turned, instead, to honour, that in our eyes, now looking back, it
shines on Him like a star. As a fire catches the lump of dirty coal or
clot of filth that is flung into it, and converts it into a mass of
light, so at this time there was that about Christ which transmuted the
very insults hurled at Him into honours and charged even the incidents
of His crucifixion which were most trivial in themselves with
unspeakable meaning. The crown of thorns, the purple robe, Pilate's
Ecce Homo, the inscription on the cross, the savage cries of the
passers-by and other similar incidents, full at the time of malice, are
now memories treasured by all who love the Saviour.

So His position between the thieves was ordained by God as well as by
men. It was His right position. They had called Him long before "a
friend of publicans and sinners;" and now, by crucifying Him between
the thieves, they put the same idea into action. As, however, that
nickname has become a title of everlasting honour, so has this
insulting deed. Jesus came to the world to identify Himself with
sinners; their cause was His, and He wrapped up His fate with theirs;
He had lived among them, and it was meet that He should die among them.
To this day He is in the midst of them; and the strange behaviour of
the two between whom He hung that day was a prefigurement of what has
been happening every day since: some sinners have believed on Him and
been saved, while others have believed not: to the one His gospel is a
savour of life unto life, to the other it is a savour of death unto
death. So it is to be till the end; and on the great day when the
whole history of this world shall be wound up He will still be in the
midst; and the penitent will be on the one hand and the impenitent on
the other.

But it was not in one way only that the divine wisdom overruled for
high ends of its own the humiliating circumstance that Jesus was thus
reckoned with the transgressors. It gave Him an opportunity of
illustrating, at the very last moment, both the magnanimity of His own
character and the nature of His mission; and at the moment when He
needed it most it supplied Him with a cup of what had always been to
Him the supreme joy of living--the bliss of doing good. As the parable
of the Prodigal Son is an epitome of the whole teaching of Christ, so
is the salvation of the thief on the cross the life of Christ in
miniature.

II.

Both thieves appear to have joined in