Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025
To watch a video of this word, please click below:
To listen to an audio recording of the homily based on this word, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- As Jesus continued to bleed from his hands and feet, back and head on Calvery, he puts into practice his divine mission for the forgiveness of sins through the new and eternal covenant in that blood. Whereas in his first word from the Cross, he cried out in mercy for everyone except his mother stretching from the foundation of the world until the end of time. In his second merciful word, he showed his love for individual sinners in particular. And that special love is a reason for hope for all of us.
- The context of the dialogue with the thief on Jesus’ right, called by tradition the Good Thief or since the fourth century in apocryphal texts St. Dismas, is incredible. Hanging on the Cross, Jesus had been mocked by Pilate in writing with the title plate over his head, and then live by the leaders of the people, the soldiers, the passers-by and even, according to St. Matthew, both of the thieves. The latter must have been most difficult. Jesus had risked his reputation to become labeled a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” and had promised that tax collectors and sinners would enter the kingdom before the self-righteous, but now, as he was numbered among the malefactors, even they were verbally abusing him. But something happened in the bandit on Jesus’ right. Maybe it was watching Jesus suffer well in contrast to the way he was dealing with his own terrible pain. Maybe it was hearing Jesus’ first words from the Cross, which were indeed strange words to come from a condemned, crucified criminal, even if Pilate in three languages derisively said he was a king. It may have just been that he saw his whole life flash before him at the moment of his death and wanted to go out right. But something happened in him. He was filled with some fear of God, the beginning of wisdom. St. Luke tells us that because of that change, only one of the two continued to taunt Jesus. Dismas went from deriding to defending Jesus. Even though it would have been excruciatingly difficult for him, too, to talk, he rebuked the other thief and said, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” He stuck up for someone who was innocent. He was thinking about someone else, rather than himself. And he turned to Jesus with a prayer that betrayed a glimmer of hope.
- His prayer started out simply enough. He called the Lord by name, Jesus, “God saves,” and asked, “Remember me.” Everybody hopes that someone will remember him after he dies, that he would have made some difference in someone’s life such that somebody might miss him. But what was odd was that Jesus would die even before Dismas. How would Jesus possibly remember him, … unless, … unless the Good Thief someone intuited, doubtless helped by grace, that Jesus would have some life that would extend beyond Calvary? The concrete request showed even more. He asked to be remembered when the naked, despised, crucified man beside him would enter his That he wasn’t just a carpenter but a king and somehow would have the capacity to remember.
- Jesus turned his aching head toward his companion in suffering. Even word cost him enormously to pronounce, he added the words of a Jewish oath, “Amen, I say to you.” Then he promised him that he would do far more than remember. “I say to you today, you shall be with me in … paradise.” As the great Jesuit missionary Archbishop of Bombay, India, Alban Goodier, once commented, “It was language worthy of a conqueror, spoken on a field where a battle had been won; it was a reward worthy of Jesus Christ, the King of Israel, the Son of God. From a criminal, in an instant, to a saint, the first of the New Dispensation; with this unique distinction granted to no other, that he was canonized before his death.” Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen famously quipped: “A dying man asked a dying man for eternal life; a man without possessions asked a poor man for a Kingdom; a thief at the door of death asked to die like a thief and steal Paradise.”
- The response of Jesus to the good thief’s appeal is a source of hope to everyone. He shows that God meant the inspiring words he said to sinners through his Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, that even “though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow” (Is 1:18) and “when a wicked man turns away from wickedness and does what is right and just, because of this he shall live” (Ezek 33:19). Conversion is possible, even at the last minute. The last can indeed become first. Converted sinners and tax collectors will enter the kingdom of God before the rest. The dead was brought to life. The lost was found. A sinner asked and received. He knocked and the door to paradise was opened. And heaven rejoiced more for that one repentant sinner than for 99 who didn’t need to repent.
- The story of the Good Thief has given hope to so many.
