" Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in
paradise."-Luke 23:43. THIS is now the offertory of the Mass, for our
Lord is offering Himself to His heavenly Father. But in order to remind
us that He is not offered alone, but in union with us, He unites with
His offertory the soul of the thief at the right. To make His ignominy
more complete, in a master stroke of malice, they crucified Him between
two thieves. He walked among sinners during His life, so now they let
Him hang between them at death. But He changed the picture, and made
the two thieves the symbols of the sheep and the goats, which will
stand at His right and left hand when He comes in the clouds of heaven,
with His then triumphant cross, to judge both the living and the dead.
Both
thieves at first reviled and blasphemed, but one of them, whom
tradition calls Dismas, turned his head to read the meekness and
dignity on the face of the crucified Savior. As a piece of coal thrown
into the fire is transformed into a bright and glowing thing, so the
black soul of this thief thrown into the fires of the Crucifixion
glowed with love for the Sacred Heart.
While the thief on
the left was saying: "If thou be Christ, save thyself and us," the
repentant thief rebuked him saying: "Neither cost thou fear God, seeing
thou art under the same condemnation. And we indeed justly, for we
receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done no evil."
That same thief then emitted a plea, not for a place in the seats of
the mighty, but only not to be forgotten: "Remember me, when thou shalt
come into thy kingdom."
Such sorrow and faith must not go
unrewarded. At a moment when the power of Rome could not make Him
speak, when His friends thought all was lost and His enemies believed
all was won, our Lord broke the silence. He who was the accused, became
the Judge: He who was the crucified, became the Divine Assessor of
souls, as to the penitent thief He trumpeted the words: "This day thou
shalt be with me in paradise." This day-when you said your first prayer
and your last; this day-thou shalt be with me-and where I am, there is
paradise. With these words our Lord who was offering Himself to His
heavenly Father as the great Host, now unites with Him on the paten of
the cross the first small host ever offered in the Mass the host of the
repentant thief, a brand plucked from the burning, a sheaf torn from
the earthly reapers; the wheat ground in the mill of the crucifixion
and made bread for the Eucharist.
Our Lord does not
suffer alone on the Cross; He suffers with us. That is why He united
the sacrifice of the thief with His own. It is this St. Paul means when
he says that we should fill up those things that are wanting to the
sufferings of Christ. This does not mean our Lord on the cross did not
suffer all He could. It means rather that the physical, historical
Christ suffered all He could in His own human nature, but that the
Mystical Christ, which is Christ and us, has not suffered to our
fullness. All the other good thieves in the history of the world have
not yet admitted their wrong and pleaded for remembrances. Our Lord is
now in heaven. He therefore can suffer no more in His human nature but
He can suffer more in our human natures. So He reaches out to other
human natures, to yours and mine, and asks us to do as the thief did,
namely, to incorporate ourselves to Him on the Cross, that sharing in
His Crucifixion we might also share in His Resurrection, and that made
partakers of His Cross we might also be made partakers of His glory in
heaven.
As our Blessed Lord on that day chose the thief
as the small host of sacrifice, He chooses us today as the other small
hosts united with Him on the paten of the altar. Go back in your mind's
eye to a Mass, to any Mass which was celebrated in the first centuries
of the Church, before civilization became completely financial and
economic. If we went to the Holy Sacrifice in the early Church, we
would have brought to the altar each morning some bread and some wine.
The priest would have used one piece of that unleavened bread and some
of that wine for the sacrifice of the Mass. The rest would have been
put aside, blessed, and distributed to the poor. Today we do not bring
bread and wine. We bring its equivalent; we bring that which buys bread
and wine. Hence the offertory collection. Why do we bring bread and
wine or its equivalent to the Mass? We bring bread and wine because
these two things, of all things in nature, most represent the substance
of life. Wheat is as the very marrow of the ground, and the grapes its
very blood, both of which give us the body and blood of life. In
bringing those two things, which give us life, nourish us, we are
equivalently bringing ourselves to the Sacrifice of the Mass.
We are therefore present at each and every Mass under the appearance of
bread and wine, which stand as symbols of our body and blood. We are
not passive spectators as we might be watching a spectacle in a
theater, but we are co-offering our Mass with Christ. If any picture
adequately describes our role in this drama it is this: There is a
great cross before us on which is stretched the great Host, Christ.
Round about the hill of Calvary are our small crosses on which we, the
small hosts, are to be offered. When our Lord goes to His Cross we go
to our little crosses, and offer ourselves in union with Him, as a
clean oblation to the heavenly Father.
