“What must I do to be saved?”
It’s a question that certain denominations, churches, and individuals care more about than others. Among those who care the most, the answers are often very precise. When we go through the stories of people being saved or lost in the Gospels, however, things get a little fuzzier.
In my take on the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus, I do my best to honor that fuzziness. The basic characters of the two thieves are clearly delineated in the text, so there wasn’t much I could do about that, but I tried my best to stack the deck against the “repentant” thief in every other way. He’s the one who drags the other thief into their life of crime. He’s the one who kills one of their victims. And in a twist of irony, it’s his sensitive and reflective nature that gets them both caught. Finally, I have him not even really believing in Jesus at all. In my version, his final request is just a case of humoring the crazy guy.
After reading all this, how do you feel about the fact that it’s still the second thief who is saved, while his partner presumably is not? If I managed to make you suddenly less comfortable with that outcome, I’ll have done my job. Because the question I want to raise in this play is: What did the one thief do to be saved? Did it really require the full-on Belief in Jesus that the original text suggests he had? (And did he even have that full-on Belief in the first place? His referring to Jesus’ “kingdom” certainly suggests that, but his earlier lines about how Jesus had done nothing wrong seem pretty lukewarm to be a description of the Messiah. They sound more like he saw Jesus only as someone who had committed no crime.)
What if what saved the thief was simply his kindness toward Jesus? What if it was simply his clear-headedness? What if he was not in fact saved in that moment, but had been saved all along, due in some way to the kind of man he was even in his life of crime, and Jesus was simply reporting to him the state he’d already achieved on his own?
What if the saved thief had always been in Paradise, and the damned thief had also been in Hell?
These are worthwhile questions.