The Apostles could not have been long with Jesus before they began to discover that, although his moral judgement was unhesitating and unerring, and though his soul was infinitely sensitive to sin, his own conscience was inviolate.  Unlike the saints, whose awareness of their own sinfulness became ever more acute as their realisation of God’s blinding holiness came home to them, Jesus was without any consciousness of personal sin because his will always coincided with the will of his Father.  Jesus was sinless.

This identity of will enabled Jesus to state as the sober, humble truth: “I always do what is pleasing to my Father” (John 8:29), and to ask his opponents, “Which of you convicts me of sin?” (NRSV, John 8:46).

It was because he was free from sin himself that he could forgive the sins of the paralysed man (Mark 2:5).  It was because he needed no forgiveness that he was able on Good Friday to pour out his Blood for many for the forgiveness of sins (Matthew 26:28).

Alongside his integrity and his holiness there went the most profound, continual and all-embracing personal communication with his Father.  Jesus lived consciously at one and the same time in the Presence of his Heavenly Father and in the presence of his fellow human beings.

That is why, although his constant fellowship with his Father – being on a spiritual plane unapproached by others – made him at times remote even to his Apostles, yet his profound understanding of the human heart, which to him was an open book, also made him the most sympathetic and accessible of persons.  “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest”, he said (Matthew 11:28), and the ordinary people came to him with their tears of penitence, with their questions to be answered, their children to be blessed, their sick to be healed, their dead to be raised.