_THE VIRGIN MOTHER._
The Beautiful Gate of the Jewish Temple opened into the "Court of the
Women"--so named from the fact that they were not allowed any nearer
approach towards the Holy Place. And as we open the gate of the third
Gospel we enter the Court of the Women; for more than any other
Evangelist, St. Luke records their loving and varied ministries. Perhaps
this is owing to his profession, which naturally would bring him into
more frequent contact with feminine life. Or perhaps it is a little
Philippian colour thrown into his Gospel; for we must not forget that
St. Luke had been left by the Apostle Paul at Philippi, to superintend
the Church that had been cradled in the prayers of the "river-side"
women. It may be a tinge of Lydia's purple; or to speak more broadly and
more literally, it may be the subtle, unconscious influences of that
Philippian circle that have given a certain feminity to our third
Gospel. St. Luke alone gives us the psalms of the three women, Anna,
Elisabeth, and Mary; he alone gives us the names of Susanna and Joanna,
who ministered to Christ of their substance; he alone gives us that
Galilean idyll, where the nameless "woman" bathes His feet with tears,
and at the same time rains a hot rebuke on the cold civilities of the
Pharisee, Simon; he alone tells of the widow of Zarephath, who welcomed
and saved a prophet men were seeking to slay; he alone tells us of the
widow of Nain, of the woman bent with infirmity, and of the woman
grieving over her lost piece of silver. And as St. Luke opens his Gospel
with woman's tribute of song, so in his last chapter he paints for us
that group of women, constant amid man's inconstancies, coming ere the
break of day, to wrap around the body of the dead Christ the precious
and fragrant offering of devotion. So, in this Paradise Restored, do
Eve's daughters roll back the reproach of their mother. But ever first
and foremost among the women of the Gospels we must place the Virgin
Mother, whose character and position in the Gospel story we are now to
consider.
We need not stay to discuss the question--perhaps we ought not to stay
even to give it a passing notice--whether there might have been an
Incarnation even had there been no sin. It is not an impossible, it is
not an improbable supposition, that the Christ would have come into the
world even had man kept his first estate of innocence and bliss. But
then it would have been the "Christ" simply, and not Jesus Christ. He
would have come into the world, not as its Redeemer, but as the Son and
Heir, laying tribute on all its harvests; He would have come as the
flower and crown of a perfected humanity, to show the possibilities of
that humanity, its absolute perfections. But leaving the
"might-have-beens," in whose tenuous spaces there is room for the nebulæ
of fancies and of guesses without number, let us narrow our vision
within the horizon of the real, the actual.
Given the necessity for an Incarnation, there are two modes in which
that Incarnation may be brought about--by creation, or by birth. The
first Adam came into the world by the creative act of God. Without the
intervention of second causes, or any waiting for the slow lapse of
time, God spake, and it was done. Will Scripture repeat itself here, in
the new Genesis? and will the second Adam, coming into the world to
repair the ruin wrought by the first, come as did the first? We can
easily conceive such an advent to be possible; and if we regarded simply
the analogies of the case, we might even suppose it to be probable. But
how different a Christ it would have been! He might still have been bone
of our bone, flesh of our flesh; He might have spoken the same truths,
in the same speech and tone; but He must have lived apart from the
world. It would not be our humanity that He wore; it would only be its
shadow, its semblance, playing before our minds like an illusion. No,
the Messiah must not be simply a second Adam; He must be the Son of man,
and He cannot become Humanity's Son except by a human birth. Any other
advent, even though it had satisfied the claims of reason, would have
failed to satisfy those deeper voices of the heart. And so, on the first
pages of Scripture, before Eden's gate is shut and locked by bolts of
flame, Heaven signifies its intention and decision. The coming One, who
shall bruise the serpent's head, shall be the woman's "Seed"--the Son of
woman, that so He may become more truly the Son of man; while later a
strange expression finds its way into the sacred prophecy, how "a Virgin
shall conceive, and bear a son." It is true these words primarily might
have a local meaning and fulfilment--though what that narrower meaning
was no one can tell with any approach to certainty; but looking at the
singularity of the expression, and coupling it with the story of the
Advent, we can but see in it a deeper meaning and a wider purpose.
