Exactly a hundred years ago, a German by the name of Friedrich Nietzsche died. Nietzsche has probably been the most influential western moral philosopher of the past century. He was also a bitter critic of Christianity. In one of his books he wrote, "What is now decisive against Christianity is no longer our reasons but our taste." In other words, there is something about the Christian message that sticks in the throat.

We know that Nietzsche was repelled by the picture that some Christians gave of God, as a stern, joyless lawgiver. He was also repelled by many Christians, who appeared as insipid, life-denying neurotics. But he was repelled even more by human weakness; by dependence; and he despised human compassion and pity. These virtues got in the way of Nietzsche's project: to create a new race, of masterful, responsible men, answerable only to themselves.

Nietzsche was not alone in finding the Gospel distasteful, and even repulsive. In the ancient Roman empire, crucifixion was viewed with universal horror and disgust. It was cruel and degrading; the victim was often flogged and tortured before being strung up on a cross, on busy, crowded junctions as a deterrent to the masses. Crucifixion was the most humiliating form of death in the ancient world. It was a penalty that was reserved for rebellious slaves, and what we today would call terrorists against the state.

No Roman citizen could be crucified. Romans didn't even discuss the subject in their homes. They pretended it never existed. The great senator and orator Cicero once declared, "The very word 'cross' should be far removed, not only from the presence of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears."

So crucifixion was a way of wiping out not only the victim, but also his memory. A crucified man had never existed. And that is why not a single historian of ancient Rome discusses the subject of crucifixion.

Now it is in a world such as this that we meet a group of men and women, travelling around the Roman empire, and announcing that amongst those forgotten, crucified nobodies, there was one who was no less than the saviour of the world.

My friends, I cannot overemphasize the foolishness of such a message. If you wanted to convert the intelligent and pious people of the empire to your cause, whatever your cause may be, the worst thing you could ever do was to link your cause with a recently crucified man.

To put it mildly, that would have been a public relations disaster. And to associate God, the source of all life with a crucified criminal, was to invite mockery and sheer incomprehension. And we know that that was indeed the experience of the first Christians.

This message, if true, subverted the world of religion. For it claimed that if you wanted to know what God is like, and to understand God's purposes for God's world, then you had to go not to the lofty speculations of the philosophers, or to the countless religious temples and sacred groves that dotted the Empire. But you had to go to a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem.

For the Jews in the empire, a crucified saviour was a contradiction in terms. It expressed not God's power, but God's inability to liberate his people Israel from Roman rule. As for pagans, the idea that a God or a son of God should die as a state criminal, and that human salvation should depend on that particular historical event, this was not only offensive; it was sheer madness.

This message, if it were true, also subverted the world of politics. For it claimed that Rome's own salvation would come from amongst those forgotten victims of state terror; that Caesar himself would have to bow the knee to this crucified Jew. It implied that by crucifying the lord of the universe, the much vaunted civilization of Rome stood radically condemned. No wonder that the Christians' "good news" was labeled a dangerous superstition by educated Romans of the day.

Now it is the madness of this word of the cross that compels us to take it seriously. My friends, I do not find it easy to be a Christian: there is much in the Bible I don't understand, there is even more that I don't practice. But I am a Christian today because there is something so foolish, so absurd, so topsy-turvy about the Christian Gospel that it gets under my skin. It has the ring of truth about it. No one can say that this was some pious invention, for it ran counter to all notions of piety. And nothing was gained by it.

But what I want to do this evening, is to explore some of the implications of this message being true. In other words, if such an absurd, improbable message is true, what difference does it make today, to our lives and to the kind of world in which we live?

I want to suggest that the message of the cross is as subversive today, as it was in the first century world. And I want to look at this process of subversion in three areas.

First: the story of the cross subverts the stories of salvation that we find in the world religions. For all these stories - especially the dominant schools of Buddhist, Hindu and New Age Philosophies - they all offer us liberation, freedom from the shackles of our humanness. The way to ultimate transcendence lies in breaking free from our individuality, our physical embodiment, and from our entanglements in this meaningless world of historical existence, the ordinary, everyday world of work and home and family. It's our humanness that gets in the way of transcendence or of union with the divine.

But the cross speaks of a god who is entangled with our world, who immerses himself in our tragic history, who embraces our humanity in all its vulnerability, pain and confusion, including our evil and our death. Here is a god who comes to us, not as a master, but as a servant who stoops to wash the feet of his disciples, to suffer brutalisation and dehumanization at the hands of his creatures. And in identifying with us in our humanity, he draws the human into his own divine life.

So what this means is that the closer we get to God, the more human we become, not less. Our created physical bodies have a future. In raising Jesus from death, the creator was affirming our humanity, that this historical, embodied existence does have a future.

