What is the cost for God to save us?
There is a question that has nagged me for years since I first heard the story of the cross but I never dare ask it. I did not want to be irreverent…it must be something I’m missing but how can I ask and not be stoned 😅. But Job questioned God and Jacob wrestled with Him and neither of them were struck by lightning so maybe it’s OK to ask? ## What is the Cost? All the faithful spoke of how much Jesus suffered. The cross, the nails, the weight of all our sin laid on Him. They spoke of the cost, and I believed them. But still, I keep wondering…what exactly is this cost for God - the creator of all? He is God. Whatever the price was, of course He could pay it. He planned the method by which He would rescue His children and it was the only way. He knew He would die a human death and then would rise 3 days later. He knew what it would take to redeem His children and He knew it must be done but it is His plan and it will be done to His will. So when I heard that He paid so dearly, part of me wondered, dearly compared to what? For the One who holds all things and is eternal, what is loss? Let me start with what I do not doubt. He did not have to do any of it. However, in a fallen world we cannot simply decide to be good and if He left us to our choices we would be lost. Given the choice, again and again, we do not choose Him. Without grace, we are lost. And He would not force us, because love that is forced is not love. But He would not leave us to our ruin either. So He took a third way. He came down and paid it Himself. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Not once we had cleaned ourselves up. While we were still in the wrong. And it was not nothing to Him. In the garden, before a single soldier arrived, He was already in anguish. “Let this cup pass from me,” He prayed, “yet not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39). Something in that cup was heavy enough to make God in flesh tremble and ask for another way. So the question only grows sharper. What was in the cup? What does it cost Jesus? ## Wolverine?! Here is where my mind went somewhere strange. I thought of Wolverine. In the comics, Wolverine didn’t have super strength. He wasn’t invulnerable. Bullets didn’t bounce off him. Wolverine has the ability to heal from all wounds but he still feels all the pain the wounds cause but somehow knowing he can heal allows him to move forward. Any wound closes over and vanishes. He seemingly cannot be killed. So he throws himself into fights that would destroy anyone else. He takes pain that should be unbearable, because he knows that in a moment the wound will be gone, as if it never happened. Even his mind seems to scar over and keep going. He carries the bitterness of all of it, but his body always comes back whole. So when I first heard the story of the cross, I kept thinking of Wolverine and thought, the cost had to be more than just physical pain or even death since death and pain would not be something God would fear. Jesus knew He could not stay dead. He knew the pain was temporary. He knew Sunday was coming. So it can’t be this simple, Jesus could braced for what was to come the way Wolverine braces, enduring pain He knew would pass. ## The Cup is Heavy But there is the matter of the cup that Jesus asked the Father to take away. What’s in the cup? The deepest wound on the cross was not in the body. Wolverine’s pain is flesh, and flesh heals. For one moment, holding the full weight of our sin, He was cut off from the Father. “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” He cried (Matthew 27:46). A moment is nothing against eternity. But think about what broke at that moment. The Son had been one with the Father for all of eternity, in a communion with no beginning. To be severed from that, even once, even for a breath, is a loss we have no way to measure. It is hard to imagine what could frighten God… but maybe this did. That’s then is the real cost - the separation from God. Christian often proclaim how God sent His son to die for us on the cross. To die in our place but if it is just a death and pain of the cross then didn’t the martyr do the same - they die while singing praise to the Lord. This misses the mark, I think. Death and pain is not the cost, the true cost is the separation from God that’s what we are spared by Jesus' sacrifice. ## The Wounds He Kept And then there is the part that finally settled it for me. When Jesus rose, His wounds did not disappear. Wolverine comes back from every battle smooth. Skin closed. No record left on the body. Jesus did not. Three days later He stood alive among His friends, and the holes were still in His hands and His side. He told Thomas to reach out and touch them (John 20:27). He didn’t rise body whole without the wounds of the cross. Scripture says that when we are raised, we are given new bodies, free of sickness and injury. Every tear wiped away. No more death, no more mourning, no more pain (Revelation 21:4). What is sown perishable is raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42). We are healed clean. Our old wounds are simply gone. He was the exception. He carried His wounds through death and out the other side, into the resurrection itself. And not only there. When John is shown heaven, the throne at the center of everything, he sees the Lamb standing in glory, “looking as if it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). The wound is still there. At the very center of heaven, in the place of highest honor, the mark of the cross remains. Forever. The true cost! ## How Much We are Worth to Him! Maybe that’s the answer to the question that had nagged me for years. If the cost had been fleeting, if His wounds had closed over like Wolverine’s and left no trace, then what was really paid? A pain that fully heals and is forgotten is not a price. But the mark did not leave Him. He carries it into eternity, where it can never be lost, where one day we will all see it. And that will remind us of the real cost. It was not just physical. It was not just death and pain. It was spiritual. It is past anything we can hold, a cost only God could pay and only God could measure. That is what our rescue was worth to Him. 🙏 🧘
When the Mirror is Clear: Finding Common Wisdom on the Walk for Peace
In late 2025, nineteen Buddhist monks set out from Fort Worth on a 2,300-mile journey to Washington DC. The walk is done. The journey continues at facebook.com/walkforpeaceusa. I wrote a series of posts and discover deepening faith along the way.
