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Someone told me a secret once. It was a hard secret. But I’ve never forgotten it. During a church service, I’d been leading some prayers. I said “we pray for people we love”. In the following silence, they said they’d realised with a horror that brought them close to tears, that they couldn’t think of anyone. It wasn’t that this person didn’t have other people in their life; they did. But even after all these years, they said, in their heart of hearts, they weren’t really sure what love was. I think this is more common than we might suppose. In a society that seems rather obsessed with one kind of love – romantic love expressed in sexual intimacy – the loneliness and sense of inadequacy brought on by watching everyone else’s perfect life on social media, is especially acute for young people. And in a society seemingly more connected than ever, persistently one of the questions most frequently entered into search engines is one of the deepest; what is love? The events of Good Friday, marked by Christians all over the world today can seem macabre , even mawkish. Gathering for three hours this afternoon, as we will, to pray, to hear the gospel story of Jesus’s torture and death, to imagine it, is not an easy thing to do. And many people, even committed churchgoers, not unreasonably, stay away. I don’t think it’s just because of the violence. But because the picture of today is of almost unbearable love. The baffling kind of love that chooses to be given over into the hands of others. However strong you are, however self-sufficient, however godlike in your own workplace, home or community; the cross reveals that it’s is at the point of our greatest risk taking, at the point of risking our reputation, risking being humiliated for the sake of love; that’s where our humanity finds the most profound connection with God. So it’s not surprising that we resist going there. We’re often rather confused by such inexplicably courageous love. And for Christians, we find ourselves spoken to by this dying Christ whenever we try to suppress or destroy the love that would break us open and leave us vulnerable. Whenever love seems too foolish or the sacrifice too great, we have a hundred reasons to keep ourselves safe; a hundred reasons to nail shut the enduring desire in us to give ourselves away. So as surely as for the soldiers who pinned love to the cross, a Christian conviction is that today, it’s for us that Christ continues to speak; asking God for our forgiveness, because even now, we know not what we do.