Evidently it was that the virgin-conception might strike upon the
world's ear and become a familiar thought, and that it might throw
backwards across the pages of the Old Testament the shadow of the Virgin
Mother. We have already seen how the thought of a Messianic motherhood
had dropped deep within the heart of the Hebrew people, awaking hopes,
and prayers, and all sorts of beautiful dreams--dreams, alas! that
vanished with the years, and hopes that blossomed but to fade. But now
the hour is coming, that supreme hour for which the centuries have all
been waiting. The forerunner is already announced, and in twelve short
weeks he who loved to call himself a Voice will break the strange
silence of that Judæan home. Whence will come his Lord, who shall be
"greater than he"? Where shall we find the Mother-elect, for whom such
honours have been reserved--honours such as no mortal has ever yet
borne, and as none will ever bear again? St. Luke tells us, "Now in the
sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee,
named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of
the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary" (R.V.). And so the
Mother-designate takes her place in this firmament of Scripture,
silently and serenely as a morning star, which indeed she is; for she
shines in a borrowed splendour, taking her glories all from Him around
whom she revolves, from Him who was both her Son and her Sun.
It will be seen in the above verse how particular the Evangelist is in
his topographical reference, putting a kind of emphasis upon the name
which now appears for the first time upon the pages of Scripture. When
we remember how Nazareth was honoured by the angel visit; how it was,
not the chance, but the chosen home of the Christ for thirty years; how
it watched and guarded the Divine Infancy, throwing into that life its
powerful though unconscious influences, even as the dead soil throws
itself forward and upward into each separate flower and farthest leaf;
when we remember how it linked its own name with the Name of Jesus,
becoming almost a part of it; how it wrote its name upon the cross, then
handing it down to the ages as the name and watchword of a sect that
should conquer the world, we must admit that Nazareth is by no means
"the least among the cities" of Israel. And yet we search in vain
through the Old Testament for the name of Nazareth. History, poetry, and
prophecy alike pass it by in silence. And so the Hebrew mind, while
rightly linking the expected One with Bethlehem, never associated the
Christ with Nazareth. Indeed, its moralities had become so questionable
and proverbial that while the whole of Galilee was too dry a ground to
grow a prophet, Nazareth was thought incapable of producing "any good
thing." Was, then, the Nazareth chapter of the Christ-life an
afterthought of the Divine Mind, like the marginal reading of an
author's proof, put in to fill up a blank or to be a substitute for some
erasure? Not so. It had been in the Divine Mind from the beginning; yea,
it had been in the authorized text, though men had not read it plainly.
It is St. Matthew who first calls our attention to it. Writing, as he
does, mainly for Hebrew readers, he is constantly looping up his story
with the Old Testament prophecies; and speaking of the return from
Egypt, he says they "came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it
might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, that He should be
called a Nazarene." We said just now that the name of Nazareth was not
found in the Old Testament. But if we do not find the proper name, we
find the word which is identical with the name. It is now regarded by
competent authorities as proved that the Hebrew name for Nazareth was
Netser. Taking now this word in our mind, and turning to Isaiah xi. 1,
we read, "And there shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse,
and a branch [Netser] out of his roots shall bear fruit: and the Spirit
of the Lord shall rest upon Him." Here, then, evidently, is the
prophetic voice to which St. Matthew refers; and one little word--the
name of Nazareth--becomes the golden link binding in one the Prophecies
and the Gospels.