The Venerable Bhikkhu Paññākāra and his fellow monks are nearing Washington DC now, over 100 days and more than 2,000 miles since they left Fort Worth, Texas on foot. They have walked through communities across the South, stopping in each state capital, drawing thousands of people who came not for spectacle but for something harder to name, maybe a hunger for peace that we all share regardless of what tradition we call home.
As they passed through Virginia this week, I found myself reflecting on some of the wisdom the Venerable has been sharing along the way and I was struck by how much of it resonates with teachings I know from my own Christian tradition. Not because one tradition borrowed from the other but maybe because these truths are written into something deeper than any single tradition, something fundamental about what it means to be human and to seek peace.
The Bathroom Mirror
Many who follow the monks may have already heard the Venerable Paññākāra’s teaching about cleaning a bathroom mirror right after your morning routine, wipe it while the water and soap spots are fresh and it takes no effort at all, but leave it for weeks and those spots harden and now you’re scrubbing. Of course he wasn’t really talking about mirrors. He was talking about our minds and hearts, how small disturbances and negative thoughts are so much easier to address when they are fresh. Let them accumulate and take root and then when something big comes along to shake us, all those buried things surface at once and overwhelm us.
This brought me back to about 14 years ago when I was going through a painful time and studying meditation. I was trying to use meditation to run away from my suffering so my practice was all wrong. My instructor asked me to imagine a calm pond with crystal clear water and trees lining the banks. Dust and small particles naturally fall into the pond and if I just let them sink to the bottom, the surface stays calm for a while. But when a large stone drops in, it stirs everything up from the bottom and the water becomes muddy and takes a long time to settle. However, if as each pebble falls I notice it, find it right away and toss it out, then when that big rock inevitably comes the water remains clear. The ripples settle quickly and I can deal with the rock itself without all the accumulated muck.
This same wisdom appears in the Christian tradition. Paul wrote that we should not let the sun go down on our anger and not give a foothold for darkness to take root in our hearts (Ephesians 4:26-27). The Psalms speak of searching our hearts in the quiet moments before sleep (Psalm 4:4). The Christian practice of daily prayer and self-examination is really about this same principle, tend to the mirror daily, deal with what disturbs our peace while it is still fresh.
Whether we call it mindfulness or prayerful self-examination, whether we sit in meditation or kneel in prayer, the wisdom is the same: pay attention to what enters our hearts and address it before it takes root.
The House With Many Doors
The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, a beloved teacher from a different school of Buddhist practice (the Zen/Mahayana tradition), once offered another image that I think speaks to all of us. He asked us to imagine a house with many doors and windows but we have locked them all shut except the front door. We stand in this darkened house, staring at that one open door, insisting that happiness must come through it. We have decided what happiness should look like and where it must come from and we wait and wait.
But what if we threw open all the doors and windows? What if we let light flood in from every direction and allowed fresh air to move freely through the house? Happiness might come through the back door, or a side window, or even through the attic in a way we never expected.
