There is a moment of silence when one stands before the crucified figure of Christ. The image has been seen countless times across centuries, but when the gaze lingers long enough, something awakens inside. The world seems to grow still, and the familiar explanation begins to echo: Jesus died for our sins. That phrase has been repeated so often that it risks becoming distant, yet it carries a meaning that reaches beyond doctrine. It asks not only what Christ did, but who we are.
At first, we hear that Jesus died to take away the sins of the world. We are told that this act redeemed humanity, that his suffering bore the weight of our faults. But as faith matures, a more piercing question arises. Who crucified him? Who held the hammer? It was not only Roman soldiers or Jewish priests. It was the entire human condition. The cross stands not as a monument to ancient injustice but as a mirror of the heart.
To look at Christ on the cross is to recognize a reflection of what lies within. The very people who admired his compassion were the ones who consented to his death. They were not monsters. They were ordinary human beings trying to defend what they thought was sacred. And that is where the mystery begins. The same heart that can love deeply can also condemn fiercely, believing it acts in righteousness.
The People Who Believed They Were Right
The Gospels describe the crowd that called for crucifixion as passionate and convinced. They believed they were protecting divine law, defending the holiness of their nation, preserving tradition from blasphemy. Their cruelty was justified in their own minds. They were certain they were right.
This is one of the most frightening truths about human morality. Evil often does not appear in the form of hatred. It appears in the form of conviction. People do not wake up wanting to be cruel. They wake up wanting to be faithful, just, and strong. The high priests who condemned Jesus saw themselves as guardians of order. The soldiers who carried out the sentence were following duty. The citizens who watched believed they were witnessing justice. Every era has its own version of that crowd.
We see the same pattern today. Ideological battles, religious divisions, and political campaigns often carry the same moral energy. People fight not because they love evil, but because they love what they think is good. When loyalty to a cause replaces compassion for a person, cruelty becomes sacred. That is the oldest trick of the human mind: to mistake righteousness for love.
The Universal Mechanism of Cruelty
Human beings are capable of immense kindness. Yet, under certain conditions, they become instruments of destruction. Psychologists have long observed how ordinary individuals can commit atrocities when guided by collective authority or belief. This is not because they lose their humanity, but because their moral sense becomes absorbed into something larger than themselves. The group replaces the conscience.
In small communities or families, empathy thrives through direct encounter. You see the eyes of the other, you feel their presence, you understand their pain. But when the other becomes a category, empathy collapses. People begin to act not toward persons but toward symbols. The one before you is no longer a man or woman, but an infidel, an enemy, a threat to the nation, a danger to purity. The mind convinces itself that harm is not harm when it serves a higher goal.
Throughout history, wars, inquisitions, and revolutions have repeated this pattern. Nations kill in the name of freedom, religions persecute in the name of truth, and movements suppress dissent in the name of justice. The cruelty is not random. It is systemic, born of a mechanism that transforms love of truth into hatred of difference.
When people unite around an ideology, they often cease to see. Their shared conviction blinds them to the faces before them. The very capacity that made humans moral, the desire for good, becomes twisted into the justification of evil. That is why every collective ideology must be watched with humility. Even noble causes can turn into crosses when the love of power replaces the power of love.
They Do Not Know What They Are Doing
At the center of the crucifixion story, there is one line that pierces every heart: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” These are not words of weakness. They are the deepest revelation of the human condition. Jesus recognized that those who condemned him were blind, not only to his divinity but to their own humanity. They believed they were saving their world. In truth, they were destroying it.
Ignorance, in this sense, does not mean a lack of education. It means the loss of awareness that every person is part of one body of life. The crowd, the soldiers, the priests, all acted out of fear. Fear of losing power, fear of chaos, fear of being wrong. Fear disguises itself as virtue. That is why Jesus’ words are not only forgiveness, but also diagnosis. Humanity does not know what it is doing when it acts without love.
This blindness continues in every generation. We still destroy what we most need to love. We still condemn the voices that challenge our assumptions. We still build crosses for those who remind us of our own hypocrisy. Each time we divide the world into the righteous and the damned, we crucify the truth that binds them together.
I Crucified Christ
To say “I crucified Christ” is not to wallow in guilt. It is to wake up. It is to recognize that the seeds of betrayal, fear, and pride live in each heart. The cross becomes not a story about others, but a revelation about ourselves. The hammer was held by the human condition itself.
Every time we judge another person harshly, every time we dehumanize an opponent, every time we defend ideas more fiercely than people, we repeat that act. It happens in families, communities, and nations alike. The crucifixion is not an ancient event. It is a continuous pattern of blindness and redemption woven into the story of humanity.
Yet this realization is also the beginning of grace. The moment I confess that I am among those who crucified him, I also open myself to the possibility of forgiveness. The wall between sinner and saint dissolves. The cross stops being an accusation and becomes a mirror of compassion. To see oneself as the crucifier is to lose the right to hate anyone.
The Duality Within Us
Every person carries two forces within; the impulse to love and the impulse to dominate. They are not separate entities but intertwined aspects of the same soul. The parent who comforts can also wound with words. The believer who prays for peace can also despise those who differ. The citizen who serves society can also justify war.
