May it be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please do be seated. 

How would you go about calculating the value of a human life? How about the value of your life? That's a hard question to answer. We all assume that we're valuable, but are you valuable because of how much money you make or what you contribute to society through your job? Are you valuable because of how many people consider you a friend? Are you valuable because you have a family? The question makes us feel uncomfortable and the answer's even more, because if our worth is calculable in those ways, we could easily find ourselves worth not very much. Money, jobs, friends, even family can come and go. 

But more than that, we want to be valuable because of who and what we are, not because we have a relationship with someone else. So what about calculating your value according to how much good you bring into the world? That at least would seem to put the equation into your hands. Maybe you're valuable if you do lots of good things for people and not so valuable if you do lots of bad things.

But if we really think about it, this isn't quite such a safe metric either. If we look at ourselves objectively, I think most of us probably know that there are plenty of things we do which we shouldn't and there are plenty of things that we should do and we could do, but we definitely don't. So if we start getting into earning points every time we say a nice thing to one of our loved ones, but losing points every time we cut someone up in the car or swear at someone who's annoying us, most of us might be in trouble. 

This would be even more the case if our total points score determined something really important. Imagine you had to have enough good points to get certain benefits, like being able to shop for food or get water out of your tap, maybe get access to healthcare. Then those bad days would be pretty scary, wouldn't they? What about if your score total decided whether you lived or died? Would you be confident enough in your goodness that you'd get enough points that you'd risk a death sentence if you made enough mistakes? Probably most of us in this room wouldn't take the risk, but if the idea of calculating our worth based on a goodness total is so terrible, I wonder why so many of us assume that our relationship with God is based on basically those terms.

If I were to ask every person who left church this morning whether or not I thought you were going to heaven, I bet more than half of you would make some kind of reference to being a good person. Sure, I'm going to heaven. I'm a good person. 

I do more good than bad. If I asked you what it meant to be a Christian, I bet you'd say something roughly similar. Being a Christian means following the commandments of Jesus, being a good person. 

Our language about God seems to assume that God judges us on this goodness point system, that we have to get enough good points and avoid bad points. But I assure you that if God worked in that way, none of us would pass the test, least of all me. Good Friday, which we celebrated just three days ago or on the third day past, is and was in many ways a test of the inherent goodness of human beings. 

It was a test to see what would we do if we had God in our hands and we could do anything we wanted to him? Well, the answer is there, plain to read in four gospels. We would deny him. We would humiliate him.

We would torture and we would kill him. We would hate his message so much that we would spin lies and manipulate our systems to get rid of him. Because God's message, the son of God's message, began with an idea that we wouldn't like. 

As Jesus said in Mark 10 verse 18, no one is good but God alone. The powers that heard this message really didn't like it. The religious authorities, they hated it. 

The Romans too, in their own way, they hated it too. And they hated it because it rendered them just as it renders us powerless. If God is the measure of goodness, then none of us comes close. 

And this is actually true whether or not you believe in God. The philosophical definition of God, according to Western philosophical traditions, is one who is perfect. One who is perfect love. 

Whether or not you believe in the existence of that being, the definition stands. And everyone in this room falls short of it. If you have ever acted without love, even in your own head, then you've fallen short of perfection.

And if you've fallen short of perfection, then you aren't good. And that makes you powerless. Because that means that you can't determine your value and you can't determine the value of the person sat next to you either. 

All that remains is a race to the bottom. If we're judging each other according to a good point system, all of us have fallen short. And unfortunately, that means that judging other people isn't quite so fun. 

It doesn't have quite the same moralising satisfaction when all you can say is they're not as bad as you are. But that wasn't the end of Jesus's message. He went on to say that though we can't earn our worth because God alone is good, he had come to bring us to perfection anyway. 

On Good Friday, as I say, humanity showed its inherent moral worth and it proved itself lacking. The Son of God put himself into our hands and we killed him. But as we did so, he represented each of us. 

He carried and took responsibility for every act of hatred which was killing him. For every unloving thought and word and action by any human being that had happened before or would happen since, by all of those who simply give their permission for him to take that responsibility. Jesus offered to take the choices that we would rather not have made and make them his own. 

And he represented us as he died on that cross. He was present in his death and we were present in him, as truly present in his death as he was himself according to God. What follows is that that death and what happened afterwards gives every human being worth.

A worth that cannot fade away because it wasn't based on anything that you did. It was a free gift that you couldn't even try to earn. In response to seeing the totality of who and what you are, all of your good and all of your bad, your worst mistakes, the stuff you don't even admit to yourself, Jesus saw you and he chose to die for you anyway. 

In fact, he went to the very thing that renders human life the most at nothing, death itself, and he overcame it for you. On the third day after his death, Easter day, the day we celebrate today, Jesus rose to new life. And those who choose to allow him to represent him on the cross are brought to the new life of the resurrection, a newness of life which is the promise of eternal life in him. 

That very thing that would take you to nothing is overcome. And though this is not a gift that is forced on any of you, or indeed on anyone, following Jesus is always a choice you can make or not. It was extended to every human being that ever had been or ever will be. 

Which means that Jesus looked at every human life, the totality of what it means, and he valued it worth the total perfection of God. In his death and in his resurrection, Jesus looked at every human being that has ever been born and said, you are worth me dying. The best thing of all is there's nothing you can do about it. 

He has seen the very worst of us and chose to die anyway. Which means that there is literally nothing that you can do. There is no act so heinous you could commit that would make him love you any less than perfectly. 

There is no good thing that you could do that would make him love you any more than perfectly. He already loves you as much as it is possible within the divine self to love, just because you are. So that's the message this Easter Sunday. 

You are worthy. You are valuable, not because of what you do, or how much money you make, or who loves you, or what relationships you have. In fact, your worthiness, your value is totally out of your hands, just like the worthiness of the person sat next to you. 

For you and for them and for all people everywhere, Jesus has looked at you in your totality and decided that you are worth his life. How you respond is up to you.