Sometimes, we are blessed to see the vanity in Protestantism. Protestants often use Luke 23: 39-43, the good thief’s plea, to avoid taking Catholicism seriously: “‘Jesus remember me when You come into Your Kingdom.’ ‘Indeed, I promise you;’ He replied, ‘today you shall be with me in Paradise.'”
Protestants think that passage proves their position’s propriety: “The ‘good thief’ was allowed into Heaven without the Catholic Sacraments of Baptism, Confession, Communion, Confirmation, or Last Rites. Therefore, all that any of us need to be saved is belief, desire, and The Blood of Jesus.”
Catholics are appalled at that risk! It is not wise to bet one’s soul on one passage! That risk becomes absurdly great when we realize that Matthew 27:44 completely contradicts the passage in Luke. St. Matthew tells us that both robbers joined the crowds in mocking Jesus, telling us: “. . . even the robbers who were crucified with taunted Him in the same way.”
Neither St. Mark nor St. John even mention Jesus and the robbers.
It seems clear that the seeming contradiction is a test. Many prefer their own ideas to The Only Church Jesus Founded when He said one time to one man, “Verily, verily I say unto you thou art Peter and on this rock I build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I give you the keys to The Kingdom of Heaven.”
Now, we must ask our Protestant friends and neighbors, “Shouldn’t we obey when Jesus directly endorses One Church, promising that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it and giving only that Church “the keys to The Kingdom of Heaven”?
The vanity in Protestantism keeps them from considering that. They only reply: “Jesus said that the robber would be with Him in paradise.”
The vanity in 43,000 versions of Protestantism leads many of them to prefer one, contradicted passage to any of Jesus’ words that stand without any contradiction. They would rather be separated from The Only Church Jesus Founded than do what is necessary to receive His Body and Blood.
The false idol also prompts Protestants to ignore a dozen of the 33 verses between John 6:33 and John 6:66 in which Jesus winnows two thousand years of hearers twelve times with variants of “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” The first Protestants were so offended by His words that they stopped following Him then. Many ignore His Instruction, today.
We see the self-serving preferences in Protestantism, then and now. Jesus gives those “Eat My Body/Drink My Blood” instructions a full dozen times! “It is intolerable!”, Protestants said then, and now. The idol of Conventional Reality leds Protestants from obeying Him, then, and keeps them from participating in any Mass since The Last Supper to this day. That was when Jesus first turned bread and wine into His Body and Blood and empowered His priests to do the same thing at each succeeding Catholic Mass.
Is Jesus offended when a person turns from obeying His choice of Church and His frequently repeated command to “eat My Body and drink My Blood” and chooses to obey one brief passage about the “good thief” that is contradicted once and ignored twice in three of the four Gospels?
It is not a contradiction between the two passages about the thief, but a test. Will we be among those who obey only that which justifies our vanity?
Did He come to separate the obedient sheep from the willful goats? Who is our God? Jesus, or Conventional Reality?
