“Commemoration of the Holy Ladrone who, having confessed Christ on the cross, deserved to feel he said to him:” Today you will be with me in Heaven “”. Thus we read in the universal list of saints, the Roman martyrology, on March 25th; And the oriental churches remember him two days before, the 23rd.
He is the man who usually call a good thief, and who venerates himself as a saint. A saint, we can also say, canonized by the same voice of Jesus. We do not know his name with certainty. It is called it Inhama in Acts of Pilatewhich are a non -canonical text, that is, not welcomed by the Church among the sacred scriptures. And we certainly know about his life, except that for his crimes he was sentenced to death together with another.
Both, we learn from the Gospels, are put on the cross on the Calvary together with Jesus: one on his right, the other on his left, as Matteo, Marco and Luca specify. The latter then gives us the most widespread narrative of those moments.
The good thief makes an act of faith in the face of the dying Jesus
One of the two condemned, from his cross, starts to shout insults against Jesus, deriding him as the executioners do also do: “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us too!”. And here is the reproach of the other condemned for those injuries: “Not even you are afraid of God, although condemned to the same penalty? We rightly, since we receive the right for our actions; he instead did nothing wrong”.
At this point the man has already deserved the qualification of “good thief”. It is one, in fact, who knows how to recognize that he deserves the maximum and infamous penalty for his crimes. In short, a repentant, but who regrets expanding; not to avoid the atonement.
In the end, A man who in his suffering is also capable of compassion for the pains of Jesus, which was condemned despite being innocent. Generally attention to man stops here. But he still speaks, turning directly to Jesus: “Remember me when you enter your kingdom”. And this is his quiet and total “act of faith” in Jesus, who at this moment is not making miracles like those who marvelous the crowds and encouraged the disciples: now Jesus hangs agonizing from the cross, between insults and contempt. But he speaks to him as a sovereign on the throne. He recognizes him lord of a kingdom in which he begs to be welcomed, without a word of regret for his earthly life he is ending.
He has that faith that Jesus tried to instill in his disciples, and that he now rewards in the thief with the short response: “Today you will be with me in paradise”. In Christian antiquity, many legends about the good thief have spread. According to one of them, he would have participated in the kidnapping of Mary and Giuseppe with the little Jesus, during their escape to Egypt. Even these imaginative narratives confirm the importance that from the very first times the Christian world has attributed to him, venerating it immediately as a saint.