- We see it in one of the most famous scenes in the life of Blessed Michael McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus, who reached out to a young man, James “Chip” Smith after he, drunk, killed a New Haven police officer. Despite Smith’s initial defiance, the persevering kindness of Father McGivney eventually got him to hope that the way that people despised him on earth, he was in fact loved by Jesus, and even though he was sentenced to death, he might nevertheless enter into eternal life. Chip Smith died in the graces of the Lord.
- We see similar hope in the work of St. Joseph Cafasso, the mentor of St. John Bosco, according to St. John Paul II one of the four extraordinary apostles of the confessional, and greatest prison chaplain of all time. He would go into prisons that even prison guards wouldn’t enter to confess the inmates within, help them humbly to renounce the sins and crimes they had committed, resolve to do good with the time they had and focus with hope on the mercy of God. With those on death row, he would patiently persuade them to make their peace with God and seize an eternal treasure. He would call them his “saints of the gallows,” the heirs of the paradise Christ gave to Dismas.
- We see this form of hope in the work of St. Camillus de Lellis, the patron saint of all those who work in hospitals, who with his fellow Camillians would care for those abandoned in hospitals and help all of them, especially those whose conditions were terminal, seek, trust in and receive God’s mercy. They took a fourth vow to care for the sick even at the risk of their life, something they routinely did in caring for those with the bubonic plague and other infectious diseases. When he couldn’t walk to see the sick, he would crawl on the floor. So great was his focus on Christ in the sick that he would literally treat them as if he were handling Christ, sometimes expressing sorrow to him for all his past sins and begging mercy. It moved so many to imitate his trust in God’s mercy and his hope in eternal life.
- We see it in the venerable Father Emil Kapaun, U.S. military chaplain in World War II and again in Korea, who repeatedly risked his life to bring the last rites to injured soldiers on the battlefield so that they would be ready to meet the King of Kings, and who when he was imprisoned with them in Korea awaiting execution, helped them never to lose hope in Christ’s promise of eternal life.
- We see similar work in St. Maximilan Mary Kolbe, who, when he offered himself to take the place of a married man, accompanied the other nine selected to be starved to death out of punishment for a prisoner who had escaped Auschwitz. Despite their sufferings he helped them keep a vivid hope of eternal life.
- And of course we cannot forget St. Therese, who prayed for Henri Pranzini as he was preparing to suffer the death penalty, that he would go the way of the Good Thief. Despite all odds and predictions, before Pranzini died, he asked for a crucifix and kissed the corpus, finding in Christ on the Cross a source of hope for mercy at the end.
- Hope, the Catechism tells us, “is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (1817). The great hope that is meant to inspire us in life is heaven. Jesus wants us to desire it and learn how to seek the things that are above. Not to wait for the last minute, but to hunger for it now.
- Heaven, paradise, cannot be taken for granted. Just as we see in the two thieves, one can turn to Jesus asking for mercy, and another can turn away in anger and self-alienation. Jesus said that at the end of time, when he comes to judge the living and the dead, he will separate us into two groups, like sheep and goats, based on whether we care for or stiff him in the hungry, thirst, naked, stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need. “Two will be in the field” or “grinding meal together” or in bed, he said: “one will be taken and one will be left.” In this case, two were on the Cross and it appears that only one was taken. But there is hope. And we’re called to act on that now. Thomas Aquinas wrote in his famous Eucharistic hymn, Adoro Te Devote, Peto quod petivit latro poenitens!, “I ask for what the Good Thief asked.” And we make that ask here and now, full of hope, that the Lord Jesus, who responded to the good thief’s plea to be remembered with the largesse befitting the King of Kings, will do far more than remember us, too, but give us the help he knows we need to be with him who has gone to prepare a place for us and promised to return to take us with him, so that where he is, we, too, may be. And so we pray in response to this second word, “Hail O Cross, key that opens paradise, our only hope. Help us to lift high that saving cross every day!”
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