I am re-reading a short book by Samuel Wells called Hanging by a thread all about the meaning of the cross. I wanted to share this extract as I found it really helpful in explaining the meaning of the cross and resurrection:

In his book Speaking of God (London: SPCK 1992, pp. 80-82), Trevor Dennis tells of a scene of desolation. He describes a stale, stinking canal, broken lamp-posts, flats boarded up. No grass, and no trees, Graffiti everywhere. For 30 years the site had been empty since an explosion killed Mabel and Arthur, asleep in their bed in the front room downstairs. No one had ever found their bodies. Nothing grew there, until one autumn a seed took root. Nobody noticed the plant for several weeks, but in the end you can’t miss a sunflower. There it stood, five or six feet tall, with its heavy, golden head. Most of the local people had never seen a sunflower. Some were changed by its beauty. They no longer had that tired, dejected stoop, so characteristic of the inhabitants of those streets. Most people, however, were merely bewildered. It was so out of place.

The people left the sunflower alone. They thought they’d get used to it. But they couldn’t. It showed up the drabness, the desolation all around for what it was: empty, ugly, dead. So people grew bitter about it. It became intolerable. One evening they went in a great crowd and they trampled on that sunflower, and danced on it, and beat the fibres of its leaves and stem, and crushed its petals. Then they went away in silence. And yet the people destroyed that plant in high summer, when its flower was full of ripe seed. In their dance of death they scattered that seed over the entire site, and buried some of it in the ground. So it was that next spring what had been a scene of desolation was covered with sunflowers. There were flowers on Mabel and Arthur’s grave at last.