The meaning of the cross

"What if we see on this cross not a transaction with an offended mountain god, but a revelation at a moment of time of the love which is eternally in the heart of God, lived out in the long trek of Jesus? What if we smile at our failed and compromised images of paid penalties, sacrificial blood, ransoms, and punishments, all of which reflected some truth but also distorted it, and see in this historical moment a climax of lived love and lived hate, of the gods of religion and the God of compassion, of the political suppression of change and the unwillingness to recant on care? Then he died for us, against us, within us, before us - in a moment frozen in time for all time. And perhaps, then, we begin to know. "

William Loader
http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/mountain.htm