Returning to our main subject, it is to this secluded, and somewhat
despised city of Nazareth the angel Gabriel is now sent, to announce the
approaching birth of Christ. St. Luke, in his nominative way of
speaking, says he came "to a Virgin betrothed to a man whose name was
Joseph, of the house of David; and the Virgin's name was Mary." It is
difficult for us to form an unbiassed estimate of the character before
us, as our minds are feeling the inevitable recoil from Roman
assumptions. We are confused with the childish prattle of their _Ave
Marias_; we are amused at their dogmas of Immaculate Conceptions and
Ever Virginities; we are surprised and shocked at their apotheosis of
the Virgin, as they lift her to a throne practically higher than that of
her Son, worshipped in devouter homage, supplicated with more earnest
and more frequent prayers, and at the blasphemies of their Mariolatry,
which make her supreme on earth and supreme in heaven. This undue
exaltation of the Virgin Mother, which becomes an adoration pure and
simple, sends our Protestant thought with a violent swing to the extreme
of the other side, considerably over the line of the "golden mean." And
so we find it hard to dissociate in our minds the Virgin Mother from
these Marian assumptions and divinations; for which, however, she
herself is in no way responsible, and against which she would be the
first to protest. Seen only through these Romish haloes, and atmospheres
highly incensed, her very name has been distorted, and her features,
spoiled of all grace and sweet serenity, have ceased to be attractive.
But this is not just. If Rome weights one scale with crowns, and
sceptres, and piles of imperial purple, we need not load down the other
with our prejudices, satires, and negations. Two wrongs will not make a
right. It is neither on the crest of the wave, nor yet in the deep
trough of the billows, that we shall find the mean sea-level, from which
we can measure all heights, running out our lines even among the stars.
Can we not find that mean sea-level now, hushing alike the voices of
adulation and of depreciation? Laying aside the traditions of antiquity
and the legends of scribulous monks, laying aside, too, the coloured
glasses of our prejudice, with which we have been wont to protect our
eyes from the glare of Roman suns, may we not get a true portraiture of
the Virgin Mother, in all the native naturalness of Scripture? We think
we can.
She comes upon us silently and suddenly, emerging from an obscurity
whose secrets we cannot read. No mention is made of her parents;
tradition only has supplied us with their names--Joachim and Anna. But
whether Joachim or not, it is certain that her father was of the tribe
of Judah, and of the house of David. Having this fact to guide us, and
also another fact, that Mary was closely related to Elisabeth--though
not necessarily her cousin--who was of the tribe of Levi and a daughter
of Aaron, then it becomes probable, at least, that the unnamed mother of
the Virgin was of the tribe of Levi, and so the connecting link between
the houses of Levi and Judah--a probability which receives an indirect
but strong confirmation in the fact that Nazareth was intimately
connected with Jerusalem and the Temple, one of the cities selected as a
residence of the priests. May we not, then, suppose that this unnamed
mother of the Virgin was a daughter of one of the priests then residing
at Nazareth, and that Mary's relatives on the mother's side--some of
them--were also priests, going up at stated times to Jerusalem, to
perform their "course" of Temple services? It is certainly a most
natural supposition, and one, too, that will help to remove some
subsequent difficulties in the story; as, for instance, the journey of
Mary to Judæa. Some honest minds have stumbled at that long journey of a
hundred miles, while others have grown pathetic in their descriptions of
that lonely pilgrimage of the Galilean Virgin. But it is neither
necessary nor likely that Mary should take the journey alone. Her
connection with the priesthood, if our supposition be correct, would
find her an escort, even among her own relatives, as least as far as
Jerusalem; and since the priestly courses were half-yearly in their
service, it would be just the time the "course of Abijah," in which
Zacharias served, would be returning once again to their Judæan homes.
It is only a supposition, it is true, but it is a supposition that is
extremely natural and more than probable; and if we look through it,
taking "Levi" and "Judah" as our binocular lenses, it carries a thread
of light through otherwise dark places; while throwing our sight
forward, it brings distant Nazareth in line with Jerusalem and the
"hill-country of Judæa."
