“Between Despair and Presumption”
The Reverend Tom Steffen
4 April 2010 – Easter Sunday

Readings: I Corinthians 15:19-26

John 20:1-18

David Cunningham, who teaches religion at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, recently wrote about remembering a banner that hung years ago in the Alice Millar Chapel on Northwestern University’s campus. This caught my eye. I stay in touch with a number of my former students, and I’m glad when I hear that they occasionally get themselves to church; I’d be utterly amazed if they could tell me the words printed on banners hanging on the walls of the chapel at their universities or colleges.

Well, Cunningham writes that on this particular banner were these words: “Do not Despair one of the thieves was saved. Do not Presume one of the thieves was damned.” These statements, of course, refer to the two thieves who were crucified alongside Jesus, as recorded in St. Luke’s gospel. The words on the banner, however, are not St. Luke’s, but, as best we know, are attributed to St. Augustine. I’ve not been able to track down the exact citation, but I did uncover an interview with the playwright Samuel Beckett in which Beckett links St. Augustine to the phrases.

The interview with Beckett concerns his play Waiting for Godot. Early in the play there is a darkly comic exchange between the two principal characters concerning the fate of the thieves crucified with Jesus. It begins when Vladimir remarks: “One of the thieves was saved,” and then he goes on to comment on the probability of salvation, which is not actually 50-50 (one thief or the other) but actually one in four, because he points out that only one of the four evangelists even mentions a saved thief. In the interview, Beckett remarked that it was St. Augustine who gave him the idea for the lines in the play. And the writer who transcribed that interview places semi colons after “despair” and “presume.” And Beckett supposedly commented: “Those phrases have a wonderful shape and balance to them; it is the shape that matters.”

Now, I agree that shape sometimes matters. And punctuation matters. In young Cunningham’s religious awakening while a university student, the lines in question, blessedly, savingly, had no punctuation, at least as he remembers them. Do not despair one thief was saved. And do not presume one thief was dammed. Do you sense how revolutionary, how miraculous this Easter proclamation is? On this Easter morning, I invite you stand with me at the foot of the cross, to gaze on that cosmic spectacle one more time. In spite of Beckett’s preference for balanced phrases, and in spite of our human intrigue with either/or structures, our polarizing categories of winners and losers, heroes and villains, consider once again the outrageous, reconciling Easter message. Here it is – six words that have perfect shape and balance: “Father, forgive them. It is finished.”

On the cross, the one between the other two, all that separates us from God and each other is miraculously brought into the very heart of God. Someone put it this way: “In the midst of every dualism interrupting every dichotomy, God is there…. While we are busy dividing up the world into the saved and the damned, God is at work on an entirely different kind of project: reconciling the world to God’s own self.” Father, forgive them, because they are out of their minds, stuck in the vicious, never-ending cycle of hurt and hate and revenge. It is finished.

Dare I remind us that for the first 1100 years or so after these words were spoken, some of our best thinking suggested that Jesus’ death was payment to the devil. And then St. Anselm came along and suggested that, no, this payment was made to God. Why? Well, it was thought that it was God who all along would not rest until a sinless sacrifice was slaughtered. But I’ve come to suspect that this reasoning has more to do with our need, not God’s. I suspect that this reasoning is about our desire for balanced structures and our fascination with straight-laced moral bookkeeping.

Jesus, out of His anguish, dying on the cross, joined His voice with the angel that spoke to Abraham as he was about to slaughter his son, and joined His voice with Micah, the prophet, who said for God: “I do not want your sacrifices; I take no pleasure in seeing your blood-splattered altars.” On that day of days, Jesus said once and for all, for all who will listen: “Father, forgive them. It is finished.” And speaking as God incarnate, He was not simply talking about His earthly life. What came to an end was the need for sacrifice. Jesus gives His life and is raised to resurrected life, because He would not take a life. The scapegoating, the blood-thirsty placing of blame, all the bookkeeping is finally and forever finished.

At the cross, at the cross, where we first saw the light, we witnessed God drawing into the outstretched hands of the Christ all the sin and sickness, all the estrangement, paradoxes, confusion and violence, theirs--those two hanging next to Him, and those who were watching, and those who loved Him yet fled from Him, and yours and mine. God, in Christ, draws into His eternal heart all that divides and polarizes us, draws and reconciles all things to God’s own self. “Forgive them.” “It is finished.” And why is it that God forgives? Because only forgiveness will do. Only mercy, only sheer, unmerited grace has the power to heal, to restore and to create a future worth living in.

The Psalm assigned to this day (118) invites us to gives thanks to God because God’s hesed, God’s steadfast love, endures forever. “And this the Lord’s doing,” says the Psalmist, “and it is marvelous in our eyes.” Indeed, this is the true marvel of resurrection power. It is not that death died that day on that hill far away. Last I checked, the mortality rate still stands at 100 percent. It is perfectly natural to expect that one day you and I will die. Resurrection living does not erase earthly death but proclaims God’s eternal desire to forgive. And it comes from the One whose name is Love, “Love so amazing, so divine,” Love that demands our souls, our lives, and our all.

Let the people say: “In Christ, we are forgiven.” “It is finished.” “Alleluia and Amen.”

The reader should note that Rev. Steffen included the following line from Hannah Arendt in his welcome at the beginning of the service: “The only remedy for the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.”

I am grateful to Reva Allington, friend and member of St. Peter’s UMC, who edits my sermons.