The passion of two thieves.

My mother always liked the story of the two thieves who were crucified with Jesus. She liked how, in Luke's version of the Passion, the one--an obviously coarse and grasping man--taunted Jesus, even while sniveling in a desperate hope to avoid death, "Save yourself and us as well." She liked knowing that he would get his comeuppance.

And she liked how the other, clearly a man of some insight (despite his trade), berated his colleague, "We are paying for what we did. But this man has done nothing wrong." She liked it that Jesus said to the second man, "Today, you will be with me in paradise."

What my mother liked was the black-and-whiteness of the story, the good-and-badness of it. There were those who were right and those who were wrong.

Me, I took away a different lesson. What I remember most about the two thieves was how I heard their story when I was a preteen altar boy, listening to the Passion according to John during that always-sobering service on Good Friday.

The words of the Passion would roll on and on and on, and then Jesus would announce, "It is consummated!" And he would die.

At the altar, the priest would kneel, and the congregation would follow his lead with a loud rumble of knees hitting kneelers. And, for a few moments, there would be this profound silence.

Then, the priest would stand. The congregation would stand. And the last few sentences of the Passion would be read, a sort of epilogue to Jesus' death, an anticlimax, really, with the main character dead, with the central act of the story complete.

Yet I was always struck by that coda to the story--not the part about Joseph of Arimathea, the rich member of the ruling council (and secret follower of Jesus) who went to Pilate for permission to take down Jesus' body and bury it in a rock tomb he had earlier prepared for himself. No, not the part about Joseph, but the part about the thieves.

See, in those moments in the church after the pause for prayer following Jesus' death, the priest read how the Jewish authorities had themselves gone to Pilate and told the procurator that the next day was a special Sabbath. It would not be right, they told him, to have three criminals still dying on their crosses.

Their solution? Let the soldiers go and break the legs of the three men so they would die right away. This way their bodies could be taken down and taken away before the onset of the Sabbath. (Death, by the way, would occur because the men, no longer able to support themselves on their crosses, would sink down and suffocate. It wouldn't take too long.)

Let the soldiers go and break the legs of the three men so they would die right away--it was an idea that always got to me, and still does. Not only were these men being put to death, not only were they required to die for whatever it was that they had done (and, remember, I knew from what had come before that Jesus had been framed--there was always a flicker in my mind that if that had happened to him, it might just as well have happened to the two thieves), not only were these three men required to forfeit their lives, but they were being forced to die at a convenient time. Death on a timetable--on someone else's timetable.

"Consequently, the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with him and then of the other" (John 19:32).

That's it. The legs are broken and the two men die, although the gospel writer makes no mention of their deaths. Instead, he's on to describing how, when the soldiers get to Jesus, he is already dead, and how they pierce his side with a lance, and how blood and water come out, and how a couple of Old Testament prophecies are fulfilled.

But I can't get the two thieves out of my head, and I couldn't many years ago when, as an altar boy, I'd listen to the sad and violent end to their story in that gloomy church on that gloomy Friday.

It was the era of the civil-rights movement. It was also a world still trying to come to grips with the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and millions of other people deemed unfit to live. It was the 1960s, and I was a member of a Catholic Church that was beginning to question itself after centuries of defensiveness and triumphalism.

I was also a citizen, a young citizen, of a nation in which the young were beginning to take issue with a complacent worldview of "my country, right or wrong." It was a time when nuclear weapons--the ultimate weapons of destruction--were hanging directly over my head and the heads of hundreds of millions of Americans and citizens of the Soviet Union, not to mention forming a deadly threat to the rest of the world as well.

It would be too strong to call those two thieves my patron saints. They were, rather, my patron non-saints.

I was coming face to face with the complexity of life and the unfairness of life and the chaos of life. I was reading about how industrialists had muscled around their workers, keeping them in poverty and beating them down, until the rise of unionism provided a brake to their power.