Betrothed to Joseph, who was of the royal line, and as some think, the
legal heir to David's throne, Mary was probably not more than twenty
years of age. Whether an orphan or not we cannot tell, though the
silence of Scripture would almost lead us to suppose that she was.
Papias, however, who was a disciple of St. John, states that she had two
sisters--Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Salome the wife of Zebedee.
If this be so--and there is no reason why we should discredit the
statement--then Mary the Virgin Mother would probably be the eldest of
the three sisters, the house-mother in the Nazareth home. Where it was
that the angel appeared to her we cannot tell. Tradition, with one of
its random guesses, has fixed the spot in the suburbs, beside the
fountain. But there is something incongruous and absurd in the selection
of such a place for an angelic appearance--the public resort and lounge,
where the clatter of feminine gossip was about as constant as the flow
and sparkle of its waters. Indeed, the very form of the participle
disposes of that tradition, for we read, "He came in unto her," implying
that it was within her holy place of home the angel found her. Nor is
there any need to suppose, as some do, that it was in her quiet chamber
of devotion, where she was observing the stated hours of prayer.
Celestials do not draw that broad line of distinction between so-called
secular and sacred duties. To them "work" is but another form of
"worship," and all duties to them are sacred, even when they lie among
life's temporal, and so-called secular things. Indeed, Heaven reserves
its highest visions, not for those quiet moments of still devotion, but
for the hours of busy toil, when mind and body are given to the "trivial
rounds" and the "common tasks" of every-day life. Moses is at his
shepherding when the bush calls him aside, with its tongues of fire;
Gideon is threshing out his wheat when God's angel greets him and
summons him to the higher task; and Zacharias is performing the routine
service of his priestly office when Gabriel salutes him with the first
voice of a New Dispensation. And so all the analogies would lead us to
suppose that the Virgin was quietly engaged in her domestic duties,
offering the sacrifice of her daily task, as Zacharias offered his
incense of stacte and onycha, when Gabriel addressed her, "Hail, thou
that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee" (R.V.). The Romanists,
eager to accord Divine honours to the Virgin Mother as the dispenser of
blessing and of grace, interpret the phrase, "Thou that art full of
grace." It is, perhaps, not an inapt rendering of the word, and is
certainly more euphonious than our marginal reading "much graced;" but
when they make the "grace" an inherent, and not a derived grace, their
doctrine slants off from all Scripture, and is opposed to all reason.
That the word itself gives no countenance to such an enthronement of
Mary, is evident, for St. Paul makes use of the same word when speaking
of himself and the Ephesian Christians (Eph. i. 6), where we render it
"His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved." But
criticism apart, never before had an angel so addressed a mortal, for
even Daniel's "greatly beloved" falls below this Nazareth greeting. When
Gabriel came to Zacharias there was not even a "Hail;" it was simply a
"Fear not," and then the message; but now he gives to Mary a "Hail" and
two beatitudes besides: "Thou art highly favoured;" "the Lord is with
thee." And do these words mean nothing? Are they but a few heavenly
courtesies whose only meaning is in their sound? Heaven does not speak
thus with random, unmeaning words. Its voices are true, and deep as they
are true, never meaning less, but often more than they say. That the
angel should so address her is certain proof that the Virgin possessed a
peculiar fitness for the Divine honours she was now to receive--honours
which had been so long held back, as if in reserve for herself alone. It
is only they who look heavenward who see heavenly things. There must be
a heart aflame before the bush burns; and when the bush is alight it is
only "he who sees takes off his shoes."
