God sends his son into the world: to use a modern sociological expression, God conducts the most revealing, most expensive social experiment; God sends his son into the world to love, and only love; you shall have no other powers than loving. You shall not judge, you shall not condemn, you shall not punish; If someone slaps you on one cheek, show the other cheek as well, if someone takes your shirt, give your coat as well, if someone asks you to go one mile with them, go two miles; be gentle and only gentle; in the words of Isaiah 42, a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not put out; it highlights the extreme gentleness, compassion, and restorative care of the Messiah. The words of gospel may be most fitting to him, I send you out as a sheep among wolves (Matthew 10:16).
He became Immanuel (God with us). He worked like us, ate like us, drank like us, lived like us, except that he did not sin, meaning he did not do anything against the will of one who sent him. He loved, he forgave, he showed compassion, and he suffered. And today we see the shape of a man who only loves, who is gentle, who is compassionate. Prophet Isaiah had long ago foretold, he had no beauty or majesty to attract, nothing in his appearance to desire him. He was despised and rejected, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain; from whom people hide their faces he was despised (Isaiah 53: 2-3). That is the face of the crucified one—the most Christian social experiment.
Jesus’ body has archived the weight and consequence of loving and being merciful. Scholars, writers, and activists across traditions have come to understand that the body archives what it goes through. The experiences of war, caste discrimination, class violence, and trauma do not simply pass through us; they leave deposits; they become us. Jesus gradually became the crucified one.
It is true of the brutalities that happen in one’s life too. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the foremost researchers on trauma, makes a devastating observation in his landmark book, The Body Keeps the Score, "Trauma is not stored as a narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. It is stored as sensation." Van der Kolk goes on to describe Tom, a Vietnam War veteran who could no longer connect with his family. Tom himself said that after his experience, it had become “truly impossible for him to go home again in any meaningful way.”
If war writes itself on the body through shock and terror, caste writes itself more slowly; through repetition, through a thousand daily interactions that teach a person what their body is worth, what it is permitted to touch, where it is allowed to stand. Dr BR Ambedkar, the great Dalit advocate, understood that caste was not merely a social custom. It was a system of control of the body with a logic of purity and pollution inscribed on the skin, colour, and birth. Caste choreographs the body: who bows to whom, whose feet are touched and whose are not, whose body must move out of the way. The Dalit writer and activist Sharankumar Limbale, in Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, argues that Dalit writing must be understood as testimony that speaks from the wounded body; it is written from within a body that has been systematically told it is less than human.
Coming back to Jesus, perhaps there is no other text so close to Jesus as Philippians 2: 6-11. It is written before the gospels were written. It is a hymn the first Christians sang. It is the oral tradition of those who lived with Jesus; it is what they saw and experienced. For those people who already had the knowledge of Yahweh, who was considered as the lord of the armies, a god more powerful than all other gods, to begin to think this way there must have been a serious paradigm-shifting experience.
The first half of the hymn of Kenosis has 4 lines. Every line makes Jesus more despicable and abominable than the previous. 1. He did not count equality with God, 2. He emptied himself, 3. Took the form of a slave, 4. Gave into death, death on a cross.
The famous Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in one of his novels has a Christ-like main character, called Lev Myshkin. When he had to name that novel he found no better suited name than ‘The Idiot’.
He was despicable. He looks around, and what does he see? He sees darkness and silence. In the gospel of Mark there are two mountains: mount Tabor and mount Calvary. On mount Tabor there were three people: Jesus, Elijah, and Moses. There was glory, there was comfort, and the voice came from heaven, “this is my beloved son, listen to him” (Mark 9:2-13). Mount Calvary had three people: Jesus and two thieves. There was blood, sweat, and discomfort. The voice comes from below, the centurion said, “Truly this man was the son of God” (Mark 15: 39). To the onlookers’ eyes Jesus looked powerless, foolish, and an Idiot.
Where Do We Stand in the Passion of Our Lord?
We are Christians by profession, we have been with him for long, and we are close to God in proximity; we go to church, we have the most Christian name, we have a cross on our walls etc. The parallel that we have in the passion narrative is the person of Judas. He was with Jesus, but he was calculative and he had his own plans. Judas was terrifyingly human like us.
