By Ozodi Osuji
During his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before he was arrested and taken to the judges of this world to judge and find him guilty and crucify him on the cross, Jesus prayed thus:
“Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me; nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done.” Luke 22:42 (KJV)
This prayer implies that Jesus was like most human beings and would like to keep on living on earth, but eventually realized that his Father, God, insisted that he die, and he obeyed God’s will and allowed himself to be crucified.
From our human perspective, we ask: What kind of father requires his son to be crucified to satisfy his will? God must practice tough love, and once he set down a rule, it must be obeyed, or he will not spare you.
Some Christians interpret the passage to mean that Adam and Eve disobeyed God and God demanded that they die to satiate his desire for their punishment and hence had their son, Jesus, die for the sins of his earthly parents for disobeying Him (eating the forbidden fruit).
God allowed his only begotten Son to be crucified at Calvary and did not prevent his death. The message is that God demands that each of us be crucified and die and will not budge until we are dead. Our crying and begging him to spare us will not make him do so, as he did not relent and allow Jesus to live on earth and insisted that he die.
There is another way of looking at the whole seemingly gory situation. It is that what has to die is not the Self of Jesus, but his ego-separated self. Jesus’s ego had to be crucified, die so that his real self as God created him, the Son of God, the Christ, is resurrected in him, is reborn in his awareness.
By the same token, God demands that my ego and your ego be crucified and die so that we are reborn in how he created us, his holy son, the Christ who is one with him and all his other sons.
The separated ego self and its body must die for the loving son of God to be reborn in us.
The disobedience of Adam and Eve, the sons of God, is not eating a fruit that they were told not to eat but instead inventing a new self for themselves than the Self God created them as.
God created them as unified with him; to be unified with another self, one must be in formless spirit, so the self that God created them in was formless spirit; their sin was inventing a different self for themselves, a separated self in form, body.
We left God’s Holy Self, and formed an opposite self, one in separation and bodies and now seem to live in it in a separated world., our planet earth.
What the metaphor of Jesus dying is asking is that we give up the false separated self we made to replace the self-God created us as and in doing so return to his real son, resurrect from living in ego and body.
To live in ego is to be crucified and suffer and to die to the ego and live in Christ is to live in love; to love God and all sons of God is to live in peace and joy, to return to the self that God created us as.
Thus, God was not punishing Jesus by insisting that his ego and body die so that he is reborn in formless Christ; he is returning him to the Garden of Eden, to grace, peace and joy, to heaven.
On the personal level, my ego self must die so that I am resurrected in Christ, peace and joy, and then model it to the egotists around me; they can then see the reborn Son of God in me and from him and allow their egos to die and henceforth live from the Son of God in them.
In effect, God is doing us a favor by willing that our egos die and we regain the awareness of our real self, formless spirit self, and hence forth live in eternal peace and joy.
As was the case with Jesus, I cannot wriggle my way out of allowing my ego to die; I must be reborn in Christ. My begging God to spare my ego will not make him spare it because God is a loving father and wants me, his son, to return to love and stop living in the hell of separated ego life on earth.
This does not require me and other people to commit suicide, but for us to choose love, and if love demands not running away from danger to our egos and bodies, we must stay there and love all instead of showing cowardice by running away.
In the USA, for example, the forces of Satan have taken over the land. The high priest of Satan Worship, Donald Trump, and his wicked hosts threaten to kill anyone who opposes them from transforming the USA into the hell they think is heaven.
The meaning of the metaphor of God willing that Jesus dies for the Christ in him to be reborn is staying right here and not allowing these forces of hate and darkness to make one not work for love and peace.
Note
Yesterday, I wrote an essay on the goal of psychotherapy, secular and spiritual. What I wrote above is the goal of psychotherapy, albeit spiritual psychotherapy. Psychotherapists aim at helping their patients to stop living from their separated ego self-concepts, let them die, and live from the self that God created them as, a loving self. When the ego is not desired and defended, when it is let die, one begins living from the self that God created one as, a loving self.
Ozodi Osuji
July 24, 2026
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