Luke 23:35-43

I like the gospel reading for today - Jesus tells the man on the cross next to him, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise. What I like to believe this means is that there is no purgatory and no (harrowing of) hell. Usually when I mention this in discussions, people call me a scriptural literalist, but that's not really true - I pick and choose the bits I want to take literally and and those I don't. That sounds bad, I guess, but we're all opportunistic scriptural literalists about the NT ... the Catholic Church, for instance, is especially fond of the bits where Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, where he tells the disciples they can bind and loose, where he says the bread is his body. I wonder what the choice of bits we decide to take literally and not to take literally says about us.