When Love Confronted Fear: Reclaiming the Preaching of the Cross

I’ve come to see the Cross not as the center of a divine transaction but as the center of a divine revelation—one that has far more to do with awakening than appeasement. The Jesus I know is not the Jesus of punishment, wrath, or cosmic bookkeeping. The Jesus I know is the Jesus of the Gospel of Truth, the one who steps into the world of forgetfulness to remind us of who we truly are. And because of that, the Cross becomes something far larger, far deeper, and far more beautiful than the narrative I was raised on. It becomes the moment when the fog begins to lift and the human soul is invited to remember itself again.

For most of my early life, the Cross was presented as a payment, as if God needed blood to change His mind about us. But that view never resonated with the God I knew within the quiet spaces of consciousness. It didn’t match the Father I encountered when fear dissolved and presence took over. It didn’t sound like the voice of unconditional love. And it certainly didn’t fit the Jesus who walked among us showing compassion, union, and divine identity. Over time—through reflection, mystical insight, study of early Christian diversity, and my own lived experience—I realized that the penal model was a later construction, shaped by empire and fear, not by the original heartbeat of the early Christian message. The earliest believers, especially in the mystical streams, saw the Cross not as an act of divine anger but as a victory over fear, ignorance, and the forgetfulness that had taken root in human consciousness.

The more I’ve grown, the clearer it has become that Jesus did not die instead of us—He died with us, as one of us, moving through the deepest layers of human vulnerability to show that none of it can separate us from the Source. The real enemy He faced was not His Father’s wrath; it was the fear that had ruled humanity since the dawn of consciousness—the fear of death, the fear of separation, the fear that convinces us we are unworthy, broken, and cut off from the divine. Hebrews 2:14 says that by dying He destroyed the one who held the power of death, which is the fear of death—not death itself, but the illusion around it. That illusion is what blinds us to the truth of our divine origin. That illusion is what keeps us trapped in egoic patterns. That illusion is what religions, empires, and systems have used to control people for centuries. And that illusion is exactly what shattered on the Cross.

When I look at the Cross now, I see Jesus stepping directly into the center of human suffering—not to pay a debt, but to expose a lie. He went all the way into the darkness we fear most, the place we assume God cannot be, and revealed that God had been there all along. He took on the full weight of human violence, human misunderstanding, human rejection, and even the machinery of religion itself, not to condemn humanity, but to unveil the truth that death does not define us and separation does not exist. His forgiveness from the Cross—“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”—is not a statement of divine pity. It’s a revelation that humanity acts out of ignorance, out of forgetfulness, out of the sleep that the Gnostic texts describe so vividly. We wound because we have forgotten who we are. We fear because we have forgotten where we come from. We cling to dogma because we have forgotten the living God within us. And Jesus addresses that forgetfulness not with punishment, but with awakening.

In that sense, the Cross becomes the moment where the “demon of religion”—the egregore of fear, control, and literalism—is finally exposed. Religion in its lowest form thrives on fear: fear of hell, fear of judgment, fear of not measuring up. It tells you you are separated from God unless you perform, believe, or conform. But the Cross undermines that entire structure. Jesus did not come to reinforce the fears of the religious ego. He came to break them. And so the Cross becomes the moment where religion meets its limit. It cannot intimidate Jesus. It cannot manipulate Him. It cannot bind Him through shame or guilt. He passes through the machinery of religion and reveals the emptiness of its fear-based system. The Resurrection then becomes the divine “No” to every authority that ever tried to enslave the human spirit through fear.

When I see the Cross now, I see the Hermetic pattern of descent and ascent written into cosmic history. As above, so below—Jesus descends into human form, enters the polarity of this world, and lifts it up by showing that consciousness is never extinguished. He embodies the eternal cycle: birth, death, rebirth—not as punishment, but as the structure of reality itself. In that way, the Cross is not an interruption of the divine order; it is the unveiling of it. Reincarnation, resurrection, awakening—these are all different languages pointing toward the same truth: consciousness cannot be imprisoned by matter or by fear. The Cross sits right at the center of that revelation.

And then there is grace—Romans 5, the heartbeat of everything I’ve come to believe. Grace is not something God gives reluctantly after a payment is made. Grace is the eternal flow of divine love that has always been present, always been unconditional, always been transformative. The Cross does not create grace; it reveals it. It demonstrates that God is not drawn to us because of our performance but because of His own nature. God is love, and love is not a transaction. Love is a revelation. Love awakens. Love transforms. Motivation by fear may reform a person temporarily, but it cannot transform the soul. Only grace can do that. Only unconditional, radiant, unearned love can awaken the divine spark within us. That is why the Cross is not about the law being satisfied—it is about the heart being awakened.

And this awakening is not merely individual. The Cross reveals the cosmic truth that all of creation is on a journey of remembering itself. The world of forms, the material density we inhabit, the experiences of joy and sorrow, love and loss—these are the classrooms of consciousness. We incarnate not to escape but to experience, to learn, to awaken. Jesus enters this cycle not as a distant God peering in, but as the highest expression of what we are meant to become: awakened humanity, divine consciousness embodied. He shows us that death is not a wall but a veil, and that the human journey—across lifetimes, dimensions, and layers of awareness—is held in a field of unimaginable love.

So yes, the Cross matters to me deeply—but not because God needed it. It matters because we needed it. We needed to see that fear has no final word. We needed to see that the divine is not separate from our suffering. We needed to see that consciousness cannot be killed. And most of all, we needed to see who we truly are: children of the Divine, bearers of the Christ within, destined not for fear, but for awakening. The Cross is the moment the world was invited to remember itself. It is the revelation that the Divine has always been for us, with us, and within us—even when we forget.