A great dancer, Nijinsky and a genius of a composer, Stravinsky, collaborated in a new dance which electrified and stunned the ballet goers of Paris in 1913 and sparked off riots. The Rite of Spring was dreamt up by Stravinsky. He said, "[I had a vision of] wise elders, seated in a circle. watching a young girl dance herself to death ... to propitiate the god of spring." Whether intended by Stravinksy or not, this flash-back to Russian pagan rites perhaps mirrored at the time the terrible instability of Europe and Russia before the 1914-1918 war. Leaving the artistic merits of the Rite of Spring behind - (it was to influence, and indeed change, how dance and music were to be seen in the 20th century), I mention this because Christian history has also been obsessed with ideas of sacrifice in relation to Jesus' death.

How do we understand Jesus' death? The Middle Ages fastened on the ideas that to 're-enact' the death of Jesus in the mass was to enable us all to be forgiven and made free. At least from the time of Anselm (1033-1109), God needed to be propitiated, it was said, for our sin. Theology was influenced by the concerns of the time that justice demanded satisfaction and punishment for sins committed. Jesus' main work, it was thought, was to perform this satisfaction and that we also must express and continue that in the ritual of our worship. At the Reformation, the liturgical ritual was abolished but the Protestant churches highlighted the doctrine that Jesus died 'instead of us', as a sacrifice and satisfaction to God. (This was a misreading of the New Testament text that Jesus lived and died 'for us').

One of the simplest and most straightforward references to Jesus' death is in Luke's account of Peter's speech in the Acts of the Apostles -

"... Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it ... Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified."(Acts 2: 23-24 & 36)

So God was involved in the death as well as in the life of Jesus, the destined fore-runner of humanity. But God was not the object of a sacrifice. We have to remember that God, his Abba, is revealed in Jesus' life. As Michael Ramsey put it so well, ''In God there is no un-Christ-likeness at all.' Jesus, according to the gospels, three times looked ahead to the inevitable death that was coming to him. Both to Jesus, and to God, the outcome of Jesus' ministry was plain. There was an inevitable conflict between Jesus' preaching of the kingdom of God and the Jewish (and Roman) ideas for Palestine and Judaism.

Michelangelo's extraordinary and beautiful sculpture captures a different Mediaeval 'take' on Jesus. It speaks of love. As the 14th-15th century mystic, Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416), wrote, 'Love is his meaning.' It had always been the Father's intention, it seems, (reading between the lines!) to make of this death the 'bridge' - for Jesus, first as he was exalted to the right hand of the divine, as Lord, but also for us all.

Throughout the centuries, in the mainstream churches, there has always been the fear that to think of Jesus as 'one of us, of our bone and flesh', is to think of him as only an adopted son of God. The sometimes high language of the later epistles,and John's unique presentation of Jesus, seems to imply that he was other than a member of the human family. But a close reading of the New Testament does not bear out this 'adoptionist' fear.

The disciples were close to Jesus and must have sensed both his close root links as a son of Israel as well as his superlative qualities which sometimes made them afraid. That human fear was not, it seems, the fear of someone who had another 'divine' nature. That would have been, if the term can be excused, 'spooky'! The actual reality of that close knit band of disciples, men and women, round Jesus is coherent and a revelation of the truth of their, and his, calling. This, as we have seen, was restored to them when they finally met their Master as he revealed himself to them in his new, divine mode of being. Peter said, according to John, at the lakeside meeting, 'It is the Lord!'

The Jesus whom we meet, responding to him daily and around the table of Eucharist, is the Lord who has shared our whole being from birth to death. It is not easy to hold all this understanding of who he is at any one time - the views we see of him are, as it were, kaleidoscopic. Particularly in prayer, being with him, wherever we are, we often have just to wait in his presence. He is no longer the Jesus of Nazareth - and yet he is! But it is as he is known in relation to the God, the Abba of his life that we have confidence. For God has been revealed by him and we know that the divine, in God and Jesus, is not far from us - aware and concerned and upholding and remembering.

Just after the 'Death of God' controversies, in the 1960s, there came the Jesus freaks in the 1970s. Bishop John Robinson (1919-1983), in his amazing graduate thesis in 1947 (called Thou Who Art: On the concept of the Personality of God - published in 2007) - took to task any idea of there being a justifiable sort of Jesu-ology which might be intent on bypassing the Father. With Anglicans, that has always been there: like Elijah being jealous for God - 'I have been very jealous for the LORD, the God of hosts' (1 Kings 19: 10) Thirty years after that graduate treatise, John Robinson was writing academic and popular books about who Jesus was in the New Testament and in the history of doctrine. Since then, not everyone has seen the necessity of making this move into a more coherent understanding of the relationship between Jesus and God, and to ask, 'Who is Jesus?' It is important to be asking that question today when there is a great deal of conservative literalism in the churches.

John's gospel attempts to coalesce the historical, human Jesus with the transformed Jesus of the resurrection. It is a tribute to its success that many find a true reality here of the kaleidoscopic views of Jesus that I have mentioned. The author was building on historical foundations - and some of the historical events in John are now considered truer to the possibilities of Jesus' ministry than the other gospels. But he was concerned at the time of writing - perhaps the late first century when there was a great deal of Jewish opposition - to present the Jesus of faith as both the Jesus who was truly born from our stock and the Christ of God's victory, our Lord and Master. Any episode from the gospel would illustrate this but here is a poignant one -

'Philip found Nathanael, and said to him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." Nathanael said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Philip said to him, "Come and see." Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" Nathanael said to him, "How do you know me?" Jesus answered him, "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you." Nathanael answered him, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Jesus answered him, "Because I said to you, I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe? You shall see greater things than these." And he said to him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man."' (John 2: 45-51)