Glory to Jesus Christ!
According to the wisdom of the world, a basic principle for action is to meet force with force, or “might makes right.” If we are hurt, we strike back. If we are wronged, we demand repayment. If evil confronts us, we assume it must be crushed.
And yet today we celebrate a very different kind of reasoning: at the core of our faith is something entirely different: a crucified God. This is the “wisdom of the Cross.”
Bernard Lonergan called this paradox the Law of the Cross. It is not a slogan or a metaphor. It is a law in the deepest sense—a pattern written into the very logic of redemption and human history. According to this law, evil is not overcome by returning evil for evil, but by absorbing it in love and transforming it from within.
1. To understand this better, we begin with the failure of power.
If power could save the world, the Cross would never have been necessary. Jesus could have silenced his accusers, summoned legions of angels, or overwhelmed his enemies. Instead, he chose weakness, vulnerability. He allowed injustice to run its course.
This is deeply unsettling to us, because we would prefer a God who intervenes decisively, who fixes things quickly, who restores order without cost. But we must accept that the reign of sin — the accumulated weight of personal and social evil — cannot be undone by coercion. Violence only multiplies violence. Domination breeds resistance. Force may restrain evil for a time, but it cannot heal it.
So God chooses another way.
2. Lonergan describes the Law of the Cross in three moments:
Jesus does not deny the reality of suffering. He enters it fully out of love.
Mother Teresa: “We all know [of] the terrible poverty of the Passion. The slapping on the face - the spitting on the face – the crowning with thorns, the scourging, the removing of his clothes, the crucifixion – putting the Cross in the center – showing that He was worse than the other two – the burial in somebody’s grave. All these and many others, especially the terrible longing to be loved - the terrible loneliness... All, all these (are) the love with which He loved you and me.”
He accepts betrayal, injustice, humiliation, and death — not because these things are good, but because refusing them would leave them untouched, unchanged.
On the Cross, evil does everything it can do. It exhausts itself. And in that very moment, something astonishing happens: evil is met not with hatred, but with forgiveness; not with resentment, but with obedience and love. Death itself becomes an act of self-gift to the Father and to each one of us.
As Mother Teresa wrote: “Today, I want you to read through it [the Passion] slowly. Don’t try to imagine too much or meditate, but to experience that deep love Jesus has for you, a love that knew no limits and that led Jesus to the Cross.”
This is the transformation. What was meant for destruction becomes the means of salvation.
3. The Law of the Cross is not a call to passivity or resignation. This is certainly not the case.
This is not about accepting injustice as “God’s will.” It is about refusing to let evil dictate our response. The Cross is not submission to evil; it is resistance at a deeper level—the resistance of love that refuses to become what it opposes.
To live by the Law of the Cross is to say:
· I will not let your hatred make me hateful.
· I will not let your injustice define my soul.
· I will not let your violence have the final word.
This is costly. It always involves suffering. But it is the only suffering that is redemptive rather than destructive.
4. The Law of the Cross is not only about Christ. It is the law of Christian existence.
Every person, every family, every community, every society faces the same question: How will we respond to evil?
When we forgive instead of retaliate, when we tell the truth instead of protecting ourselves, when we remain faithful in the face of misunderstanding, when we choose solidarity with the suffering rather than comfort — the Cross is at work again.
And like Christ’s Cross, these moments often look like failure. They rarely look victorious. But we need to remember that resurrection is not the avoidance of death; it is what God does with faithful love after death has had its say.
5. The Law of the Cross does not end in suffering. It ends in transfiguration.
The Resurrection is not an undoing of the Cross but its fulfillment. The wounds remain, but they now shine. What was endured in love becomes the source of life for many.
This is our hope.
That no act of faithful love is wasted. That no suffering borne in love is meaningless. That God is at work precisely where the world sees only loss.
So when the Cross appears in our lives—as it surely will— we are invited not to flee from it or romanticize it, but to trust the wisdom hidden within it.
Because in God’s strange and beautiful logic, love crucified is love victorious.
Glory to Jesus Christ!