This duality is not proof of corruption, but of the fragile nature of human freedom. We are capable of holiness and cruelty with the same hands. The cross exposes this contradiction without denying our dignity. It reveals that what we call sin is not always rebellion, but often blindness. People act cruelly not because they are monsters, but because they are afraid, insecure, or lost.
The Christian story tells us that Jesus did not come to destroy this duality, but to redeem it. His compassion did not exclude the cruel. His forgiveness embraced those who struck him. That is why the cross remains the most radical symbol of hope. It shows that even within our darkest capacity lies the possibility of transformation.
Forgiveness as Transformation
Traditional theology often speaks of atonement as payment for sin, as if divine justice required blood. Yet the deeper mystery is that Jesus’ death reveals the character of God, not the wrath of God. The cross is not a transaction. It is a revelation.
God did not demand sacrifice. Humanity did. We demanded someone to bear the consequence of our blindness, and God entered that demand to transform it from within. Forgiveness does not erase wrongdoing. It redefines the relationship between wrong and love.
On the cross, mercy absorbs violence. The wounds become instruments of healing. When Jesus said “It is finished,” he did not mean that suffering had triumphed, but that love had reached its fullness. He turned the darkest act of humanity into the brightest act of grace. That is the meaning of redemption: the transformation of cruelty into compassion.
Forgiveness is therefore not forgetfulness. It is the power to see beyond the act to the soul beneath. The crucifixion teaches that even when we are at our worst, love does not abandon us. It enters the pain and remains there until it becomes light.
The Continuing Crucifixion
History has not stopped crucifying Christ. Every age finds new crosses. Every ideology, when corrupted, repeats the same scene. Wars are waged in the name of peace, faith communities fracture in the name of purity, and political movements persecute dissenters while claiming to defend freedom. The instruments change, but the logic remains.
When people attack others for believing differently, they crucify Christ again. When nations bomb civilians in the name of justice, they crucify Christ again. When social media becomes a battlefield of hatred, they crucify Christ again. The crucifixion is not an event of the past, but a mirror of our present condition.
Yet the resurrection continues as well. In every act of mercy, in every moment of reconciliation, in every refusal to hate, Christ rises again. The cross is the wound of the world, but resurrection is its heartbeat. The same humanity that kills is also the humanity that forgives. Love remains unkillable, returning quietly through those who remember what the cross means.
Loving the Enemy, Seeing No Enemy
When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” he was not asking for an impossible virtue. He was describing a state of awakened vision. Once you recognize that the capacity for cruelty lives in everyone, you cannot divide the world into good and evil without hypocrisy. Loving your enemy becomes natural because you see your own blindness reflected in theirs.
True love of the enemy is not affection for hostility. It is recognition of shared confusion. It does not excuse injustice, but it refuses to dehumanize. It insists that no one is beyond redemption. In the spiritual sense, there are no real enemies, only people who have forgotten their belonging to the same divine reality.
This is the heart of Christian ethics. To love the enemy is to dismantle the illusion of separateness. It is to see that the one who persecutes is also a soul in need of mercy. It is to act not from fear or retaliation, but from compassion rooted in humility. That is why Jesus could forgive even while dying. He was seeing the world as God sees it; wounded, blind, and beloved.
The Cross as Eternal Compassion
The cross, viewed through this understanding, becomes an image of eternal compassion. It is not the victory of power over weakness, but the victory of love over fear. The arms of Christ are open not only to the faithful but also to the faithless, not only to the innocent but also to the guilty.
To stand before the crucifixion is to stand before the truth of what we are. The divine does not turn away from human cruelty but enters it fully. The symbol of pain becomes the revelation of love. The vertical beam unites heaven and earth, the horizontal beam unites all people in one embrace.
When believers contemplate the cross deeply, they begin to see not only what Christ suffered, but what humanity continues to inflict upon itself. And yet, even then, the message remains: forgiveness is stronger than failure. The light that shines through the wounds never goes out.
From Judgment to Compassion
The journey of faith begins with judgment and ends with compassion. At first, we look at history and ask, “How could they crucify him?” Then we see ourselves and whisper, “I crucified him.” In that recognition, judgment gives way to tenderness.
Once you see your own capacity for blindness, you lose the desire to condemn. You begin to see others not as threats but as fellow sufferers of the same ignorance. The anger that once divided turns into a gentle sorrow. Out of that sorrow grows mercy, and from mercy, peace.
This is the spiritual transformation at the heart of Christianity. It is not merely about belief in doctrines, but about the healing of perception. The goal is not to be right, but to be real, to see the world as God sees it, without the walls that make enemies out of neighbors.
The Silence of Forgiveness
At the end, there is only silence. The noise of the crowd fades, the arguments disappear, and the cross remains. In that silence, one understands that “We crucified Christ” is not a statement of despair but of awakening. It means we finally see what we have done and what we keep doing. And in seeing, we begin to stop.
Forgiveness flows from that silence. It is not shouted or demanded. It arises like breath from a still heart. We forgive because we have been forgiven. We show mercy because mercy was shown to us even in our blindness.
When you stand before the crucified Christ and say, “I killed him,” you also hear the answer, “I love you.” That is the gospel in its purest form. Not the story of divine wrath, but of divine patience. Not the defeat of humanity, but its redemption.
To confess that we crucified Christ is to enter the mystery of a love that survives every betrayal. And from that realization begins the slow healing of the world.
Image: A photo captured by the author
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