‘Christ’s Seven Last Words’ is a production of the University Church in Oxford, featuring Professor Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, which will be released each evening throughout Holy Week.
In this second episode, Professor Graham Ward reflects on the words, ‘This day you will be with me in paradise’.
Music sung by the University Church Choir.
Sound design by Ana-Maria Niculcea
Like the Prodigal Son among the swineherd, all inheritance spent, we are recalled to ourselves by the thief on the Cross and Christ’s words to him: “This day you will be with me in paradise.” We know something about what we are, though far less about what we will be, and we don’t know what paradise is. We have echoes of a mythic garden in Eden or the city coming down from heaven. We have dreamt ancient dreams and every laid-out and well-tended garden, woodland silence, sunset sea and frosted mountain leaves traces of a delightful beauty. But each culture imagines what is paradisial differently, or reads into the Biblical accounts familiar, though idealised, scenes. It is the transit from one realm and situation to another that speaks from the Cross. The transit from the physical and mental agony of being crucified to some place of eternal delights in which violence and violation cease. We are caught in the very moment of transition, not just between the present and the future, but an axial moment in created time and the eternal. But there is something also about judgement here: the criminal who, on his own account, deserved his punishment and Christ, the just one, the one alone who is without sin. There is a new justice manifest here; a divine justice revealed in the very face of both human injustice (against Christ) and the justified punishment of the thief. And who knows what led the thief to steal? Sin is exposed, even acknowledged and forgiveness comes through an intercession between Christ as Son and the divine Father. We have no understanding of what is involved in that exchange between Father and Son such that eternal forgiveness is possible. The forgiveness is and will always remain a mystery in which the first word from the Cross echoes: “they know not what they do.” For all the decisiveness of human practices of justice and the meeting out of punishment, there is a profound ignorance and only one who can be truly said to be innocent. So many unknowns about our human condition are staged here in the final moments on the Cross: the truth about where we are going and what we have done, the righteousness or unrighteousness of all our acts, singly and collectively. What is certain is the love that forgives and our eternal presence with Christ. Christ with us is paradise. It’s as if one day, beyond our deaths, we will awake, open our eyes and have to ask “what was that all about?” We are not the ultimate controllers of our destiny, or the destiny of anybody else either. “This day you will be with me in paradise” – and then we will understand. We will know even as we are known.
