I HAVE A BOX FILLED with old letters, postcards and photos of people who have come and gone in my life. I don’t look at them often, but when I do, I feel a bittersweet ache. These memories fail to satisfy; they reveal a hole in my heart I cannot close. Loss of life, relationships, health, hope, faith, love— these leave us feeling broken, in conflict with ourselves, unsettled and uncertain.
True healing of the heart—true remembering— belongs to God alone. As St. Augustine wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
A priest friend of mine keeps his office filled with religious gifts—artwork and Scripture verses from friends. When asked if he looked at them often, he said no, but he feels the love behind them. His favorite, he said, is a small, framed card with only these words: “Remember, you are going to die.”
Today’s Gospel (Lk. 23:35-43) about the Crucifixion and the exchange between Jesus and the two thieves may seem out of place as we approach Thanksgiving and Christmas. Yet it perfectly concludes the Church year and leads us into Advent, a new beginning. Today we celebrate Christ the King—the only one who can truly, perfectly re-member us, as He did the repentant thief who knew he was going to die.
The thief wasn’t asking Jesus merely to recall him hanging on a cross, ending a life marked by sin, when he asked Jesus to remember him. He was asking for something greater something he could not do for himself. He was praying to Jesus, face-to-face, to put his fractured body and soul back together, to restore him to the wholeness God intended. It was a final prayer of humility that became the meeting place with God.
In Scripture, to be “remembered” has two profound senses: First, it means for God to act in favor of the one being remembered; here, granting salvation. Second, it means for God to re-create the person into perfect wholeness. “Remember” usually means to recall the past. But biblically, it means to re-member—to return the members, the parts of a
person, into a harmonious whole.
The thief was imploring Jesus to restore him in communion with God. And Jesus responded not with a promise of memory, but of presence: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
When God remembers, He restores His order through salvation into a new creation. The thief asked for and received eternal healing—perfect reunification, a re-membering of body and soul fully reconciled with God. Jesus closed the hole in his heart.
This is a regal act of nonviolent love from the Cross: taking the thief with Him into Paradise. What humanity condemns, God can redeem through grace. We are not saved by the violence of the Passion, but by its loving non-violent acceptance by Jesus. Out of mutual isolation and abandonment, Jesus opens heaven to the thief, never again to be forgotten, forever re-membered.
Jesus did for the thief what He came to do for all of us—restore what sin and death have dismembered. He re-membered brokenness into eternal life through healing, forgiveness and love. “Behold,” He says, “I make all things new (Rev. 21:5 )”— for all time, all the time, outside of time. And so, we return to the priest’s plaque: “Remember, you are going to die.” Missionary Jim Elliott once wrote, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” May our lives join with the thief’s prayer: “Jesus, our King, re-member us when you come into your Kingdom.”