The University boat race last weekend and the Grand National this weekend! There were no such global excitements like those in the Middle Ages! Nor were there such extraordinary global meetings like the recent one in London to talk about the world's financial crisis. But there were other excitements and it is these I wish to remark on here. They were religious excitements because, unlike today, 'religion' was a part of the political strategies, and of the daily lives, of the then known world.

There were few people who could read and, in any case, there were no printed books until the early 15th century - even if you could read Latin or Greek. So, a thousand years before the first printed books, in Jerusalem pilgrimage to holy places was the way to read history and to celebrate what happened in years gone by. And religious pilgrimage was for access to the holy - to the places associated with the divine. For Christianity this meant, primarily, Jerusalem where Jesus had died and was raised. It was there, in Jerusalem, in the late fourth century, that the need arose to re-cap the whole process of redemption in the very place where these events took place. It did not really matter that there was no verification of these holy places associated with Jesus. What mattered was the drama that had taken place at the close of Jesus' life. So there grew up an extended re-enactment of his last week. From the entry into Jerusalem through the cleansing of the Temple by Jesus, the Last Supper, betrayal, trial, crucifixion and resurrection. It was inevitable that this process of re-enacting the drama of redemption in Jerusalem was taken back to the dioceses and parishes from which the pilgrims had come and there, eventually, codified into liturgical rites which could be celebrated anywhere - reflecting the actual pilgrimages in Jerusalem.

The beginning of the modern world in the 17th century saw the religious establishment re-organised. The Protestant revolution in Europe left to one side the pilgrimages and liturgical rites that Catholicism had codified over the previous twelve hundred years. In England and in some Scandinavian countries many of the texts in use, and the calendar of feasts and fasts, remained, purged of anything that was not biblical. But the interesting thing was, that the ideas behind the fourth century explosion of pilgrimage to explore the places and enter into the sense of the events that led up to, and included the passion and death of Jesus, now became a central theme of much protestant preaching. This was also the opportunity for extreme ideas about why Jesus died to enter into common thinking in a more detailed way than had been the case in catholic times. Ideas that Jesus in his death was a substitute for us became common in one form or another. Some of this basis of Jesus as a sacrifice for us or even instead of us went back to the 12th century in one form or another. Feudal ideas in society in the 11th - 12th centuries were a happy breeding ground for theological ideas that Jesus was punished instead of us - understanding more in the phrase Christ died for us than the New Testament was able to bear.

Much of this Calvinist theology was modified in the 18th century. The church was faced with the scientific and philosophical revolution, commonly called the Enlightenment. Then in the rise of the industrial revolution the churches lost a great deal of support when families moved from the country to the new towns. A period of great scepticism in regard to religion began at this time and is the source of much of today's agnosticism in Europe. Then came a brief revival of religious ideas, partly as a result of the romantic movement in the middle of the 19th century. On the one hand atonement preaching became more focussed and fervent and on the other hand there was a revival of catholic practices in the Church of England. For a hundred years these parallel movements grew and were strengthened and in the course of time became accepted as part of the religious outlook of many people in chapel or church. So we might conclude, after this breathless survey of 1600 years of church traditions about Jesus' death and the services connected with that at Easter, that very little, in essence, had changed. The ideas of sacrifice and substitution probably go back right to the early fourth century and the beginnings of large scale pilgrimages. Which leads me, at last, to the point of this historical essay!

We need to ask, today, how did ideas about the death of Jesus come about in quite the opposite way intended by the authors of the gospels, or of Paul in his letters to the Asian churches and to the church in Rome? Their accounts are quite sophisticated and reticent about the details of Jesus death - as indeed they are in their whole account of his life. Their aim was to show how Jesus of Nazareth inaugurated the Father's kingdom, or rule, in his own lifetime and the astonishing outcome of the raising of Jesus, transformed to become Lord. The answer to the question lies in many strands of the expansion of the churches from the first century onwards. So one is hesitant here to give any specific answer to that question. But I think that we can look at it in this way - which is not by any means intended as a riposte to today's church traditions.

The apostles and disciples locked themselves away after the crucifixion of Jesus. They were afraid. The cause had been lost. Jesus was dead. Their all too human feelings of lostness, failure, despair must have taken hold of them. It took the appearances of the transformed Jesus to take them out of themselves and to realise what we might call the 'success' of God's new creation which had begun in Jesus and was now to be replicated in them, in their own lives. They had been, in a way, locked into death. Now, transfer these all too human responses and attitudes into the ideas that surfaced in the church's acceptance of an emphasis on the death of Jesus. The rites that grew up around the pilgrimages and consequent theologies of atonement, punishment and sacrifice that surfaced throughout the centuries in different ways and in different eras, all contributed to a slewing of the right perspective of the gospel. We were, without realising it, re-writing the new creation in Jesus and allowing the ideas of failure and death to take precedence over life, the new life in Jesus - not completely, but just sufficiently to upset the balance of the gospel intentions.

What then can we do about this situation? Perhaps we need to base our liturgies, and our own prayers, less around the once and for all death of Jesus, and instead, realise that we too have died as his disciples - which puts us into a quite different frame of mind! Here is what Paul says:

... if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6: 8-11)