For as soon as Our Saviour Jesus Christ came into this world to save us from the power of evil and to enable us to be the true and faithful sons and daughters of God that God means us to be, then from that moment the Crucifixion was a certainty: simply because the nature of evil is essentially to destroy, and the nature of love is essentially to save.

And Jesus in his love for us did not flinch from seeing his mission of salvation through to the end, whatever the cost. In the Garden of Gethsemane he had the opportunity to evade that cost by abandoning his mission and fleeing for his life. But to do so would have been to play his Father false and to leave us to fend for ourselves without him. It would have been to act like “…a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not”, who “sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them” (RSV, John 10:12).

But Our Lord was not God’s hireling but God’s Son who, in his twofold love for his Father and for us, did not flinch from carrying out to death itself what he knew to be his Father’s will. "I am the good shepherd;” he said, “I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep” (RSV, John 10:14,15).