The thief who was told today
Demas
born Judah
Named by tradition · Backstory original
Witness I of VI · Deep crimson
02 In one line
The man who wasted his whole life, had nothing left in his nailed hands, asked to be remembered — and was told today.
03 In the books
Born Judah, and blessed over the cradle by a father he would never remember. He grew up under a carved pomegranate with his mother’s hope resting on him, and found it too heavy to carry. So he borrowed a name. Demas — a small foreign word that meant nothing to anyone around him and a little distance to him; a name that said here, now, what I can hold. His mother heard something else in it, and would not put it in her mouth, and the not-saying sat at the table with them like a third person.
He learned to keep his feet quiet and his face shut, to find the fear in a man and turn it like a key. The road ran from a carpenter’s empty bench to a holding cell to a hill outside the city, and in the cell, in the dark, he heard something come down through the stone and did not set himself against it.
In the last hour of a wasted life, on a cross, with nothing in his hands and no time left to do anything about it, he turned his head toward the middle cross and asked to be remembered. And a dying Teacher overturned the world’s whole accounting out loud, in front of witnesses: today.
04 In Scripture
Luke 23:39–43. One of two criminals crucified beside Jesus. He rebukes the other, admits his own guilt, asks only remember me when you come into your kingdom — and is promised paradise that day.
Scripture gives him no name, no backstory and no mother. Everything before the cross is imaginative filling of a deliberate silence.
Tradition calls the penitent thief Dismas. The series’ Demas is his own chosen street-name — and is not the Demas of 2 Timothy 4:10.
Luke 23:39–43
39One of the criminals who was hanged insulted him, saying, “If you are the Christ, save yourself and us!” 40But the other answered, and rebuking him said, “Don’t you even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? 41And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42He said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” 43Jesus said to him, “Assuredly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
05 His world
Rome crucified for banditry and sedition, and did it publicly, by the roadside, as a lesson for the living. A condemned man expected no mercy, no last words that mattered, and no burial.
06 What he carries
The series’ opening question: how much of a life can you waste before it is too late to be saved? Demas is the answer with nothing in his hands — no time, no good deeds, nothing but the nails — and he is told today, not someday.
07 A lesson
Mercy does not wait to be earned, and does not expire because you ignored it for years. He built no temple, founded no church, healed no one, kept no commandment anyone could point to. He turned his head toward mercy and asked, and the asking was enough — not because the asking was a great work, but because it was aimed at the right place. If that is true, the world’s books are not the real books.
08 Threads
Son of Miriam and Eliezer. Gestas, the other thief, is the road he did not take. And in the cell before the end he prays beside Bar-Abba — the man the crowd will free in the Teacher’s place, and who will spend a year afterwards trying to understand why.
- Miriam — His motherThe house on the road · Remember Me
- Bar-Abba — Prays beside himThe cell · Remember Me · Barabbas
- Longinus — On the same hillGolgotha · Remember Me · The Centurion
09 Where they stood
10 Hear the opening
11 His book
Remember Me (Book I)
Book One
Remember Me
The man who wasted his whole life and was told today.
Ebook · Paperback · Hardcover — From £4.99 (sample)
Which is harder to believe — that grace would reach the worst person you can think of, or that it would then seat you at the same table as them?