This resonates deeply with what I understand from the Christian scriptures too. The proverbs teach us to trust in the Lord and lean not on our own understanding of what we need (Proverbs 3:5-6). Isaiah reminds us that God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). Jesus himself taught that we need not be anxious about what we need because our Creator knows us intimately, He made us after all, and He knows what we truly need before we even think to ask (Matthew 6:8).
How often do we insist that the answer to our prayers must come through that one front door we are staring at? How often do we miss the blessings that came through windows we didn’t even know were there because we were so fixated on our own idea of what we needed? Maybe part of finding peace, in any tradition, is learning to hold our expectations loosely enough that we can recognize goodness when it arrives in unexpected forms.
Loving in an Impermanent World
Perhaps the most profound teaching I’ve been reflecting on is about love and attachment. The Venerable Paññākāra has spoken about how attachment to impermanent things causes suffering. At first this troubled me because it seemed like the teaching was saying we should avoid love altogether since all things in this world change and everyone we love will eventually be gone. If loving leads to suffering when loss comes, wouldn’t the logical conclusion be to not love at all?
But I don’t think that is what the teaching means. I think it is saying something much more beautiful. That we should love deeply and fully but not grasp so tightly to what we love that we cannot bear the inevitable changes that come. When someone we love is gone, we can hold the joy of having loved them without being destroyed by the fact that the time has passed. In fact, recognizing that our time together is precious and impermanent can make us love more deeply, not less. Every moment becomes more precious when we understand it will not last forever on this earth.
The teacher of Ecclesiastes recognized this same truth thousands of years ago when he observed that everything under the sun is fleeting, like vapor (Ecclesiastes 1:2). And yet the same teacher also wrote that there is beauty in enjoying the gifts we are given in this life, in eating and drinking and finding joy in our labor as gifts from God (Ecclesiastes 3:12-13). The recognition that earthly things are impermanent doesn’t make them meaningless…it makes them precious.
In my own tradition, Jesus taught us to store our treasures not in earthly things that rust and decay but in the eternal things that cannot be taken from us (Matthew 6:19-21). We are comforted in loss because we believe our loved ones return to the arms of our Creator and that this separation is temporary. The Buddhist tradition also points beyond the impermanent world to something transcendent and lasting, a state of enduring peace beyond the changes of this life.
I think both traditions arrive at a similar place through different paths. Both recognize that clinging too tightly to what is temporary causes suffering. Both point toward something beyond this world that is lasting and real. And both teach us that the answer is not to love less but to love with open hands, trusting that what is truly precious does not end with this life.
Walking Together
What moves me about the Walk for Peace is not just the physical endurance of these monks who have walked over 2,000 miles barefoot and in silence. It is that their walk has become a living teaching that people from every background can receive. They are not asking anyone to convert or to abandon their own tradition. They are simply walking in peace and inviting us to find the peace that already exists within our own hearts and our own traditions.
I have found that studying the wisdom of the Venerable Paññākāra and other Buddhist teachers has not weakened my own faith but has deepened it. It has helped me see truths in my own scriptures that I had overlooked or taken for granted. When I hear a Buddhist teaching about mindfulness and then find the same principle in the Psalms, it doesn’t make either tradition less true, it makes the truth feel more universal and more real. It reminds me that we are all human beings with the same hearts, the same struggles, the same longing for peace and connection.
We have far more in common than we have in difference and the things we share are at the very core of who we are. We all want peace. We all want to love and be loved. We all struggle with our own minds and hearts. We all sense that there is something more beyond this impermanent world. Whether we find these truths through the Buddha’s teachings or through the words of Jesus or through another path, the truths themselves seem to be woven into the very fabric of what it means to be human.
As the monks approach Washington DC in the coming days, I pray that they arrive safely and that the peace they carry in their hearts and their steps continues to touch everyone they meet along the way. May we all find the courage to clean our mirrors daily, to open the doors and windows of our hearts, and to love deeply even in this impermanent world, trusting that the deepest truths transcend any single tradition and belong to all of us.
May there be peace 🙏🧘