening of the sky.

“Today you will be with me in paradise.” What did Dismas feel when he heard these words? “Today”, not tomorrow, but now, after few minutes of suffering, opening the door to a new beginning, with a meaning to your crucifixion, with a happy ending, like a successful operation healing your wounds. “With me”, you are coming with me; we are going together, crossing the threshold of this life to eternity hand in hand, lighting for you the way forward. “Into paradise”, the place you long for, what you have been created for, what your heart believes, with all the people you love.

The good thief gives us plenty of hope. We can easily place ourselves in his shoes. We can turn our bad thief into a good one and at the same time steal heaven. But we don’t need to wait till our last moments. We can begin now to repeat his petition many times, from the cross of our suffering.

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Eschatological discourse

When we reach November, at the end of the liturgical year, we have these Gospels about the end of times, about the distant future. They are always a bit frightening and we don’t know what to do about them or how to react. We want to read them quickly, and pass soon into Advent, to be able to look forward to Christmas. Why does the Church want us to look at these events, when we don’t know when they are going to happen, and most likely they won’t happen in our lifetime? They tell us about our future and teach us lessons for our own lives.

It is very human the desire to know about the future, to plan things accordingly. We would like to have more control of our lives, to foresee situations and be prepared for them. But God tells us what we need to know at every given moment. Curiosity killed the cat. We are in God’s hands and he knows what’s going on. We need to leave things in his hands and let him be the boss. We are just little children.

There are three future things which are foreshadowed in this Gospel: the destruction of Jerusalem, the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ. The first one happened in the year 70, when the Romans circled the holy city and destroyed the temple of Jerusalem, to quash a rebellion. The Jews never recovered. Now, all they have is the wailing wall, were they can pray for the future temple to be built. Once Jesus came, there was no need for God to dwell in a particular place. We shouldn’t worry too much about the destruction of material things, because everything will pass away, but we should worry about the destruction or corruption of our soul, the actual temple of the Holy Spirit.

The end of the world is something that has been prophesied many times by many people, and so far all of them have been mistaken. We shouldn’t worry about that, or have the attitude of some of the early Christians who stopped working because they thought it was imminent. This reality brings to our consideration that whatever we do here has an end. Eventually everything will disappear. We all have a desire to leave behind things that will last for ever and this is impossible. The only things that last forever are in the other life, when a new heaven and a new earth will be renewed. This thought will help us to fix our eyes more in what is behind the veil between time and eternity.

The second coming of Our Lord is less frightening. After all the signs and amazing events of the end of time, the appearance of Jesus among the clouds will be a happy ending of our universe, which began with the Big Bang when God created it. We will be happy to see Our Lord coming back to judge the living and the dead. This future event reminds us of our personal encounter with him at the end of our earthly existence. We need to get ready and the proof that we are not is that we are still here. We ask our Mother to be there when Our Lord comes to pick us up, as we pray every time we say the Hail Mary: pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen.

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Resurrection of the dead

Today in the Gospel the Sadducees tried to have a go at Jesus with a silly argument, defending their denial of the resurrection, and thanks to them we have from him a good statement about the resurrection of the body. Jesus uses sometimes our pride and selfishness for our own good, to give us a lesson. Whether we like it or not, at the end of time we will be reunited to our bodies. It will be either a glorious body or a damned one. It is a reminder that our bodies are important. They make us who we are. They are not just a cage were our souls are imprisoned. They are created by God together with our soul and they are destined to be together for ever in the other life. This reality has three important consequences.

Firstly, our bodies are good. Love your body, look after it, give thanks to God for the body he has given you. There is a vision which separates the body from the soul, a kind of dualism, with two extremes: one that says that our bodies are bad and what it is important is our spiritual side; another extreme says that I am only my body and I can do whatever I want with my body. What we do with our bodies affects our soul; we cannot isolate one from the other. If you take drugs you get addicted. If you cut off your leg you cannot walk properly anymore. If you have sex with many different people, your heart becomes divided. If you eat as much as you want, you become fat and sloppy. Our emotions, our feelings, our character, are related to our body. What affects our body, affects our soul. It is not easy to see it, because it is impossible to separate in this life our body from our soul. Only death can do it. We cannot point out where our soul is in our body, because it exists throughout our being.

Secondly, our body has dignity. Saint Paul says that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. We must treat our bodies with respect, honour it, celebrate it, bury it. During the funeral rites we sprinkle holy water and we incense the dead body. We place our ashes in a place of remembrance. We go there to pray for our loved ones. We believe in the resurrection of the body. Atheists throw the ashes into the sea, for the fish to eat them. For them everything is finished. For us it is a time of waiting. We venerate the relics of the saints. They remind us of their presence.

