"The cross is the great paradox of Christianity. More than a few have tried to explain it as a kind of cosmic child abuse perpetrated by God the Father on God the Son. But anyone who has ever loved knows that love is about sacrifice, and the cross is the ultimate sacrifice of love"

The cross stands at the center of Christian faith precisely because it confounds expectations. Instruments of terror do not normally disclose love, yet the gospel dares to say that on a Roman scaffold the heart of God is revealed. The complaint of “cosmic child abuse” imagines a divided deity: a wrathful Father venting rage on an unwilling Son. That caricature collapses before the New Testament witness: there is one God, and the Son goes to the cross freely, “for the joy set before him.” Obedience here is not servile coercion but the harmony of wills within the Trinity, where love eternally circulates and now pours itself out into history.

Love worthy of the name always costs. Parents lose sleep, friends bear burdens, spouses surrender prerogatives; the deeper the love, the more it risks. The cross is love without remainder, refusing to protect itself from the wound of the beloved’s need. It gathers the world’s violence and guilt, not to sanctify suffering, but to empty suffering of its final word. Justice and mercy converge as the Innocent absorbs the wound and returns only forgiveness, reopening the human future.

Paradoxically, defeat becomes victory: the tree of execution becomes the tree of life. Power is redefined, not as domination, but as the capacity to give oneself away without being diminished. The crucified God stands in radical solidarity with victims, and at the same time unmasks the lie that life can be secured by sacrificing others. If God loves like this, the pattern for disciples is clear: take up the cross, not to hunt pain, but to become persons capable of fidelity, reconciliation, and hope when love grows costly. The cross is thus not a divine crime scene but the radiant grammar of Christian love. From that grammar flow forgiveness, Eucharist, mission, and a new anthropology where true human greatness is measured by self-gift rather than grasping.