The glimpses we get of the Virgin are few and brief; she is soon
eclipsed--if we may be allowed that shadowy word--by the greater glories
of her Son; but why should she be selected as the mother of the human
Christ? why should her life nourish His? why should the thirty years be
spent in her daily presence, her face being the first vision of awaking
consciousness, as it was in the last earthward look from the cross?--why
all this, except that there was a wealth of beauty and of grace about
her nature, a certain tinge of heavenliness that made it fitting the
Messiah should be born of her rather than of any woman else? As we have
seen, the royal and the priestly lines meet in her, and Mary unites in
herself all the dignity of the one with the sanctity of the other. With
what delicacy and grace she receives the angel's message! "Greatly
troubled" at first--not, however, like Zacharias, at the sight of the
messenger, but at his message--she soon recovers herself, and "casts in
her mind what manner of salutation this might be." This sentence just
describes one prominent feature of her character, her reflective,
reasoning mind. Sparing of words, except when under the inspiration of
some _Magnificat_, she lived much within herself. She loved the
companionship of her own thoughts, finding a certain music in their
still monologue. When the shepherds made known the saying of the angel
about this child, repeating the angelic song, perhaps, with sundry
variations of their own, Mary is neither elated nor astonished. Whatever
her feelings--and they must have been profoundly moved--she carefully
conceals them. Instead of telling out her own deep secrets, letting
herself drift out on the ecstasies of the moment, Mary is silent,
serenely quiet, unwilling that even a shadow of herself should dim the
brightness of His rising. "She kept," so we read, "all these sayings,
pondering them in her heart;" or putting them together, as the Greek
word means, and so forming, as in a mental mosaic, her picture of the
Christ who was to be. And so, in later years, we read (ii. 51) how "His
mother kept all these sayings in her heart," gathering up the
fragmentary sentences of the Divine Childhood and Youth, and hiding
them, as a treasure peculiarly her own, in the deep, still chambers of
her soul. And what those still chambers of her soul were, how heavenly
the atmosphere that enswathed them, how hallowed by the Divine Presence,
her _Magnificat_ will show; for that inspired psalm is but an opened
window, letting the music pass without, as it throws the light within,
showing us the temple of a quiet, devout, and thoughtful soul.
With what complacency and with what little surprise she received the
angel's message! The Incarnation does not come upon her as a new
thought, a thought for which her mind cannot possibly find room, and
human speech can weave no fitting dress. It disturbs neither her reason
nor her faith. Versed in Scripture as she is, it comes rather as a
familiar thought--a heavenly dove, it is true, but gliding down within
her mind in a perfect, because a heavenly naturalness. And when the
angel announces that the "Son of the Most High," whose name shall be
called Jesus, and who shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever,
shall be born of herself, there is no exclamation of astonishment, no
word of incredulity as to whether this can be, but simply a question as
to the manner of its accomplishment: "How shall this be, seeing that I
know not a man?" The Christ had evidently been conceived in her mind,
and cradled in her heart, even before He became a conception of her
womb.
And what an absolute self-surrender to the Divine purpose! No sooner has
the angel told her that the Holy Ghost shall come upon her, and the
power of the Most High overshadow her, than she bows to the Supreme Will
in a lowly, reverential acquiescence: "Behold, the handmaid [bondmaid]
of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." So do the human and
the Divine wills meet and mingle. Heaven touches earth, comes down into
it, that earth may evermore touch heaven, and indeed form part of it.
The angel departs, leaving her alone with her great secret; and little
by little it dawns upon her, as it could not have done at first, what
this secret means for her. A great honour it is, a great joy it will be;
but Mary finds, as we all find, the path to heaven's glories lies
through suffering; the way into the wealthy place is "through the fire."
How can she carry this great secret herself? and yet how can she tell
it? Who will believe her report? Will not these Nazarenes laugh at her
story of the vision, except that the matter would be too grave for a
smile? It is her own secret yet, but it cannot be a secret long; and
then--who can defend her, and ward off the inevitable shame? Where can
she find shelter from the venomed shafts that will be hurled from every
side--where, save in her consciousness of unsullied purity, and in the
"shadow of the Highest"? Was it thoughts like these that now agitated
her mind, deciding her to make the hasty visit to Elisabeth? or was it
that she might find sympathy and counsel in communion with a kindred
soul, one that age had made wise, and grace made beautiful? Probably it
was both; but in this journey we will not follow her now, except to see
how her faith in God never once wavered. We have already listened to her
sweet song; but what a sublime faith it shows, that she can sing in face
of this gathering storm, a storm of suspicion and of shame, when Joseph
himself will seek to put her away, lest his character should suffer too!
