Biblion Bible Commentary
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Today You Will Be With Me
Luke 23:39-43
39 One of the criminals who was hanged insulted him, saying, “If you are the Christ, save yourself and us!” · WEB
Two criminals, the same mockery, and one of them changes his mind and asks to be remembered.
One of the criminals who was hanged insulted him, saying, "If you are the Christ, save yourself and us!" Luke 23:39.
The scene is this Gospel's alone. Both men joined the mockery at first — the other accounts say so Matthew 27:44 — and this one records what happened next to one of them.
"Don't you even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong" Luke 23:40–41.
The rebuke is the most theologically exact speech anyone makes in the chapter, and it is made by a dying criminal. Three things in two sentences: the fear of God, an admission that his own sentence is deserved, and a verdict of innocence on the man beside him. He is the fourth voice in this chapter to declare Jesus innocent, after Pilate three times and Herod — and the only one who does anything about it.
"Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom" Luke 23:42.
The request is astonishing in its circumstances. He is looking at a man being executed beside him, publicly mocked, with a sarcastic placard over his head, and he asks him for a place in a kingdom. There is nothing whatever in the visible evidence to support it.
And it is modest. Not a throne, not deliverance from the cross — only that he be remembered, and the request is dated to the future: when you come into your Kingdom.
"Assuredly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise" Luke 23:43.
The answer grants more than was asked. Paradise is the word the Greek Scriptures use for the garden in Genesis, and it appears twice more in the New Testament, once of a place Paul was caught up to and once of where the tree of life stands in the city to come 2 Corinthians 12:4 Revelation 2:7.
Where the punctuation falls in this sentence is an editorial decision rather than a textual one — the earliest manuscripts carry no commas, and the English translations divide over whether today attaches to the telling or to the being. Both readings have been held by careful readers, and the passage will not settle it by itself.
What the wider account gives is this. He did not go to Paradise that day: on the morning of the third day he says he has not yet ascended to the Father John 20:17, and both men's bodies were still on their crosses at sundown John 19:31. Today used as an emphatic marker on a solemn declaration is ordinary Hebrew speech — the law is full of a solemn declaration dated with today Deuteronomy 30:19 — and it is a word this Gospel has loaded from the beginning, at the birth, at Nazareth, and at Zacchaeus's door Luke 2:11 Luke 4:21 Luke 19:9.
What is beyond dispute is the promise itself, and it is the thing the man needed. He asked to be remembered and was told he would be with me — which is where the whole hope of the New Testament lands 1 Thessalonians 4:17. And it was given to a condemned criminal with no time left to make anything of it, on the strength of one sentence, hours from death.
held with reason What this mark means