So you see, our salvation lies not in an escape from this world, but in the transformation of this world. Everything that is good, and true, and beautiful in human history is not lost forever, but will be restored and directed to the worship of the true God. And all our human activities in the arts, in the sciences, in the worlds of economics and politics, and even the non-human creation, will be brought to share in the liberating rule of God.

And this grand vision centers on the cross of Jesus Christ. It's there that a vision of future hope opens up for the world. And my friends, you will not find any hope for the world in any of the religious systems or even secular philosophies of human kind. The gospel vision is unique.

And that is why when some people say that there is salvation in other faiths, we need to ask them, 'what salvation are you talking about?' For no faith holds out a promise of salvation for the world, the way the Gospel does.

Then secondly: the story of the cross subverts the stories that have dominated the Western world for the past two hundred years - the stories of human self-mastery, self-autonomy, self-realization, self-fulfillment, human progress and human perfectibility. And these stories have been exported to the rest of the world in the name of capitalism or Marxism, or unlimited faith in science and technology, to solve all our human problems and to bring about a universal peace.

What gets in the way of such dreams? It's the awkward and bitter fact of human sin. Sin is our enslavement to self. Sin is a radical bent in our human nature. So at the same time as we search for truth, we also run away from truth. And when we find what we call "truth", we often use it to assert our power over others. We also worship our human creations. We turn them into idols behind which we hide from the living and true God.

And once again, it is at the foot of the cross that we are given a different vision of ourselves and of our world. For God not only affirms our humanity on the cross, but he exposes and he judges our human sin. In the words of one writer, Lesslie Newbigin:

Calvary is the central unveiling of the infinite love of God and at the same time the unmasking of the dark horror of sin. For here not the dregs of humanity, not the scoundrels whom all good people condemn, but the revered leaders of church and state and culture combine in one murderous intent: to destroy the holy one, by whose mercy they exist and were created.

Then thirdly: The story of the cross subverts the fragmented stories and tribalisms of the postmodern world. Postmodernism has come to mean many different things in different contexts. But one thing that is agreed upon as part of a postmodern sensibility, is a suspicion of all over-arching frameworks of meaning. We no longer believe in "History" with a capital "H", but only in histories. No longer in Story, but in stories.

But these little histories, and these little stories can be as oppressive as the big ones. For we are left with nothing outside of ourselves to judge our actions, let alone the actions of others. We are left to the tyranny of our own communities. We have no shared language or framework of understanding to make communication with others possible. And the postmodern self implodes further inwards, for I am now told that there is nothing given about me. I am left to my own devices, to form my infinitely malleable persona.

For many people, not only the young, consumerism has now become the way of constructing an identity. We shop for a self. Our clothing, our houses, our cars, these tell the story of who we are becoming. It's not by accident that the fashion world now calls itself an "identity industry". Like a screen-saver on our computers, our postmodern selves are constantly mutating into new configurations.

For some, a self is pursued through therapy, or promiscuous sexual relations. For others it is through dabbling in the latest New Age techniques or by joining new religious movements. For still others it is cyberspace and virtual reality that are the means to self-creation. And then we seek recognition for this virtual self, by joining virtual communities. But even on the internet, no less than in our physical neighbourhoods, we gravitate towards others who are like ourselves.

So if the modern, autonomous self imposed a false and suffocating universalism on others, the postmodern self is estranged from those who are truly other. We may recognize them, even tolerate them, but we cannot communicate with them.

The message of the cross tells us that God takes us as we are, with all our fears and brokenness, our failings and inadequacies. He takes our families, our cultures our occupations. We don't have to make ourselves or change ourselves to be loved by God. But even though God accepts us as we are, he doesn't leave us where we are. He moves us on a journey. He gives our culture, our work and our background - everything that makes me me and you you - he gives them a new direction. He links us up with people, with whom we would never associate, left to ourselves. Some of these people I may have disliked, or considered inferior, or been unable to talk with. The cross brings us all down to the same level, and raises us up as the children of God.

The same act that reconciles me to God now reconciles me to my neighbour, even my enemy. And so at the other side of the cross there emerges a new human community, in which barriers are being broken down, while diversity is honored; and in which new identities are being formed, as we interact together in the presence of God's Holy Spirit.

How then is such a message to be communicated? My friends, the way in which we present the truth of Christ, has to flow out of the content of that truth itself. In other words, the content of the good news demands that it can only be communicated in a certain way. Jesus never gave his disciples any techniques of methodologies of mission. But he did leave with them two abiding missionary principles, and both of these principles are embedded within the Gospel message itself.