Thirdly, we are our bodies. Without our bodies we are nobody. Our bodies make us who we are. We are male or female because of our bodies, not because of our minds. Our soul in a way has sex, it is either a soul of a male or of a female body. Our bodies give us our identity, our place in space, our relational dimension. We cannot get out of our bodies, we see things from within, we need to carry it with us all the time, like a turtle its shell.

People deny these important and undeniable realities, manly to do whatever they want, to justify their own vices or passions. They have come out with the gender theory, which destroys our Christian anthropology. During the 20th century we had a struggle between common good and private property. Now it is between sex and gender. As Christopher West repeats all the time, talking about the Theology of the body from John Paul II: “You are irreplaceable, indispensable and unrepeatable; be what you are.”

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All Souls

In the month of November we remember our brothers and sisters who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith. We don’t know where they are. All we know is that they are already in eternity for ever. Some of them still have to undergo a kind of purification, because they are not completely cleaned to enjoy God’s presence. They are happy because they know they are on their way to heaven, but they earnestly desire to be transformed to be able to withstand God’s love. They don’t want to enter heaven yet. They need the right garment. It is like going to a formal party dressed in shorts and tee shirt, while all women are wearing long dresses and the men dinner suits. If you are going there, you would need to change your clothes.

We can help them to shorten their stay in purgatory. They cannot help themselves, but we can give them a hand. We have the keys to liberate them from their long imprisonment. Once two monks debated among themselves this question: What is more important, to pray for the living, or for the dead? One of them always prayed for the living and the other for the dead. The one praying for the living said: “the dead are already saved; the living can go either way.” The other monk answered: “you are right, but imagine you come across two beggars, one young and the other old. To whom would you give your money?” He answered: “To the old one because the young one can get a job.” “You are right. It is the same with souls. The living have the necessary graces to go to heaven. The dead cannot help themselves.” Therefore it is more pleasing to God that we pray for the souls in purgatory.

Let us be generous with our prayers and sacrifices. Not many people remember them. How often do we think about them? Out of sight, out of mind. Protestants don’t believe in purgatory. They don’t have the tradition of praying for the dead and therefore nobody is praying for them. Even though Purgatory is not a place but a state of being, it is getting full and we need to help God to empty it. If we pray now for the holy souls, when we die people will remember us. Then we will be very grateful to them, to be able to jump from one place to the other. Once talking with an old lady, she commented: “Father, when you are getting old, this is all that matters.”

Saint Josemaria used to call the holy souls in purgatory “my good friends”. Let us foster in our hearts a friendship with them, a relationship that will last forever and will help us to fix our eyes on the other life, the real life of the future. Let us finish the month of November with a renewed acquaintance with them.

They are very powerful in front of God. It is one of the best devotions. God listens to them, who are crying day and night. They cannot help themselves, but they can offer their sufferings for us. Any soul we help to reach heaven is going to intercede for us till we die. There will be a multitude of souls welcoming us when we reach the other life. We will ask our guardian angel who they are, and he will tell us that these are our friends the holy souls in purgatory.

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All Saints

Once a year in November the Church on earth as a good mother helps us to remember our brothers and sisters who have made it into eternity. On the first of this month, the saints in heaven; on the second, the souls in purgatory. They say there are around 10.000 saints recognised by the Church. It is impossible to count all the saints in heaven. We don’t have time to canonise every person who enters into glory. There are millions of them. We call them anonymous saints, which means saints with no names; not for God, because for Him all of us have a hidden name. At least once a year we remember them and hopefully one day it will be our feast day. Today it is the biggest celebration in heaven regarding the number of celebrants who are celebrating their dies natalis, their birth into heaven.

The remembrance of the saints helps us to lift up our eyes to heaven. It doesn’t make any difference to them, because they are already immersed in God; they don’t need our prayers. But we need their example, their model of life, their inspiration, their intercession. Not to copy them, because every person is unique, but to reassure ourselves that we all have the necessary graces to make it to heaven, that the ball is in our court, that God is willing, and it is up to us to make it there.