At that moment we
literally fulfill to the smallest detail the Savior’s command: Take up
your cross daily and follow Me. In doing so, He is not asking us to do
anything He has not already done Himself. Nor is it any excuse to say:
"I am a poor unworthy host." So was the thief. Note that there were two
attitudes in the soul of that thief, both of which made him acceptable
to our Lord. The first was the recognition of the fact that He deserved
what He was suffering, but that the sinless Christ did not deserve His
Cross; in other words, he was penitent. The second was faith in Him
whom men rejected, but whom the thief recognized as the very King of
Kings.
Upon what conditions do we become small hosts in
the Mass? How does our sacrifice become one with Christ's and as
acceptable as the thief's? Only by reproducing in our souls the two
attitudes in the soul of the thief: penitence and faith. First of all
we must be penitent with the thief and say: "I deserve punishment for
my sins. I stand in need of sacrifice." Some of us do not know how
wicked or how ungrateful to God we are. If we did, we would not so
complain about the shocks and pains of life. Our consciences are like
darkened rooms from which light has been long excluded. We draw the
curtain, and lo! everywhere what we thought was cleanliness, we now
find dust. Some consciences have been so filmed over with excuses that
they pray with the Pharisee: "I thank Thee, O God, that I am not as the
rest of men." Others blaspheme the God of heaven for their pain and
sins but repent not. The World War, for example, was meant to be a
purgation of evil; it was meant to teach us that we cannot get along
without God, but the world refused to learn the lesson. Like the thief
on the left, it refuses to be penitent: it refuses to see any relation
of justice between sin and sacrifice, between rebellion and a cross.
But
the more penitent we are, the less anxious we are to escape our cross.
The more we see ourselves as we are, the more we say with the good
thief: "I deserved this cross." He did not want to be excused; he did
not want to have his sin explained away; he did not want to be let off;
he did not ask to be taken down. He wanted only to be forgiven. He was
willing even to be a small host on his own little cross-but that was
because he was penitent. Nor is there given to us any other way to
become little hosts with Christ in the Mass than by breaking our hearts
with sorrow; for unless we admit we are wounded how can we feel the
need of healing? Unless we are sorry for our part in the Crucifixion,
how could we ever ask to be forgiven its sin?
The second
condition of becoming a host in the offertory of the Mass is faith. The
thief looked above the head of our Blessed Lord and saw a sign which
read: "KING." Queer king that! For a crown: thorns. For royal purple:
His own blood. For a throne: a cross. For courtiers: executioners. For
a coronation: a crucifixion. And yet beneath all that dross the thief
saw the gold; amidst all those blasphemies he prayed. His faith was so
strong he was content to remain on his cross. The thief on the left
asked to be taken down, but not the thief on the right. Why? Because he
knew there were greater evils than crucifixions, and another life
beyond the cross. He had faith in the Man on the central cross who
could have turned thorns into garlands and nails into rosebuds if He
willed; but he had faith in a Kingdom beyond the cross, knowing that
the sufferings of this world are not worthy to be compared with the
joys that are to come. With the Psalmist his soul cried: "Though I
should walk in the midst of the shadow of death I will fear no evils,
for thou art with me."
Such faith was like that of the
three youths in the fiery furnace who were commanded by the king,
Nebuchadnezzar, to adore the golden statue. Their answer was: "For
behold our God, whom we worship, is able to save us from the furnace of
burning fire, and to deliver us out of thy hands, O king. But if He
will not, be it known to thee, O king, that we will not worship thy
gods, nor adore the golden statue which thou hast set up." Note that
they did not ask God to deliver them from the fiery furnace, though
they knew God could do it, "for He is able to save us from the furnace
of burning fire." They left themselves wholly in God's hands, and like
Job they trusted Him.
So likewise with the good thief: He
knew our Lord could deliver Him. But he did not ask to be taken down
from the cross, for our Lord did not come down Himself even though the
mob challenged Him. The thief would be a small host, if need be, unto
the very end of the Mass. This did not mean the thief did not love
life: He loved life as much as we love it. He wanted life, and a long
life, and he found it, for what life is longer than Life Eternal. To
each and every one of us in like manner it is given to discover that
Eternal Life. But there is no other way to enter it than by penance and
by faith which unite us to that Great Host- the Priest and Victim
Christ. Thus do we become spiritual thieves, and steal heaven once
again.
