From the earliest times, Christians have been moved to prayer and worship by the death of Jesus on the cross, which they believed to be a powerful expression of God's love for the world. But the Church has also tried to understand and explain why God's work of salvation should have required a death and how that death makes a difference to others.

These explanations have often, inevitably, been expressed in the ideas and images of the time. Jewish sacrificial ceremonies; being redeemed from slavery; someone vicariously suffering punishment for another's crime; release from the captivity of Satan. Words and images from these approaches still haunt our hymns and prayers, but they don't arise from our culture or experience and so they don't 'work' so well for people today.

We live in a world where we understand our lives largely in terms of relationships. It's our relationships that give our lives meaning and boundaries and help us discover who we are. So the images that seem to work best for people today are images that try to unfold the meaning of Jesus' death in the relationship language of God's love for us. And to help us understand and explain that, we naturally draw on what we have learned from the love and the pain of our relationships with one another.

Why did Jesus have to die? Not to buy us with his life, not to pay Satan or satisfy God's righteous indignation at human sin. But as a sign of love. Sharing in the reality of which we are already aware from our own relationships that love requires self-giving involvement and that self-giving can be costly and often incurs pain. The costliness of self-giving often prevents us from giving ourselves totally. But God's love for us is total and so is God's willingness to give himself for us, even to the point of death.

Perhaps, like people who cower away from the light, lest their own sins are exposed, we cannot bear to be in the presence of total love so we destroy it. The jealous, small-minded, childishness of wanting to destroy what we cannot be and cannot have. Or is it the weakness of Jesus we despise, the weakness that reminds of our own, which we try constantly to conceal and deny. His total humanity reveals our inability to be human.

The above are the opening words from a web site - Why did Jesus have to die? For me this hasn't been a week to write great theological treatises, but perhaps that is the point. We are not to analyse the cross, but to respond to it. We are to allow its shadow to fall across our lives and to respond to it. Today, then, do not try to find a theology, but listen to the responses of others and reflect on them. Somehow our faith is less than complete until we do. I will pause briefly between these images to give you a moment or two to reflect before we move on. Perhaps you can focus your eyes on the Cross that is before us or on the cover of the service booklet Or merely close your eyes.

Bonhöffer: God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.

Goethe observed. The cross is the shape love takes whenever it enters the world.

P.W. Turner: Christ in the Concrete City

Rowan Williams: Open to Judgement

W.H. Vanstone: Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense

AMEN.