From our chaplain:
Karl Barth, in his 1957 Good Friday sermon, preached: “They crucified him with the criminals. Do you know what this implies? ..this was the first Christian fellowship, the first certain, indissoluble and indestructible Christian community…No one before and no one afterwards has witnessed so directly and so closely God’s act of reconciliation, God’s glory and the redemption of the world, as these two thieves.”
“The Criminals With Him,” in Deliverance to the Captives, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1978, pages 77,81.