|
|
Remembered Forever
Luke 23: 33 – 43 |
|
|
Summary
Remembered by God In 1967 an up and rising baseball star had his career suddenly ended by a stray fastball that hit him in the face. The pitcher was Jack Hamilton of the California Angels. Hamilton, of course, felt terrible about the accident and was haunted by his memory. Over 20 years later, Hamilton talked about the accident, saying, “I’ve had to live with it; I think about it a lot ... Watching baseball on TV, anytime a guy gets hit, I think about it ... It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2-1, and he was the eighth hitter in their batting order.” In reality, it was the fourth inning, there was no score, there were two outs, nobody was on base. The player,Tony Conigliaro, was batting sixth. Hamilton remembered it to be a day game, but, in fact, it took place at night. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus uses this story as proof that our memories are constantly being altered, transformed and distorted. Here’s some evidence: The morning after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, an Emory University professor asked the students in his freshman class to fill out a questionnaire that asked: Where were they when they first heard the news? What were they doing at the time? Who were they with? And who first told them the news? Three years later, when the same students were seniors, he asked them to fill out the same questionnaire, with one additional question: How sure were they of their answers? Forty-four students filled out both questionnaires. Here are the results: Only three subjects (7 percent) remembered the details correctly, but even then with minor discrepancies. Eleven students (25 percent) were wrong about everything. What’s more, the students who got everything wrong were just as confident of the accuracy of their recall as those who remembered accurately. And no amount of evidence could convince them otherwise, even after they were shown the original questionnaires in their own handwriting. The selectiveness of human memory is the wisdom behind these words from a Navajo Wind Chant: Remember what you have seen, because everything forgotten returns to the circling winds. Eternal life Our scripture reading today tells about Jesus being crucified between two thieves. One of them mocked Jesus, saying, “If you are the Christ, save yourself and us!” But the other thief rebuked the first, “... we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” And then this second thief turned to Jesus; he only asked that Jesus “remember” him when he comes into his kingdom. This thief’s attitude was quite different from that of so many others convicted of crimes and who profess innocence with the claim, “I was framed.” But not so the dying thief. He was guilty and he knew it. But he recognized that the man dying next to him was completely different. The thief believed, and that led him to say, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus’ responsed, “today you will be with me in Paradise.” That indicates that Jesus viewed this thief’s words as true repentance. The repentant thief’s request was really very humble. He only asked that he be remembered. It was like saying, “If you will only promise me that you will not forget that someone as bad as I was once hung by your side, then I will die satisfied.” At most he was saying, “If there is anything at all you can do for me, I will be grateful.” But Jesus promised the thief a lot more than he asked for. He promised him eternal life. Because, without a doubt, to be “remembered” by God means something more than to be held in our defective memories. In the old Norse tales, Viking kings wanted to capture huge amounts of loot when they plundered others, but not just to gain personal wealth. Instead, they wanted enough wealth to be able to give some away to their men and as a result be remembered for their generosity. In fact, one of the cherished honors was to be known as a ring-giver,” referring to the practice of giving the gold rings and other jewelry captured during raids. The Viking kings considered this business of being remembered by others as a type of immortality. But that was not what Jesus promised this repentant criminal. It was not the weak immortality of a reputation that “lives on” after our death that he offered, but the true immortality of an unending joyful existence in heaven. Paradise Christianity has always taken the fact of physical death quite seriously. But Christians know what the repentant thief discovered — that even though death is real, it is not the last word. Christians believe that the God who created us in the first place has the power to give us new life in the second place. But it is entirely God’s power. We have no innate quality to prevent our extinction. But we do have the same key that the dying thief on the cross next to Jesus had, and that is the ability to ask God to remember us. One commentator has pointed out that the thief was praying selfishly, asking for what he did not deserve. But it was not the appearance of desperation that made Jesus respond to him. It was the simple fact that the man simply and sincerely asked. While we may not often think about our personal relationship with God in terms of his remembering us, it is a helpful image when thinking about what happens after death. Gratefully, the resurrection life Christ offers is not like the fickle memory of humankind. How wonderful then that God’s memory does not suffer these human limitations. To be remembered by God means not only never to be forgotten, but also to live forevermore. This same Lord who had earlier said in Luke 11:9, “Ask, and it will be given you,” now followed through on all that he had promised and more. He went beyond simply remembering this thief to promising him a place in Paradise with him. The word “Paradise” comes from a Persian word meaning “a walled garden.” When a Persian king wanted to honor one of his subjects, he invited that subject to come and walk with him in his garden. So one way to picture what it means to be remembered by God is that after death we walk in the garden with him. But here’s an image I prefer: In one of his books, anthropologist Loren Eiseley tells of one of his expeditions to capture birds alive for a zoo. He came upon a cabin that had been unoccupied for years. There were holes in the roof and birds had come in to roost in the rafters. Eiseley put a ladder against one of these beams, and with a flashlight, ready to momentarily blind the birds, he crept up to the rafters. He snapped on the light and immediately saw a pair of sparrow hawks. He reached out to grab them, and as he did, the male hawk, a bird not much bigger than a man’s fist, attached himself to Eiseley’s hand. The bird put up a terrific struggle and that gave his mate time to escape. Eiseley was disappointed that he did not captured the pair, but he had to admit that under the circumstances, he could not have handled them both. He put the bird into a small box for the night, but the next morning, feeling somehow embarrassed by what he had done, he released it. As the bird rose into the sky, the cry of its mate came ringing down to meet it. Eiseley says: ... when I heard that cry my heart turned over. It was not the cry of the hawk I had captured; for, by shifting my position against the sun, I was now seeing further up. Straight out of the sun’s eye, where she must have been soaring restlessly above us for untold hours, hurtled his mate ... I saw them both now. He was rising to meet her ... And from far up, ringing from peak to peak of the summits over us, came a cry of such unutterable and ecstatic joy that it sounds down across the years and tingles among the cups on my quiet breakfast table [as I recall it]. Like the bird that circled overhead to keep watch over her mate in his time difficulty, God watches over us through the circling years of our lives. If we have kept faith in God, when we finally cross that threshold we call death, there is the ringing cry of recognition and joy from the Father in heaven. “Today — and forevermore — you shall be with me in paradise!” We will be living with God, remembered forever. That’s what it means to be remembered by God. |
||