Jesus tells them at the last supper, ‘one of you will betray me’. There is no greater pain than knowing that one of us would hand me over to the enemies. I am reminded of a Turkish anecdote, the woodcutters are entering the forest, the trees are terrified of the big sharp axe they are carrying. Then one of the trees told the others, ‘the handle is one of us’, it has lived with us, swung with us, and he may not cooperate with others to destroy us. Same here, the apostles must have seen Judas approaching them with others, and must have felt consoled. But Judas comes forward and does what he had agreed upon. The apostles could not rally against Judas, because they were also, in varied degrees, Judases.
The axe handle and Judas teaches us that proximity to the sacred is not the same as surrender to it. You can walk beside the light for three years and still choose the dark. Judas is the patron saint of all those who have known better and done otherwise. He had sat at the table of grace and still risen to make the transaction. He exposes the gap between what we believe and what we choose to do in the moment of testing.
Judas throwing away the 30 silver coins and crying show that he did repent, but the tragedy was that he repented without hope. He feels the full weight of the sin, without reaching for the mercy that his master, even from the cross, was in the very act of extending to the whole world. The great tragedy of Judas is not the betrayal. It is that he could not believe the forgiveness was also for him.
The Cross Is a Book, We Must Learn From It as We Learn From the Book of the Gospels
Finally we fix our gaze upon the cross. St Francis of Assisi, who is called the second Christ, who received the Stigmata—the five wounds of Christ—beautifully referred to the cross as "My Book". The cross is a profound "book" filled with dynamic, life-altering pages. From the time the cross spoke to him in the wayside chapel of St Damiano, which said, Francis, go repair my church, everything Francis understood about life, love, and sacrifice was read and absorbed from the pages of this ultimate book. He sat for hours before the cross. By immersing himself deeply into the love of the Crucified One, he internalised its teachings so profoundly that the very wounds of Christ (the Stigmata) were imprinted upon him. He too was disfigured like Jesus.
John of the Cross has read this book and found it a source of light in the darkest cells. John was imprisoned in a tiny, dark cell for nine months. Despite his intense physical and emotional suffering, he meditated deeply on the cross—the only thing he had. From that utter darkness, the cross offered him the radiant spiritual light that eventually birthed his classic work, The Dark Night of the Soul. The book talks about stripping away of worldly desires, physical attachments; the ego, intellect, and spiritual comforts; and most importantly, during which the individual often feels entirely abandoned by God and a profound spiritual desolation and darkness. John of the Cross’s painting of the cross from the perspective of the Father was the inspiration of Salvador Dali’s painting of the cross.
The Book of the Gospel is deeply verbal. It is filled with brilliant discourses, captivating parables, and fierce debates. It appeals to our intellect and our imagination. The book of the cross is starkly silent. In the face of His passion, Jesus barely speaks. When words are exhausted, or when human pain is too deep for language, the Book of the Cross speaks through presence, solidarity, and suffering. Reading both teaches us that spiritual maturity requires both the active engagement of the Word and the contemplative, silent surrender of the Cross.
Ultimately, the most crucial conclusion of reading them in parallel is that they are incomplete without each other. The Gospel without the Cross becomes merely a collection of beautiful moral philosophies or utopian ideals, lacking the ultimate proof of God's solidarity with human suffering. The Cross without the Gospel is just another tragic story of a good man crushed by a brutal empire, lacking the context of the coming Kingdom and the hope of resurrection.
Every time you are misunderstood, abandoned, or challenged by the world, open this ‘book’. Look at the cross and remind yourself of its supreme truth: you are deeply, unconditionally, and passionately loved. It is a medicine. Look on him, like the serpent raised in the desert. It cures. Things change.
The Cross will cure us of our anger, hatred, entitlement, and so on. The essence of KM Gaffoor’s Malayalam poem Yudham (War) could be translated this way: over small things, we lose our patience and cool, we grow in anger and revenge. When the food had a little less salt, we struck the table in frustration, and pushed the plate away violently. When someone gave a harsh feedback we banged the door so hard. When a glass slipped and shattered, we raised our hands in punishment. Over small things—a meal, a feedback, a mistake—we became storms. ‘This is us.’
And then we, seeing the horrors of war, ask, what is war? Why is there war? KM Gaffoor answers it plainly: ‘war is simply us, made larger.’ War is the ultimate regression; but it is not something that begins out there, between nations and armies and strangers on maps. War is something that begins in here—in the kitchen, at the dinner table, in the spaces between people who are supposed to live with each other.
Read the Cross, read the Gospels, be open to change; they even have the power to stop wars.
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