Think for a moment of your greatest fear… Whatever it is that feels like death creeping into your life: failure that kills your reputation and confidence, illness that threatens your body, betrayal that breaks your heart.

Now imagine: what if the very thing that threatens to kill you is also the very thing that heals you? That’s the mystery of the Cross. God takes what is most poisonous in human history, fear, abandonment, betrayal, cruelty, pain, political divide, death, all present on that cross, and through it offers the cure. That is why today the Church exalts it.

St. Paul tells us in the letter to the Philippians that Christ Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming obedient even to death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6–8). What does that mean?

By the time Paul writes this, he already has an understanding about the meaning of Jesus dying on the cross. A few years earlier he writes to the community in Corinth: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Paul understands that Jesus willingly chose to face the cross, appearing to others as someone who deserved it.

Why would they have thought he deserved death? How does anyone conclude that someone deserves to die? Fear. Again and again, we show our human tendency to crucify what we fear.

Jesus was feared for many reasons, one being, as we heard in the gospel, because he called himself “the Son of Man” (John 3:14). This Old Testament title refers to an agent sent from heaven who would reveal divine mysteries at the end of time (Daniel 7:13–14) and execute God’s final judgment. In those days, people lived in expectation of that end and many were terrified by it.

By using this title, Jesus was saying: I am the one sent from heaven. I have come to judge the world and bring about the fulfillment of all things. And yes, the end of the world is here. But they did not understand that the world Jesus came to end was the world of crucifixion, the human tendency to get rid of those we fear.

God’s response to this human problem was not to bring another flood, He had already promised Noah He would not do that again (Genesis 9:11). Instead, He allowed Himself to become the victim of human sin, crucified and exalted like a trophy. And just when they thought they had eliminated another “bad one,” through the resurrection Jesus revealed that the one who hung on the cross was truly the Son of Man. That realization marked the end of the world of violence, the kingdom of Satan, and the beginning of the kingdom of God.

In this new world, the cross is transformed: no longer an instrument of human sin, but a reminder of what we are capable of doing, and even more, a visible sign of God’s judgment. And what is that judgment? That despite our rejection of Him, God’s response is love.

That is what makes the cross in Christianity a symbol that speaks beyond human words: the reason we exalt it, place it in our homes, hang it around our necks, trace it over our bodies when we pray, and place it prominently by our altars in churches. When you look at the cross, it speaks directly to the soul. It is a human instrument God chose to transform so as to communicate divine love.

The early Christians understood this. Long before they developed sophisticated theological language, before they debated atonement theories or Trinitarian metaphysics, they already had the image of the Cross. And it did not take long for them to see that symbol in light of the story of Moses and the bronze serpent in the desert (Numbers 21:4–9).

After the people were bitten by poisonous snakes, God told Moses: “Make a serpent and mount it on a pole. When anyone who has been bitten looks at it, he will live” (Numbers 21:8). In the Gospel of John, written at a time when Christians had already come to understand the deeper meaning of the cross, records Jesus saying: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15).

One way to understand how the Cross “works,” what is happening in the story of Moses, and what Jesus means, is through psychology. The stories themselves are saying: the very thing we fear, the serpent, the cross, becomes the source of healing when we dare to look at it. In other words, it is God’s exposure therapy.

Modern therapists in the 20th century rediscovered this principle. Exposure therapy is based on a simple idea: if you voluntarily face what frightens you, the thing that poisons you, it loses its power to destroy you. A little bit of the poison can become the cure. That’s how vaccines work: you confront a controlled version of what could kill you, and in doing so, you become stronger.

Scholars suggest this paradox is universal. The Greeks even had a word for it: pharmakon. It means both poison and cure. And that is exactly what the Cross is: the very poison of human sin becomes the medicine of salvation.

Even more, the symbol of the cross itself is universal. Versions of the cross are found across cultures and religions. Perhaps that is why God chose the cross as His mode of communication, because it reaches all of humanity. Since you cannot heal what you will not look at, and the cross had become an instrument of death, in Jesus the Cross is lifted up and exalted for all to see so as to be healed of that which we are most afraid of, each other, God’s judgment, and death. It becomes God’s own exposure therapy.

God instructed Moses to make a serpent and mount it on a pole (Numbers 21:8). That universal symbol is still used in medicine today. You see it on ambulances or in pharmacies, the serpent wrapped around a staff.

And it is a powerful, primordial image. It appears in ancient art, in geometry, in myth and religion. Why? Because it is a symbol of movement: the crooked wrapping around the straight. The fallen winding around the upright. Sin spiraling around salvation.

It is a picture of our human condition: always spiraling, always tempted to move away from God. And yet God remains in the center, offering salvation, the straight path. In freedom he allows us to wander off if we choose, but God is always there, calling us back, making us confront our mistakes so as to be better. That is how we grow in the spiritual life.

And isn’t that how human development works, too? Children grow by placing themselves on the edge of ragged disaster. That’s where they learn. They draw close to what they fear, not recklessly, but voluntarily, and in doing so, they gain courage. As we get older, we become more cautious. There are things I would not dare to do today that I easily attempted in my early twenties.

In the same way, the Christian becomes spiritually mature not by avoiding suffering, and certainly not by causing others to suffer, but by voluntarily confronting it. We do this through spiritual exercises: abstinence, chastity, fasting. We pray the Stations of the Cross again and again. We dramatize the Passion every year during Holy Week. Why? Because we need to be exposed to what we were, and what we become when we spiral out of control, so that we do not go back to that world.

Maybe this is the divine exposure therapy we need as a society right now. Because what is being lifted up, what is being exalted in our world, is hateful rhetoric, the celebration of death and disorder, fear, causing many in our human family to fall back into that old world that pits people against each other ready to crucify the next person. But Jesus says: “When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32).

Our duty, our responsibility as Christians, as Paul puts it, is to “preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:22–24).  We exalt Jesus on the cross to announce to those spiraling out of control: God does not hate you. God loves you. I am not afraid of you; I want to understand you. I do not think less of you because of who you are, what you look like, what you think. I do not hate you. You are my brother, my sister in Christ.

They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Jesus was killed on the Cross, yes, but only to bring death to sin, and birth to a new world. The Cross is more than a symbol. More than a theological idea. More than a psychological concept hidden behind religious rituals.

On the Cross, God speaks. On the Cross, we are given a way to confront our fears and to heal our world through peace… forgiveness… service… love… and hope.

And so today we exalt the Cross of Christ. Not because it’s beautiful. Not because it’s easy. But because it speaks truth, the very remedy we need.