What’s holiness? It doesn’t mean to be perfect. It means that when we die, we go straight to heaven. It is impossible to be perfect, but we could make it to heaven thanks to God’s grace. We all feel that if we die now we can hardly make it to purgatory. How can we reach heaven? Through the mercy of God. It is so powerful that it can make us holy. And it is there, up for grabs. The Church wants today to remind us that we are made for heaven, that we come from God and we are going back to him. It is possible for us to become holy. It is good for us to remember the famous question saint Ignatius asked himself, when he was reading lives of saints, and experienced a peaceful feeling in his soul, in front of those beautiful examples: “If they could do it, why not I?” The devil is trying to discourage us; he wants us to be convinced that it is very difficult to reach heaven.

Once saint Thomas Aquinas’ sister asked him a very difficult question, maybe the most important question of our lives, the same question the rich young man put to Jesus: What do we have to do to go to heaven? Thomas, who was a man of few words, and he was very precise with his explanations, answered with two words: “velle illud”. It is a Latin expression that means: to want it. It is not a matter of conviction but of desire. God will open the gates of heaven if we want it, if we push them open with our struggle, with our desires to be with Him.

We need to remind ourselves of the power of God. Saint Josephine Bakhita, at the end of her life, expressed in these simple words, hidden behind a smile, the journey of her life: “I travel slowly, one step at a time, because I am carrying two big suitcases. One of them contains my sins, and in the other, which is much heavier, are the infinite merits of Jesus Christ. When I reach heaven I will open both suitcases and say to God: Eternal Father, now you can judge. And to Saint Peter: Close the door, because I’m staying here.”

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Zacchaeus

There were three big obstacles that prevented Zacchaeus from seeing Jesus. They seemed insurmountable, but because he wanted with all his might to see Jesus, he overcame them all, one after the other. We all have some hurdles that make it difficult for us to discover God. And we need to jump over them one by one. Every man has a desire deep in his heart to see God, a hunger for the happiness that only an infinite being can fulfill. We are restless until we find our creator, and we wish to attain the end that we are being created for.

Zacchaeus was so short he couldn’t see Jesus over the crowds around him. Short people normally have a strong will and they have to learn how to push hard, because they have to stand up for themselves; they have to fight to be able to jump and reach their desires. Our smallness is always in front of us. We cannot forget about it, even though we daydream or try to live in a virtual reality; sooner or later we have to come down to our true level and confront our nothingness. Our artificial life on the internet, cannot be our real life. Without God it is easy to have a low self esteem, hate ourselves, long for attention, and try to hide behind all sort of addictions, that only serve to dig our hole deeper and eventually destroy ourselves. We forget what theologians call the love of predilection: God loves us not because we are good, but we are good because he loves us. His love comes first, independently of how we behave or what we think or what we do. We are his creatures and he made us. And we Christians are also his children. Therefore we need to concentrate more on his love for us and not get bogged down if we find it difficult to see something good in ourselves.

The crowd was big. Everybody wanted to see the famous prophet. And because they envied and hated Zacchaeus for his riches, they didn’t allow him to see Jesus on purpose. They could see him running along the line of people as Jesus was passing by, and they lifted up their bodies higher for him to see nothing. The biggest obstacle for Zacchaeus to see Jesus was his riches. They didn’t allow him to see Jesus. They were in the way. Once he concentrated in Jesus, he was saved. Our second biggest obstacle is in the world, the multitude of things, people and events that surround us. They can be in the way because we keep looking at them. We don’t see the wood for the trees. As Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it, wealth, honours, power or pleasure, we think they bring us happiness. And over and over again we are mistaken. The happiness of a human soul can only be in an infinite being.

Lastly Zacchaeus had to overcome shame, human respect, peer pressure and a desire for prestige and fame. The last thing he had to do was to climb a tree in front of everybody. Even though he was dressed in expensive clothes, he disregarded what people thought of him and climbed like a monkey. This showed Jesus that he really wanted to see him. There is always a tree for us to climb and see Jesus. We need to find that tree and show Jesus that we are interested in him.

Jesus told Zacchaeus to come down: I want to come to your house. He gave half of his property to the poor, making room for Jesus. He is telling us the same thing: come down from your addictions and let me enter into your life. There are a few things we need to give away.

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Parable of the Pharisee and tax collector

We normally see ourselves as the tax collector. We don’t think the example of the Pharisee is for us. And we are mistaken. We walk into a church with the attitude that it belongs to us. We place ourselves in front of the tabernacle with the right to be there. We talk to God listening to ourselves, reading a list of favours we have done to him, expecting him to acknowledge our achievements. We are arrogant and proud, and we fail to see ourselves as we are. We should rather see ourselves at the back of the church, with our eyes downcast and beating our breast with our fist, trying to bring sorrow out of a dry piece of flesh. This should be our attitude in front of God the Father Almighty.

