A few years ago, I wrote a Good Friday poem from the perspective of Dismas, which is the traditional name for the penitent thief on the cross.
His right hand reaches,
his fingertip closer to mine than to his heart,
stretched like me,
fastened like me,
One of Three.
His eyes catch mine,
we hold on for dear life:
“Remember me.”
That last line is intentionally vague. Who says “Remember me?” Obviously, if you look at the text, the thief says it: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” (Luke 23:42) Yet mere hours before, in Luke 22, Jesus gathers his disciples at a table and interprets His own suffering through the broken bread and poured wine: “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Both Jesus and the thief yearn to be remembered. Why?
I think we all want to be remembered. I want my children to think of me when they are grown and I am old, to send me funny memes when they see them, and to call me on Father’s Day. I want them to reckon with what my life has meant to them, to see honestly my strengths and weaknesses, to honor my efforts by building on my strengths and unlearning what I have taught them in weakness. I want Jill to remember me, the real me, in those moments that all spouses have where we get frustrated with each other and wonder about a different life. I want the ministries I have served to remember me as someone who pointed them to Jesus, and I want them to think fondly about our time together. I don’t want my kids, or Jill, or the ministries I’ve served to remember me in a false way, a way that suits them, a way that makes me into what they want me to be. I want them all to remember the real me.
Jesus wants to be remembered, too. This is an astounding thing. He sits his disciples down and essentially says, “Please don’t stop getting together like this. You HAVE to keep doing this, even when I’m gone, and when you eat this meal, you HAVE to remember me, who I am to you. Don’t forget me. Please remember me.”
It’s easy to talk about remembering Jesus, but it’s not always easy to do. It’s why Biblical scholars parse His words so closely, to be sure we understand the intricacies of what He said. It’s why theologians are so obsessive about understanding the character of God, to be sure we are remembering Jesus and not our own vain imagination of who He is.
But learning Greek and Hebrew and dense theological terms is the easy part. The hard part is remembering Jesus outside the classroom, when there’s no grade to be earned with your accuracy. Who wants to remember Jesus when we see a fetal ultrasound and have to consider mother and child? Who wants to remember Jesus when we see prisoners stacked in a foreign prison, floor to ceiling, and we have to ask where justice becomes rage? Who wants to remember Jesus when we have to ask hard questions about sex and poverty and gender and justice and our national security and the state of the American soul?
Jesus complicates those questions, and we know it. So we forget Him, or perhaps remember the Jesus we wish He was. We fall back on what seems right to us, or what some leader or party tells us to think or do. We forget the real Jesus, and we frankly hope He forgets us; we don’t want Him to see us as we ignore the widow and the orphan, the prisoner and the beggar. We cannot bear the Gaze that reminds us that this is not who we are, because right now this is what we want to be. We follow the parties and rulers of this world.
But none of those leaders or parties loves us, and none of them will remember us. None of them will remember us when they come into their kingdom, when they have used our loyalty and complicity to get what they want. None of them will remember us when we see the blood on our hands, when we hang on the cross. None of them will remember us when we consider the crushing reality that we have made a deal with a serpent, and that we are dying, and that we are indeed suffering justly, because we are receiving the just reward for our deeds. When we awaken to ourselves, and cry out, “Remember me,” none of them will turn toward us in compassion.
Only Jesus will. And so to remember Jesus is ultimately to be remembered ourselves. Jesus calls us to this different vision of what it means to be human, calls us from death to life. Jesus shows us that it is possible to tell the truth, and reminds us that His life is our life: that through Him, it is possible to expose the powers through your living and your dying and your new Spirit-soaked life. Jesus reminds us that it is possible to live justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God on the journey he takes with us—to His cross and ours.