Perhaps they'd spent the night in the same jail cell. With nothing to look forward to the next day except death by crucifixion, they may have talked the entire night and then watched the sun rise through barred windows. Some experience must have told the Good Thief that Jesus was utterly innocent. This felon dared, before his executioners, to defend a fellow condemned man and most likely had his legs broken for the effort. It's hard to believe the Good Thief would have done that on a whim or a hunch that the man hanging on a cross next to him was profoundly without sin.
When Jesus uttered words of complete forgiveness for the very people who had nailed him to the cross, the Good Thief knew that only a god could have done such a thing. Only a divinity could see beyond its own suffering, and into the helpless ignorance of persecution.
"Forgive them, for they know not what they do." Perhaps the Good Thief wept on the cross, not only because of his own suffering, but also from the stunning miracle he saw enacted. It must have been a terrifying beauty to witness. Wherever this man came from, thought the Good Thief, I want to return with him.
"You shall see heaven with me," said Jesus, "and see it today."
What crimes had the Good Thief committed? They had to be serious enough for him to openly admit his guilt and inspire such resignation in his heart.
"I know why I'm here," cried the Good Thief from the cross. "I've sinned. This man, however, is innocent!"
With that, and a simple request to Jesus to take him to paradise, the Good Thief was swept away with Christ to enter heaven and never to return for over 2,000 years.
He is, however, back on earth, and his significance in the Book of Luke has really interested only one man, Michael Moriarty, who has become so obsessed with the possible drama within that mutually-shared, three-hour agony on two crosses, he eventually, at 60 years of age, committed his life to the meaning of the Good Thief.
He saw no reason for any church to exclude anyone from heaven, no matter what their sins, if that person sincerely witnessed Christ's profound innocence and honored, from his or her soul, the love and forgiveness that only a god could summon up.
That was all Christ required to carry the Good Thief to heaven. Who are we, thought Michael, to ask more of any human being?
The Good Thief only appears in one of the four Gospels - the Book of Luke. Perhaps that is why he has been discredited. However, Michael knows this very brief but compelling anecdote to the crucifixion is the most seminal and ultimately the most powerful moment in a new idea of Christ's salvation. It could lead to the eventual creation of a new Christian community: the Church of The Good Thief, a Congregation of Christian Sinners.
Michael saw no reason why the initial object of Christ's efforts - the common, garden-variety sinners - should not again become the heart and soul of Christ's best church. It would be a religion of devotion and ministry without hypocrisy, lies or authoritarian tyranny.
Why should Michael be the one? And does the human race really need another effort at Christian salvation? So many have tried and failed for the most part. Flocks of Christians have fallen away from the Church because of their own embarrassment and rage at the hypocrisy and lies declared by their shepherds.
What can possibly bring them back?
A faith explained to them from the point of view of the Good Thief. Visions of Christ from a man who barely knew our Lord for 24 hours, yet whom Christ carried to heaven with him for simply having defended a stranger's innocence and that stranger's divine and God-like capacity for love and forgiveness.
If that is all that Christ required from the human race, why are billions of souls lost in fear and reluctant to ever enter another Christian church again?
Hypocrisy. The one sin Christ unrelentingly attacked was hypocrisy. That this ugliest of human traits came to rule over the churches founded in His name is an irony that escaped everyone except Christ Himself. The crosses and crucifixes, which represent established Christianity, are now filled with 2,000 years of corruption, lies, crime and cardinal sins. Christ wishes us to pick up that symbol of Christian hypocrisy, forgive those churches and start again with a new church, which carries the old crucifix in love and redemption.
If we can forgive two millennia of evil, we certainly can forgive ourselves and one another and press on with Christ's true meaning of heaven on earth. We can construct the New Bethlehem out of a faith of simplicity and mutual humility. A congregation of admitted Christian sinners who guide one another with love, forgiveness and free will into what is promised us in Revelations.
"Where two or more are gathered in My Name, there am I also."
The first character in the story of Christ that Michael ever really experienced was Judas. Michael's mother had divorced his father in a wrathful and vengeful retaliation that lasted almost two decades. She made Michael and his sister hostages to her rage. The two children had become the messengers of her hatred for their father. They were to swear a loyalty oath to the ex-Mrs. Moriarty and, if they broke it, there would be painful consequences. Upon the children's returning from an enjoyable evening with their father, Polly - as she was known to her few friends - did not speak to them for two weeks. She'd throw their breakfast on the table and walk away. Their dinners, for the most part, were lonely trips to an ice cream parlor, with just enough money to buy sandwiches and a sundae each. They soon learned how to cook for themselves.
Polly told her offspring that they were lucky to be alive, because their father had ordered her to have two abortions. Michael was all of seven years old at the time.
In a drunken abandon, Polly burned their house down with a lit cigarette dropped on the basement curtains. She overdosed on sleeping pills in front of her children. Her head hit the bathtub. Only eight years old, Michael tried to give her unconscious lips a cup of water. It spewed back in his face.
Finally, when Michael could no longer take her tirades against his father, he went to the piano, his only solace at the time. His mother came and whacked him across the throat. Michael phoned his father.
Dr. George Moriarty soon began custody proceedings. Michael was placed in a lower-form boarding school to await the court's judgment. He was required, at the age of 12, to testify privately before the Friend of The Court. He corroborated the stories about his mother and was awarded to his father.
