The following is based on an excerpt from Leo Tolstoy called “I, Like the Thief” from What I Believe. Read it here. 

What would it take for you to let go of all your life philosophies? To do a complete 180, or a U-turn. That indescribable feeling when you realize you’ve been wrong all this time. Like a man “who goes out on some business and suddenly decides that the business is unnecessary and return home. All that was on his right is now on his left, and all that was on his left is now on his right; his former wish to get as far as possible from home has changed into a wish to be as near as possible to it.”

What would your reaction be? Continued denial until the end, or admission and submission?

Leo Tolstoy reflects on how his life turned around completely after he came to believe Christ’s teachings: I, Like the Thief “knew that I had lived and was living badly. I, like the thief, knew that I was unhappy and suffering.” The key to this? Seeing Jesus face to face, knowing that next to you is an innocent man, while you hang there for the crimes you committed, the life you lived. In Luke 23, two criminals hang beside Jesus, one scoffing at him, still denying his condition and spitefully provoking Jesus Christ to save the three of them – still trying to get out of his well-deserved punishment. The second criminal rebuking the first, asking him, “do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong” (I, Like the Thief).

This criminal starts with this reality: that we all face judgment for a crime committed against the Judge – God. Should we not fear Him then? The key here is context. Imagine a ketchup stain on a random doodle. Not a big deal, right? It was going to get lost in the abyss of your backpack anyway. Now imagine a ketchup stain on the Mona Lisa. The multi-million dollar painting protected by bulletproof glass, a centuries-old cultural treasure. Our sinful lives when in the proper context has this horrifying effect of a ketchup stain against a treasured masterpiece: irreversible, forever marred, unforgivable. 

And yet according to Christ’s teachings, if we confess our sinfulness and believe that Jesus’ death paid the full debt of our sins, that when he rose again three days later he triumphantly overcame death for all of humanity, then we can be forgiven and saved. While the thief was at the end of his life when he came to his realization, we get to live life in this new reality. And this is what Tolstoy means when he writes, “the direction of my life and my desire became completely different, and good and evil changed places… I, like that thief on the cross, have believed in Christ’s teaching and been saved.”

Passion Week is a chance for us to personalize the cross. It can be easy to regard the gospel as old news, something you know already and don’t need to continue rehashing – but rehashing is exactly what we need. Otherwise, we, like the first criminal, will slip into the comfortable pattern of living in denial; that we are undeserving of our penalty and trying to escape the uncomfortable knowledge of what we have all done against God. Passion Week is a chance to recalibrate and renew our wonder at the cross and, like Tolstoy, recount how the cross changes everything for us.

Check out more resources for Passion Week and Easter here.