Only one of the Seven Last Words of Jesus that comprise this devotion is found in more than of the Gospels. The remaining six are found in only one Gospel. This is particularly relevant for this second Word. While present in all four canonical accounts of the crucifixion, the thieves only speak in Luke’s Gospel.
Samuel Beckett’s most well-known work, Waiting for Godot, features two vagrants, two hobos, two ne’er-do-wells, Vladimir (“Didi”) and Estragon (“Gogo”) as main characters. Didi and Gogo are waiting by a tree on a country road for someone named Godot.
Beckett, who wrote about the fittingness of being born not only on Good Friday, but on Friday the thirteenth, was raised as an Anglo-Catholic.1 He had a deep Christian sensibility.
Druid’s production of Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, photography: Matthew Thompson.Used under the provisions of the Creative Commons License
Beckett’s unique artistic gift was to deal with life’s big questions, what we might call metaphysics, in an ordinary way, a way we might call existential. His works and characters are gritty, earthy, and intense. When dealing with matters theological, his approach was oblique, as opposed to straightforward.
In Waiting for Godot (is the name Godot, spelled G-o-d-o-t, a reference to God?), Godot never shows up. Not given to expositing his work ex post facto, choosing instead to let them speak for themselves, Beckett was always very coy about the name Godot. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, a tree and two suspicious people waiting for Godot?
Early in the play’s opening act, Didi mentions the two thieves “crucified at the same time as our Lord.” Gogo chokes on the word “Lord,” which causes Didi to modify and use “Savior,” noting “One [thief] is supposed to have been saved and the other…[pause] damned.” “how is it,” Didi asks, “that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved”?2 Vladimir doesn’t care for these odds.
Tradition has dubbed the good thief Dismas and has canonized him: Saint Dismas. He is a model believer. He is us. Dom Christian de Chergé, the martyred abbot of Our Lady of the Atlas Cistercian monastery in Algeria, ended his last testament, written to and for the Islamist insurgents who killed him and most of the other monks, with these words: “May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.”3
1 Gerry Dukes, Samuel Beckett (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2002), 5.↩
2 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act I.↩
3 Dom Christian de Chergé. Testament.↩
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