But Mary believed, even though she felt and smarted. She endured "as
seeing Him who is invisible." Could she not safely leave her character
to Him? Would not the Lord avenge His own elect? Would not Divine Wisdom
justify her child? Faith and hope said "Yes;" and Mary's soul, like a
nightingale, trilled out her _Magnificat_ when earth's light was
disappearing, and the shadows were falling thick and fast on every side.
It is on her return to Nazareth, after her three months' absence, that
the episode occurs narrated by St. Matthew. It is thrown into the story
almost by way of parenthesis, but it casts a vivid light on the painful
experience through which she was now called to pass. Her prolonged
absence, most unusual for one betrothed, was in itself puzzling; but she
returns to find only a scant welcome. She finds herself suspected of
shame and sin, "the white flower of her blameless life" dashed and
stained with black aspersions. Even Joseph's confidence in her is
shaken, so shaken that he must put her away and have the betrothal
cancelled. And so the clouds darken about the Virgin; she is left almost
alone in the sharp travail of her soul, charged with sin, even when she
is preparing for the world a Saviour, and likely, unless Heaven speedily
interpose, to become an outcast, if not a martyr, thrown outside the
circle of human courtesies and sympathies as a social leper. Like
another heir of all the promises, she too is led as a lamb to the
slaughter, a victim bound, and all but sacrificed, upon the altar of the
public conscience. But Heaven did intervene, even as it stayed the knife
of Abraham. An angel appears to Joseph, throwing around the suspected
one the mantle of unsullied innocence, and assuring him that her
explanation, though passing strange, was truth itself. And so the Lord
did avenge His own elect, stilling the babble of unfriendly tongues,
restoring to her all the lost confidences, together with a wealth of
added hopes and prospective honours.
Not, however, out of Galilee must the Shiloh come, but out of Judah; and
not Nazareth, but Bethlehem Ephratah is the designated place of His
coming forth who shall be the Governor and Shepherd of "My people
Israel." What means, then, this apparent divergence of the Providence
from the Prophecy, the whole drift of the one being northward, while the
other points steadily to the south? It is only a seeming divergence, the
backward flash of the wheel that all the time is moving steadily,
swiftly forward. The Prophecy and the Providence are but the two staves
of the ark, moving in different but parallel lines, and bearing between
them the Divine purpose. Already the line is laid that links Nazareth
with Bethlehem, the line of descent we call lineage; and now we see
Providence setting in motion another force, the Imperial Will, which,
moving along this line, makes the purpose a realization. Nor was it the
Imperial Will only; it was the Imperial Will acting through Jewish
prejudices. These two forces, antagonistic, if not opposite, were the
centrifugal and centripetal forces that kept the Divine Purpose moving
in its appointed round and keeping Divine hours. Had the registration
decreed by Cæsar been conducted after the Roman manner, Joseph and Mary
would not have been required to go up to Bethlehem; but when, out of
deference to Jewish prejudice, the registration was made in the Hebrew
mode, this compelled them, both being descendants of David, to go up to
their ancestral city. It has been thought by some that Mary possessed
some inherited property in Bethlehem; and the narrative would suggest
that there were other links that bound them to the city; for evidently
they intended to make Bethlehem henceforth their place of residence, and
they would have done so had not a Divine monition broken in upon their
purpose (Matt. ii. 23).
