Today, if we wish to review a person's life or write an obituary about them, we would normally start with their birth and upbringing and end with their death. Extraordinarily, the gospels would never have been written if that was all that was to be said about Jesus. The gospels were written precisely to highlight what happened to Jesus after death.

During the thirty or so years between the death of Jesus and the writing of the first gospel, the Christian communities shared the oral traditions of Jesus' life and death and lived and worshipped in the belief that the transcendent, risen Lord was with them. You might say that they were experiencing what the 'kingdom of God' which Jesus inaugurated during his life, was all about. But there were still fears and tears in the life they lived in a very uncertain future in the Roman occupation of Palestine. The episode in Mark of the disciples in a storm on the lake after Jesus had been teaching the crowds, perhaps reflects the tensions of the community where Mark was written, despite their belief in his presence with them -

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other side." And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. And a great storm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care if we perish?" And he awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?" (Mark 4: 35-40)

Who is he? He is the risen Lord. Jesus, the Lord, is alive. Alive in the new creation effected by the Father when Jesus was transformed out of death to become the forerunner in the 'kingdom', or rule, of God. All that preceded Jesus' teaching about the coming kingdom had been about a territorial kingdom when God would again, it was thought, reign in Jerusalem and all the nations would come there. Contrary to those ideas, Jesus was teaching that any who believed in him, turning to him, would enter a kingdom of truth and fellowship and love - in God - even the harlots and the tax collectors.

So what was the relation of Jesus, the living Lord, to God? Before we start thinking about all the theological implications of the relationship, we need to hold on to the understanding of life with God as life in the kingdom of God - both for Jesus, the Lord, and for us all. The unknown author of the letter to the Hebrews is full of ideas which express this living communion with the divine. Jesus is seated at the right hand of God - he has replaced the old priesthood by the fact that he fulfilled all the ideas of sacrifice in his willing obedience in death:

Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. (Hebrews 10: 19-22)

During his life Jesus taught about the kingdom of God and, in a way, inaugurated it. Kingdom came alive through God's victory in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And it is that total world view of the divine in relation to ourselves that the figure of Jesus stands out for us today. Throughout the centuries the Western churches have made it more difficult for us to believe in the gospel of the living Lord on account of our devotional, theological and liturgical selection of the death of Jesus apart from the victory. It is time that we rounded out the gospel to know the full extent of the gospel in Jesus who is alive, present to us all and not simply in the gatherings of the churches - 'He is Lord of all': in the market places and everywhere people gather - even in St Pancras' station in London.

There are still more answers needed to our question, Who are you Lord? which will involve us patiently looking at the traditions of who he is in his humanity and in his death. These are, in many ways, the more difficult questions! Christians have disagreed, sometimes very violently, over the person of Jesus in his humanity. We have often to ask for forgiveness over our neglect of that aphorism, See how they love one another! which Tertullian noted was spoken by the pagans of his day in the third century, (Tertullian, Apology, 39:6)