The Last Direction

A man is dying beside Jesus. His remaining life is measured in breaths. The future in which he might explain himself, repair his reputation, or demonstrate that he has changed is closing.

Yet something remains open.

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

The request is brief. It carries the weight of a life that can no longer be rearranged.

Jesus answers: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Between these two sentences, an eternity opens. The man remains on the cross. The promise concerns a belonging that death cannot exhaust.

For the Godward Way, this encounter reveals a profound spiritual truth: a person can turn toward God before becoming the person he wishes he had been. Kavanah is the direction of that returning heart. Mercy is the divine response that receives him.

The Jewish world of the cross

To understand the depth of this moment, we must return it to its Jewish world.

Jesus is a Jew. The dying man speaks the language of fearing God, acknowledging judgment, and hoping in a coming kingdom. His Jewish identity is a natural inference from the setting, although Luke does not expressly identify his ethnicity. Their exchange unfolds within Israel’s spiritual vocabulary: return, remembrance, kingship, mercy, and life in the presence of God.¹

The later tradition places the repentant man on Jesus’ right and calls him Dismas. Luke supplies neither his name nor which side he occupied. What Luke makes unmistakable is the direction of his appeal.

Before asking to be remembered, the man addresses his companion’s mockery. He invokes God. He acknowledges their responsibility for their deeds. He defends Jesus’ innocence.

His words show a person coming into a different relationship with the truth.

He can acknowledge his wrongdoing without allowing it to become a final declaration that return is impossible. He can recognize innocence beside him while confessing guilt within himself. He can look at a dying man and speak of a kingdom.

This is already an act of allegiance.

The cross has stripped away much of his power to act, but his speech still has a direction. He uses it to confess, defend, and entrust.

Remember me

Then comes the appeal: remember me.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, remembrance carries the force of relationship and saving care. Psalm 106 asks God to remember the speaker when showing favor to the people and bringing salvation. That appeal is followed by an acknowledgment of sin. The movement is familiar: the human being confesses and asks to be included in divine mercy.²

The criminal’s request belongs within that same spiritual grammar. He asks for a place in the future of God’s reign.

Jesus’ response makes the relationship personal: with me.

The man asks to be remembered. He receives the promise of companionship beyond death.

The Greek expression, met’ emou, is simple: “with me.” The word translated “paradise,” paradeisos, belongs to the scriptural language of the garden. It appears in the Greek translation of Genesis for the garden in Eden. Jesus’ promise brings the man’s future into the language of restored life and divine welcome.³

The promise is especially powerful because the man’s condition remains unfinished. Luke describes no transformation into emotional serenity. There is no account of him mastering his thoughts or acquiring an elaborate spiritual understanding. His prayer emerges within suffering.

He still hopes for something for himself. The Godward turn does not require him to pretend otherwise. His endangered future becomes what he entrusts.

The direction of the heart

This is where the encounter touches Kavanah most closely.

Kavanah means intention, directed attention, the orientation of the heart. Its spiritual significance lies in the relationship between the one who turns and the One toward whom the turning is made.

The Mishnah describes the early pious preparing for prayer so that they might direct their hearts toward HaMakom, the Omnipresent. The Hebrew phrase in Berakhot 5:1 names an inward action with a divine destination.⁴

The dying man’s appeal gives that movement a voice. He directs what remains of himself toward God’s reign through Jesus, whom he acknowledges as its coming king. In Luke’s own account, Jesus has already identified the Father as the source of that kingship: the Father has conferred a kingdom upon him.

The Father remains the source. Jesus receives the man and speaks the promise.

The pattern of return

The Torah had already established the pattern of return. Deuteronomy 30 describes Israel returning to God with the whole heart and soul. God responds with compassion and renews the heart so that it may love and live.

Return involves listening and renewed allegiance. It is a movement of the person toward God. The same passage places the renewal of the heart within God’s own work.⁵

Here is a foundation for the Godward Way: the creature turns and receives; the Creator remains the giver of life.

The prophets and writings develop this pattern. Ezekiel declares that a wicked person can turn and live, and that God desires such a return. Psalm 51 brings the broken and contrite heart before God as a real offering.

A particularly revealing passage appears in 2 Chronicles 30. Some people participate in Passover without having completed the required purification. Hezekiah asks God to pardon those whose hearts are set to seek Him. God hears the prayer and heals the people.⁶

The passage takes both worship and its requirements seriously. It also recognizes a heart seeking God amid incompleteness.

That matters for anyone who imagines that the soul must first become presentable before it can turn.

The man beside Jesus has reached the extreme of that incompleteness. Whatever he might once have accomplished, his earthly possibilities are disappearing. Yet the heart’s return remains possible.

Looking toward the serpent

An extraordinary connection appears when we follow the scriptural image of the bronze serpent.

In Numbers 21, people suffering from snakebites are instructed to look toward the serpent Moses raises. The Jewish Book of Wisdom later explains the saving encounter:

“For the one who turned toward it was saved, not by what was seen, but by you, the savior of all.”

— Wisdom 16:7

The distinction is decisive. The sign is visible; God is the saving source.

The Mishnah approaches the same story by asking whether the serpent itself gave life. Its answer concerns the people looking upward and submitting their hearts to their Father in heaven.⁷

Then, in John’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to Nicodemus, another Jewish teacher, and compares the lifting up of the Son of Man with Moses lifting the serpent. He connects this with eternal life.

These passages illuminate the encounter at the cross. The sign, the turning heart, and the saving source belong in relationship. The criminal’s appeal to Jesus reaches toward the kingdom whose source is the Father.

Kavanah names the human orientation within that relationship. God’s mercy gives the saving response.

