From Terror to Hope: A Reflection on the Cross

It's Easter Sunday and churches across the world are talking about the resurrection . They talked about the Cross and the rising. It made me think about the purpose of the cross. The cross was never meant to be beautiful. It was not crafted to inspire. The purpose was to terrify. To silence. To destroy. It was a tool of the empire, designed to make an example out of anyone who dared to challenge its authority. It was a public act of violence meant to shame, silence, and break the spirit of anyone who resisted.

Somehow, this symbol of domination becomes the center of our faith.

That transformation was Divine.

The story didn’t end on Friday. It didn’t end with the nails, the mockery, the darkness, or the final breath. It continued. It redefined the meaning of the cross.

Resurrection is the declaration that no system of violence can have the last word. The resurrection says: You may have tried to bury hope, but hope rises. You may have tried to silence love, but love speaks still. You may have used the cross to break the body, but God used the cross to heal the world.

The cross is no longer a sign of terror. It is a sign of transformation. Not because the pain wasn’t real, but because God didn’t leave us in the pain. God moved through it, redeeming even the instruments of death.

The cross stands now not as a monument to cruelty, but as a portal to grace. It’s the place where forgiveness grew, where love broke all the rules, where justice and mercy stood side by side. The cross is where suffering found a response.

This matters more than we fathom. We live in a world that still uses crosses. We live where systems crucify people all the same. Through poverty. Through racism. Through indifference. Through cruelty that wears the mask of law and order. The cross was redeemable. So are we. We can redeem what feels broken. We can rebuild our communities. We can heal the parts of ourselves that we once believed were beyond repair.

The cross, in the end, is not a period; it’s a comma. It reminds us that resurrection is always possible, even when the world is doing its worst.

This is the heart of our faith: not the avoidance of suffering, but the promise that suffering is not the end. Not the denial of death, but the assurance that death does not win. Not the perfection of the faithful, but the redemption of the fallen.

Carry the cross as a banner. Not in fear, but in faith. Not to shame others, but to love in a world that often forgets how. Embody the lesson of God and take a tool of destruction and turn it into a symbol of eternal hope.