I was learning about the treatment--the tortures, the lynchings, the slights large and small, the degradation--that had been accorded to Negroes, as African Americans were then called, throughout the nation's history, my nation's history, before and after the Civil War, during slavery, and during the century since the abolition of slavery.

I was coming to a realization that the world is not made up of saints and demons, but of people. Sure, there are some who are saintly and some who do acts of great evil. But most of us, the vast majority of us, are a grab-bag mix of good and bad. For all people, even the saintliest, life is a constant struggle to do the right thing.

Only in doing the right thing are we able to find ourselves. Only in being kind, attentive, strong, compassionate, ethical, moral, open, vulnerable, honest, loving, sensitive, expressive--only in being fully human and fully present to those around us do we fully become ourselves. And the more we become ourselves, and the more we knit ourselves into the human community--into the life of our neighborhood, our church, our city, our country, our world--the closer we come to God. The more we are together with each other--not alone, not isolated--the more we are together with God.

And here's the tough reality: We always fail.

No matter how high our ideals or how strong our determination, there will always be times when we suddenly look up and realize that, instead of caressing, we're hurting; instead of listening, we're ignoring.

Life is a journey of discovering who we are, and, at every turn, if we're paying attention, even as we're working to become better, we recognize in new ways how we're failing.

Let me give this example. I grew up in an all-white Irish Catholic neighborhood called Austin on Chicago's West Side, where it was not unusual to hear antiblack jokes and remarks from the mouths of adults. These were men and women who thought of themselves as good people, who were raising their families, trying to inculcate in their children a strong sense of good and evil.

Were they saints? No. Were they demons? No. In many ways, the prejudice they held against African Americans was something they had been taught and was something that had been reinforced throughout their lives by the broader society, day in and day out. It was wrong, no question. Yet even as they did this wrong thing, they were also doing many right things.

And, as American society changed, as blacks found ways to make their voices heard, there were whites in Austin who began to realize that their antagonism toward African Americans was wrong. They began to recognize how they were failing and began to try to change themselves, to be more open, more accepting, less closed-minded, less fearful of those who were different.

Was it possible for them to eradicate all traces of prejudice? No. That wasn't the point. No one is going to be perfect; no one is going to be able to erase all of the biases and fears and assumptions that have been knit into the character over years and decades. Failure is not a surprise. The call, simply, is to make the effort, to recognize the way in which we fail and to try to do better. To reach out. That's the right thing: to reach out and break down the walls that keep us isolated one from the other, that keep us alone.

Maybe my mother liked the story of the two thieves because, coming of age as she did during World War II, it echoed the sense that she and the rest of the United States had of being engaged in a crusade, of being involved in a fight of good against evil.

For me, though, it's the death of the thieves that resonates, a death they share, a horrible death. For me, it is a reminder that we are all going to die. We share this in common.

And I like to think that, when the soldiers came to break the legs of the thieves, the weak thief, the sniveling one, called out to the more thoughtful one. I like to think that, in pain and terror, he sought something from this other human being.

And I like to think that the stronger one had words of kindness, support, and encouragement for the other, that he didn't lord his goodness over him, that he didn't look down on him, that he saw beneath the sniveling and cravenness to the human being who, in all essentials, was just like himself.

I like to think that in those final moments, the two thieves, so different, went to their deaths together. That they formed a small community of two, that neither felt alone. That neither was alone. That they did right by each other.

The killing of the two thieves is a small counterpoint to the grand tragedy of the Crucifixion and death of Jesus. Jesus, on the cross, dies alone. Later, the two thieves die. Legs broken, they suffocate from the unsupported weight of their bodies.

They are alone on their crosses. But maybe, just maybe, saints and sinners, they die together.

I like to think that they do.

By Patrick T. Reardon, a feature writer for the Chicago Tribune and author of Daily Meditations (with Scripture) for Busy Dads (ACTA Publications, 1995).