Return at the threshold of death

Jewish tradition also speaks directly to the possibility of return at the threshold of death.

Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:2 describes a condemned person being urged to confess before execution. Confession is associated with a share in the World to Come. Its example is Achan, whose confession in Joshua 7 is understood to open a distinction between his punishment that day and his future beyond it.⁸

The setting differs from Roman crucifixion, but the spiritual resemblance is striking. A person acknowledges guilt. Earthly punishment continues. The future with God remains open.

The Mishnah was compiled after Jesus’ lifetime, around 200 CE. It serves here as a witness to Jewish understanding, rather than a claim about which teachings the criminal knew. Its importance is that final confession and a future in the World to Come belong together within Jewish tradition.

The Talmud gives another memorable example in the story of Elazar ben Durdayya. After a life of wrongdoing, he reaches a profound repentance and dies. A heavenly voice declares him destined for the World to Come. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi reflects that some acquire their share over many years, while another does so in a single moment.

Maimonides later states explicitly that repentance on the day of death can bring forgiveness after a lifetime of transgression. He also insists that confession must correspond to an actual inward resolution to leave the sin.⁹

A genuine turn can be brief. Its brevity does not make it empty.

The man beside Jesus has no time to accumulate a new biography. His available speech already expresses his changed allegiance. Responsibility, recognition, and entrustment have become present realities.

Four words for one encounter

This also helps us understand the relation between Kavanah, repentance, and faith.

Repentance—teshuvah, return—describes his turning from the direction in which he has lived.

Kavanah describes the Godward orientation of that return.

Faith describes his entrusting himself to Jesus and the coming kingdom.

Mercy describes the saving welcome he receives.

These words illuminate different dimensions of the same encounter.

Luke has prepared us to recognize this pattern. The tax collector in Jesus’ parable acknowledges his sin and appeals to God’s mercy; he goes home justified. The returning son heads toward his father with an acknowledgment of failure; the father receives him with compassion.

At the cross, the pattern is compressed into a few remaining breaths.¹⁰

Bringing everything into the turning

For the Godward Way, this makes the story intensely practical. Our lives are rarely complete when the need to turn becomes clear. We carry fear, desire, unfinished responsibilities, regret, and hopes we cannot control.

Those experiences can be brought into the turning.

“Catch and Offer” names the practice of recognizing what is present while remaining intentionally directed toward the Father. The recognition and the offering belong together. An emotion need not become the center of consciousness simply because it is intense.

The criminal’s words reveal an analogous movement. He acknowledges what is happening and places his remaining hope within God’s reign. The encounter gives us no account of a meditation technique. It gives us something more immediate: a person entrusting himself.

Jesus’ own prayers deepen the connection. Before the crucifixion, he brings his desire for the cup to pass into relationship with the Father’s will. At death, he entrusts his spirit into the Father’s hands.

Suffering is present. Desire is present. The Godward relationship remains the governing direction.¹¹

Echoes beyond this setting

The same spiritual possibility echoes beyond this setting. Islamic tradition tells of a man guilty of many killings who begins a journey of repentance and dies before reaching his destination; mercy receives his return toward God. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of a profoundly flawed person whose exclusive devotion establishes a new resolve, with transformation following. These traditions retain their distinct understandings, yet each recognizes a significance in the person’s present spiritual direction that a record of the past alone cannot contain.¹²

With me, beyond death

The thief’s story brings that significance into a personal promise.

He receives no assurance that the remaining pain will disappear. He receives an assurance of presence beyond death. Elsewhere, Luke’s Jesus describes resurrection life as life in which people can no longer die. That is the wider horizon of the welcome spoken beside the cross.¹³

For the Godward Way, eternity begins to become intelligible through this relationship: the life we receive belongs to a Source whose giving exceeds our present circumstances.

We cannot manufacture that gift through concentration. We can turn toward its Giver.

The man’s remaining life was brief. His return was real.

His kavanah was the direction of his returning heart. Jesus answered that appeal with mercy and belonging.

Even there, at the edge of death, the way toward God remained open.

Sources and textual notes

1. Luke 23; later Dismas tradition. Luke alone preserves this dialogue. Matthew 27:44 and Mark 15:32 describe the crucified men joining the mockery; an earlier period of mockery followed by repentance is a possible harmonization, rather than an explicitly narrated sequence.
2. Psalm 106:4–6, Hebrew and English. The connection is a scriptural echo, rather than a quotation identified by Luke.
3. Luke 23:42, Greek; Luke 23:43, Greek; Genesis 2:8, Septuagint. Ancient witnesses differ between “in” and “into” the kingdom, and over inclusion of “Lord.” Most translations attach “today” to the promise of presence in paradise. The alternative punctuation attaches it to the declaration. Both preserve the promise of future companionship.
4. Mishnah Berakhot 5:1; compare Mishnah Menachot 13:11 on directing intention toward heaven. Kavanah is used here as a comparative Jewish concept; the Hebrew term does not occur in Luke’s Greek.
5. Deuteronomy 30:1–6.
6. Ezekiel 18:21–23; Psalm 51, especially verses 18–19 in Hebrew numbering; 2 Chronicles 30:18–20.
7. Wisdom 16:6–7; Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:8; John 3:14–15. These are compared theologically without assuming direct literary dependence between them.
8. Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:2.
9. Avodah Zarah 17a; Maimonides, Laws of Repentance, chapter 2. These later sources illuminate Jewish understandings of return; they are not presented as first-century transcripts.
10. Luke 18:9–14; Luke 15:17–24.
11. Luke 22:29, 42; Luke 23:46.
12. Sahih Muslim 2766a; Bhagavad Gita 9:30 and 9:31.
13. Luke 20:35–38.