"Judas!," screamed Polly. "You're my little Judas!"
She never rescinded the judgment, nor apologized, to the day she died. Mercifully, through Alcoholics Anonymous and daily reading of the Bible, she'd come to some peace with her life and her rage. She never, however, made amends to either Michael or his sister. The Twelve Steps demand that.
It took Michael 15 years before he could even shed a tear over his mother's death. A great, female psychoanalyst in New York found a key to Michael's profound desire to mourn the loss of his mother. He'd murmured something about the condition of his soul and his counselor connected that inner disease to the umbilical cord he'd been tied to for nine months.
Michael wept for two weeks straight. He'd seen an abyss of love and connection that was bottomless, indomitable and eternal. No matter what his mother had done to him, he would never release himself from that profound physical and metaphysical dependence upon the memory of his mother.
Her last words in the hospital were: "If you can't say anything nice about me, lie!"
Michael's inner response was Christ's "The truth shall set you free!"
Michael's forgiveness is based in Christ's desire that we "Love our enemy" and that we "resist not evil." Vengeance is God's, not ours.
All we are allowed to request is justice. Peace without justice always leads to war. Perhaps that is why Michael's four years on Law and Order seem to remain so indelibly fixed in the public's collective memory. The public could sense that he did his level best to enact justice, not only as Ben Stone but as Michael Moriarty.
Michael saw this record of the facts as nothing more than justice. He knew, however, that the pattern of these afflictions in his life was building to a Christian vision and an obligatory idea for a new Church. After reviewing the failure of two centuries of Christianity to stop the now overwhelming hegemony of Karl Marx and his appeal to disillusioned Christians, Michael knew the story of the Good Thief and a Christian self-image as nothing more than Good Thieves stealing hearts and minds for Christ, had become the only alternative, the only possible answer to world rule by over 300 socialist federations.
Their atheism, their genocidal indifference in the name of "population control," their empowerment of labor, women, and Third World and North American minorities had been built upon that coalition's jealousy, self-pity, self-entitlement and vengeance. He knew very well that the United Nations might convince the human race that man lives on bread alone, but they'd also extract their ultimate payment in a tyranny over rich, comfortable and poor. The so-called 'have-nots' would get food and shelter, but their real reward would be to enact vengeance upon their 'enemies.' Marx would serve it up to the 'lucky' in progressive taxation, court systems ruled by Marxist principles, wholesale abortion to punish all men by destroying their children, and ultimately fulfilling what could only be the devil's wish: they, the "enlightened despots," as Voltaire called them, would be the only people left walking the earth.
Michael had endured his mother's projection. She - her own, profoundly malevolent Judas - had hung that label on her son. It would take decades for Michael to come to some acceptance of why he should have been so falsely accused. He would know why he had been persecuted for a crime he'd never committed. He had learned to suffer without retaliation, vengeance or justice. Only now could he set some balance straight and see that part of his life as a major cornerstone of his vocation. He had enacted Christian principles even before he'd been aware of them. His considerable achievements later in life went way beyond what might have been expected from a personality ordered to loathe himself by his own mother.
Now, at 60, dead broke but nestled in a Canadian Christian community -speaking of Christ at all hours of the day and night - Michael had found home. He knew that millions of disillusioned ex-Christians, many of them now Marxist by necessity and not free will, were suffering in a wilderness of cynicism, apathy and increasing bitterness. They knew there was something wrong and they hadn't the slightest idea of what to do for themselves.
Marxism was a religion, not merely a political or economic idea. Its foundation was "Do unto the rich what we would not want done unto ourselves."
No secular, conservative movement could have battled a socialist belief that was actually entrenched in religious zealotry. Those worldly goods, stolen from individually free citizens, were only a weapon if Christians allowed them to be. The vengeance of Marxism was only enacted if the sufferers were still, in some way, attached to anything worldly. God wants, as shown in both the Old and New Testaments, all the truly faithful to be rewarded with earthly blessings, but with such evil ruling the world, that was not possible.
So Christianity returned to its condition of 2,000 years ago. It was reliving the life of its early founders. Persecuted and demonized by a secular press, media and agnostic/atheistic artists of every persuasion, the meaning of Christ had been lumped in with the millions of mistakes, sins and crimes committed by Christian institutions. It hadn't been difficult. The fruit on the tree of institutionalized Christianity had been very rank. Its history was bedecked in hypocrisy.
Ireland alone was the most psychotic example: Christians shooting each other in the name of a non-violent God. No political solution could ever cure that. The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury should have jointly declared that if any Irishman picks up a weapon to harm another Irish brother or sister, he or she would be excommunicated. Ireland had fallen into the arms of agent-provocateurs, communist troublemakers whose only aim was to destroy a free world nation and demonize the meaning of Christ by revealing the hypocritical behavior of Christians. However, the leading shepherds of today's Protestant and Catholic world would not risk what Pope Pius XII refused to risk - assassination. Had that pope excommunicated any Catholic collaborating with either Hitler or Mussolini, the Second World War could never have happened.
However, with a ubiquitous, all-pervasive leukemia called Marxism, there was no single tumor like the Fuhrer or Il Duce to extricate. Robin Hood ruled.
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