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What if the most radical thing you could believe today is not a theological proposition, but a deeply personal truth? Not just that God exists, or that God is good, but that God is madly, extravagantly, unreservedly in love with you. Not with humanity as an abstract concept. With you. Specifically. Completely.

It sounds almost too simple. And yet it changes everything.

A Sign That Defies Logic

We live in a world that prizes intelligence, strength, and self-sufficiency. We admire power. We reward those who project confidence and control. And so when we are told that the central sign of God’s love for humanity is a cross, a Roman instrument of execution designed to humiliate and destroy, we can understand why so many people across history have struggled to accept it.

To the intellectually sophisticated, it does not compute. To those seeking a triumphant, conquering God, it disappoints. And yet, the cross is precisely the point. It is the sign. It is the proof. Why would God’s greatest declaration of love be required to fit neatly within our logic? It never will. And that is, in a strange and beautiful way, exactly what makes it so powerful.

The cross is not a premature tragedy or a story that went wrong. Every writer of the Gospels is clear on this: the crucifixion is the climax of Jesus’s mission. It is not the end of the story. It is the heart of it.

Love That Was Always Moving Toward the Cross

If we pay attention, we can see the cross lurking behind every scene of Jesus’s ministry long before that final day.

Consider the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. A king arriving to claim his throne might be expected to ride a warhorse, a symbol of military might and earthly dominance. Instead, Jesus arrives on a donkey. Humble. Unhurried. Unimpressive by the world’s standards. This was not accidental. It was a declaration. The way Jesus would defeat the powers of darkness, sin, and death would not be through violence or force, but through weakness, through surrender, through allowing himself to be broken.

Consider the washing of the disciples’ feet. In first-century culture, this task belonged only to the lowest of servants. It was beneath dignity. And yet Jesus, the Son of God, kneels before his friends and washes their feet. He comes not to be served, but to serve, even to the point of death.

Consider the Last Supper, where Jesus breaks bread and pours wine as symbols of what is to come, and shares them not only with those who love him, but with Judas, the one he knows will betray him. No exclusion. No withholding. Love offered freely, even to the one who would hand him over to his enemies.

And then consider Gethsemane, where the weight of what lies ahead presses so heavily on Jesus that one Gospel writer describes his sweat falling like drops of blood. This is not a God who floats above human suffering. This is a God who enters it fully, who wrestles with it, who feels the full cost of love, and chooses it anyway.

What the Cross Weighs

There is a difference between looking at something and looking through it. To look at the cross is to see it at surface level, to acknowledge it as a historical event or a religious symbol. But to look through the cross is to seek its weight, to press deeper into what it means and why it matters.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby once said: “A cross that has no weight is no cross worth carrying.”

So what does the cross weigh? It weighs the full measure of God’s love for every human being who has ever lived. It weighs the deliberate, willing choice of the Son of God to be pierced for our failings, crushed for our rebellion, wounded so that we might be healed. It is not the act of a distant God imposing suffering on an unwilling victim. Jesus himself says throughout the Gospels that he chooses this. The Son who existed with the Father before time itself voluntarily lays down his life. That is the weight of the cross. That is the weight of love.

Romans 5 captures this with extraordinary clarity. At just the right time, when human beings were still powerless, still enemies of God, still deep in sin, Christ died for us. Not for the righteous. Not for the deserving. For sinners. For us. While we were still sinners. That is the staggering nature of this love.

Love as a Way of Living

Understanding the depth of God’s love is not merely a theological exercise. It is the foundation of everything.

Think about the way we treat one another. The grudges we carry. The people we find difficult to forgive. The walls we build between ourselves and those who have hurt us. Now consider this: how could Jesus wash the feet of the disciples, knowing one would betray him and another would deny him three times? Because he was completely secure in the love of his heavenly Father. That security freed him to love without condition.

The same is true for us. When we are genuinely rooted in the knowledge that we are loved by God, not because of what we have achieved or how well we behave, but simply because God loves us, it changes how we move through the world. It frees us to love people who are difficult to love. It frees us to give generously, to serve humbly, to forgive those who do not deserve it.

So much of the Christian life lived in fear or duty misses this foundation entirely. The motivation for following Jesus is not obligation. It is love. Knowing we are loved, we love in return.

The Truth That Holds

Feelings come and go. There will be days when this truth feels distant, when grief or confusion or pain makes it hard to sense God’s presence. But feelings are not the measure of truth. The cross stands regardless of what we feel on any given morning.

God is not mildly fond of you. He is not cautiously optimistic about you. He is madly, completely, sacrificially in love with you.

Do not just look at the cross. Look through it. And there you will find the weight of a love that has never stopped reaching for you.