In our modern society we have taken God out of the picture, or, if we still believe in Him, we have brought Him down to our level. Through the pendulum law, we have gone from a God of fire and brimstone, to an old fluffy sweet man, with a white long beard and a face of a teddy bear. The balance is always difficult to achieve, and the pendulum keeps swinging. We can never imagine how God is.

Today through this parable Jesus teaches us that prayer should flow from a humble heart. And he does it by opposing two figures very familiar to the Jews of his time. The goodie, the master of the law, the teacher of morals and obligations, and a baddie, a public sinner, who steals the money from normal people and gives it to the Roman oppressors. The righteous man and the thief are the best examples to be opposed to each other, and to bring the audience to a contrary reaction. Both go to the temple to pray, but only one is justified. We know who goes back pleased in God’s eyes.

What Jesus wants us to do today is to look into our hearts, where nobody else can peek: into the depths of our intentions, our desires and our longings, to what really moves us and what we really worship. He is taking us on a wild journey; he wants us to accompany Him, to come down with us, to drag our feet through a rough surface, and to look at something we don’t normally want to look at: the depths of our soul. What is there? What sort of stuff do I keep inside? Can I make room for him? Today is a good day for a spring cleaning, for a garage sale, to allow Jesus to come in, leave the windows wide open, turn on all the lights and discover what’s inside.

At the beginning of the Mass, during the penitential rite, we make an act of sorrow, like the tax collector, hitting our breast three times, trying to break it open, to see what’s inside, as Saint Augustine says, “to bring to light what is concealed in the breast, and by this act to cleanse your hidden sins.” Or as Saint Jerome declares, “We strike our breast because the breast is the seat of evil thoughts: we wish to dispel these thoughts, we wish to purify our hearts.” We should hear the sounds of our chest, resounding deep, striking hard without the fear of a broken rib. We need to break the bones of our chest, to let our heart be seen, like open heart surgery, for Jesus to come in, and fix our arteries; maybe to have few bypasses, or better yet, to have a heart transplant, like Saint Catherine of Siena, when Jesus gave her a new heart, his heart.

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Parable of the unjust judge

Even though this parable focuses mainly on the reactions of the unjust judge, on his lack of fear of God and his indifference about justice, it should be better called the parable of the persevering widow, because she is the real protagonist, the one who wins at the end and is vindicated. She is our model in front of injustices and the indifference of human beings. She teaches us how to react when we find ourselves in hopeless situations or in great trouble: persevere in prayer.

The first reading of the Mass talks about Moses watching Joshua fighting against Amalek. While his arms were outstretched, the Israelites were winning; when he grew tired and let his arms go down, they began to lose. What a responsibility for Moses! People’s lives were at stake. We too experience the same. When we stop praying, the devil has the upper hand; when we persevere in our prayer, the faith of the Church strengthens. People’s souls are somehow connected to our prayer. This teaches us the lesson that we should always have our arms stretched out, in prayer, that we Christians are called to sustain the world with our spiritual life, that we cannot give up and lower our defences. We have the responsibility of supporting others with our struggle, with our sacrifices and with our personal witness.

The Gospel says specifically that Jesus taught us this parable to teach us how to pray always and not to lose heart. How can we pray without ceasing, as Saint Paul recommends us? In principle it is not possible, because we are not angels. Saint Augustine says that prayer is an exercise of desire. We are created for God and we are restless until we find him. We all have in our hearts a desire for eternity, for the infinite, a longing for our Creator, even though many times we cannot articulate this pain. Prayer finds the embers of this feeling in our hearts and blows them to enkindle them, to eventually create a huge fire that burns the whole forest of our sins. Saint Augustine comments that desire is your prayer; and if your desire is without ceasing, your prayer will also be without ceasing.

The Eastern tradition have the famous Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Through repetition and breathing, it can become a part of your life, without realising you are praying, like the beating of the heart. In the Western Church we have the Rosary, a prayer that can be said anywhere, anytime. Many saints give us an example of their immersion in God.

Modern society tells us that it is possible to concentrate on one thing all the time: our mobile phones. They are always in our hands, beeping, receiving messages, taking photos, talking, checking, clicking. They want constant attention, like babies. Big companies design strategies to keep us hooked to the little screen, and try to sell us data for us to keep the gadget happy. We look for hot spots where we can rest and spend time with our handset. Can we do the same for God? Can we give Him more time, more attention? Prayer allows us to connect with God. It is free and we don’t need a fast expensive gadget. It is always on in our hearts. And it connects us with eternity, infinity and beyond.

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