Throughout, it was as though his Mother and Father saw no defect in their son as he gradually deteriorated and died from complications resulting from Down's Syndrome. To them, he was the most lovable baby alive and I am sure that had they had a second, more normal child, they would not have loved this first child any less.

So many scriptures illustrate God's unconditional Love….”Whilst we were yet sinners Christ died for us”……….. “He came to seek and save that which was lost”……… “He who spared not his own Son but freely delivered him up for us all” and the Gospels are full of examples of Jesus expressing his love to those in trouble even to the point of being criticised for it.

We tend to think mostly about Jesus as someone who 'went about doing good' and of course, he did, but we probably only begin to realise, as we get older, what sorrow and suffering the conditions around him caused him in his spirit. He could see the deformity of sin everywhere yet he still loved us enough not to turn aside from the pathway leading to the cross which lay before him.

Think of who he was. He was none less than God, come into manhood but 'He never ceased to be who he was by what he became' when he “emptied himself”' and took our form. In John chapter 17, you get an insight into his relationship with God and his Father when he speaks about the glory he had with the Father before the World began.

He knew better than anyone, the demands of the Holiness and Righteousness of God. He was with God in the beginning and saw the how good everything was before the fall. If we shrink at deformity, think about how he must have felt as, on earth, he became surrounded by the ugliness and power of sin and felt the power of death over the spirits of men.

To us the condition of sin is commonplace. To him it must have been dreadful, grotesque and a cause of great sorrow.

This was another kind of sorrow, not for himself but what he felt for others. The awful condition of mankind and the ugliness and deformity of sin. It all pressed heavily upon his spirit and he knew that if he was to remain obedient to his Father's will he was soon going to have to bear all that in his own body and endure the wrath of God as though he was that abhorrent thing itself……..indeed the scripture speaks about him “Being made sin for us”

Every day, he bore in his spirit what he was going to take away in his body.

Thinking about his sufferings in this way helps us to understand Gethsemane in a different way. As well as what he had to endure from men, the pain, the mocking and the stares……. he was about to endure something from God which was only understood by him and would felt by him as no other. We cannot imagine how awful the anticipation of that must have been.

No wonder his soul was troubled and he prayed that “If possible this cup should pass from him”. We read that an Angel appeared to him strengthening him showing how real this struggle was.

Perhaps this Angel was one of those who joined in with the heavenly hosts at the time Jesus was born, praising God and singing and who had marvelled at the unfolding of the Divine plan of salvation. Now he saw the one to whom it had all been entrusted, alone, facing the awful prospect of going forward to the cross to complete that work and all that it involved.

Those he had come to save had abused him, mocked him, tortured him and treated him with contempt and yet it was for them he died, not some better or improved race. He died for man at his worst. It was unconditional love.

There is not one person too bad to be saved.
                                                                                                                                                                                  The Author