You will find them explicitly in the Gospel according to John as part of the teaching of Jesus, in the last week prior to the crucifixion. The first principle is found in John 13:35. He has just washed his disciples' feet, as a symbolic pointer to the crucifixion on the following day. He then challenges them to do the same for each other. "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples: if you have love for one another."

That same evening, in his final prayer for them as he launches them into a hostile world, he asks the Father, that they and all who respond to their preaching, "may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved them even as you love me."

It is the visible unity of the disciple community, drawing together people of all cultural, economic and social backgrounds, which will convince a skeptical world, that here something radically new is taking place. - That Christ is breaking down those walls of apathy and hostility, and he is creating a new human race out of a fragmented and twisted one.

So my friends, the unity of the church is central to the Gospel message itself. And that is why authentic Christian mission can never be a one man enterprise, or even a one church enterprise, or a one nation enterprise. For mission flows out of a community of reconciled and reconciling men and women. Mission has nothing to do with the expansion of my local church, or my denomination, or my Christian organization around the world.

But mission is a matter of proclaiming in word and action, the offer of new life in a new human community that is made possible through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and that mission begins today on your college campuses.

If the first great missionary principle is loving one another, the second great missionary principle is dying. "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit" John 12:24. And these are words that once again are spoken on the way to the cross. The grain of wheat or rice falls into the soil, and is buried, it disappears from view for many months, and then it emerges as a fruitful stalk.

And likewise the disciple community of Jesus, walking in the footsteps of their master, must be prepared to be buried. Buried in a world of cruelty, poverty, bigotry, violence, hopelessness - the same world which crucified their master. The church that seeks security and prestige and worldly power is no longer the church of the crucified Jesus. And if the Gospel message is foolishness, it can only be conveyed by people who are willing to turn their backs on the American dream, and become fools in the eyes of the world.

We have seen today that there are many who are suspicious of claims to truth, because in history such claims have often led to intellectual tyranny and to social repression. But the logic of the Gospel leads in a different direction. For the truth that God has come amongst us as a humble, lowly servant, who embraces our suffering and our dying, who gives his life away on behalf of his enemies - this truth can only be proclaimed by people who themselves love their enemies and embrace the sufferings of the world in humble servanthood.

Truth is not only embodied in a community of reconciliation, but truth is embodied in a community that refuses to use power to force its claims on others; but instead to identify with the powerless in the world.

My friends, think of the crucifixion as literally a crossroads. A point where two fundamentally opposing visions of reality converge and conflict. The first vision is what put Jesus on the cross. We see it in the self-righteousness of the Pharisees: the calculating self-preservation of the priestly establishment. Remember the words of Caiaphas: "It is better for one innocent man to die than the whole nation perish" [John 11:50]. You see it in the cynical pragmatism of Pontius Pilate and Herod; the fickleness of the crowds, whose disillusionment with Jesus fuels a lust for revenge. And it is this vision of humanness that most people consider reality. "This is the real world," people tell us.

But the second is embodied in Jesus himself: his fearless unmasking of the false gods of nation and culture; a radical surrender to and a joyful dependence on the one he called 'Father'. Which led to a willingness to lay down his life in self-forgetful love for others.

So two ways of defining humanness clash: self-preservation, or self-giving. Power over others as the highest goal in life, or power to empower others through sacrificial service. And it is the resurrection of Jesus that is the creator's vindication within history, of the way of the cross. That this is true reality: this is the reality that is to come, and which we experience even now in the Holy Spirit. The resurrection vindicates not only the unique sonship of Jesus, but also the way of self-abandoning love that he embodies.

I guess some of you must have heard of Graham Staines, an Australian missionary doctor who worked amongst lepers and tribal peoples in Orissa in North India. He was brutally murdered on the twenty-second of January 1999, along with his two young sons. Many in that country and abroad were rightly outraged. His grieving widow, Gladys Staines, told a newspaper reporter the following day, "I am deeply upset. But I am not angry. For Jesus has taught us how to love our enemies." And she has chosen to stay and to continue her husband's work. "To joyfully suffer for the Gospel, to forgive and serve those who inflict that suffering on us, this is to be taught by Christ, who walked the way of the cross."

Her words were carried by national dailies all over India and the Indian diaspora. And as a result hundreds, if not thousands of Hindus have come to Christians they know, asking for Bibles to read, and saying "Why are you Christians different?"

And I cannot help feeling that that middle aged Australian widow has probably done more for the Gospel in India, than the slick evangelists and the twenty-four hour Christian channel networks that are now beaming into that country.

My friends, the Gospel is not only true, it is powerful, and it is beautiful. Indeed, truth is beautiful. And there is a strange beauty in the cross. The world needs to see that strange beauty, which generates a new way of being human. Thank you.