And so they move southward, obeying the mandate of Cæsar, who now is
simply the executor of the higher Will, the Will that moves silently but
surely, back of all thrones, principalities, and powers. We will not
attempt to gild the gold, by enlarging upon the story of the Nativity,
and so robbing it of its sweet simplicity. The toilsome journey; its
inhospitable ending; the stable and the manger; the angelic symphonies
in the distance; the adoration of the shepherds--all form one sweet
idyll, no word of which we can spare; and as the Church chants her _Te
Deum_ all down the ages this will not be one of its lowest strains:--
"When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man
Thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb."
And so the Virgin becomes the Virgin Mother, graduating into motherhood
amid the acclamations of the sky, and borne on to her exalted honours in
the sweep of Imperial decrees.
After the Nativity she sinks back into a second--a far-off
second--place, "for the greater glory doth dim the less;" and twice only
does her voice break the silence of the thirty years. We hear it first
in the Temple, as, in tones tremulous with anxiety and sorrow, she asks,
"Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us? Behold, Thy father and I sought
Thee sorrowing." The whole incident is perplexing, and if we read it
superficially, not staying to read between the lines, it certainly
places the mother in anything but a favourable light. Let us observe,
however, that there was no necessity that the mother should have made
this pilgrimage, and evidently she had made it so that she might be near
her precious charge. But now she strangely loses sight of Him, and goes
even a day's journey without discovering her loss. How is this? Has she
suddenly grown careless? or does she lose both herself and her charge in
the excitements of the return journey? Thoughtfulness, as we have seen,
was a characteristic feature of her life. Hers was the "harvest of the
quiet eye," and her thoughts centred not on herself, but on her Divine
Son; He was her Alpha and Omega, her first, her last, her only thought.
It is altogether outside the range of possibilities that she now could
be so negligent of her maternal duties, and so we are compelled to seek
for our explanation elsewhere. May we not find it in this? The parents
had left Jerusalem earlier in the day, arranging for the child Jesus to
follow with another part of the same company, which, leaving later,
would overtake them at their first camp. But Jesus not appearing when
the second company starts, they imagine that He has gone on with the
first company, and so proceed without Him. This seems the only probable
solution of the difficulty; at any rate it makes plain and perfectly
natural what else is most obscure and perplexing. Mary's mistake,
however--and it was not her fault--opens to us a page in the sealed
volume of the Divine Boyhood, letting us hear its solitary voice--"Wist
ye not that I must be in My Father's house?"
We see the mother again at Cana, where she is an invited and honoured
guest at the marriage, moving about among the servants with a certain
quiet authority, and telling her Divine Son of the breakdown in the
hospitalities: "They have no wine." We cannot now go into details, but
evidently there was no distancing reserve between the mother and her
Son. She goes to Him naturally; she speaks to Him freely and frankly, as
any widow would speak to the son on whom she leaned. Nay, she seems to
know, as by a sort of intuition, of the superhuman powers that are lying
dormant in that quiet Son of hers, and she so correctly reads the
horoscope of Heaven as to expect this will be the hour and the place of
their manifestation. Perhaps her mind did not grasp the true Divinity of
her Son--indeed, it could not have done so before the Resurrection--but
that He is the Messiah she has no doubt, and so, strong in her
confidence, she says to the servants, "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do
it." And her faith must have been great indeed, when it required a
"whatsoever" to measure it. Some have thought they could detect a tinge
of impatience and a tone of rebuke in the reply of Jesus; and doubtless
there is a little sharpness in our English rendering of it. It does
sound to our ears somewhat unfilial and harsh. But to the Greeks the
address "Woman" was both courteous and respectful, and Jesus Himself
uses it in that last tender salute from the cross. Certainly, she did
not take it as a rebuke, for one harsh word, like the touch on the
sensitive plant, would have thrown her back into silence; whereas she
goes off directly to the servants with her "whatsoever."
We get one more brief glimpse of her at Capernaum, as she and her other
sons come out to Jesus to urge Him to desist from His long speaking. It
is but a simple narrative, but it serves to throw a side-light on that
home-life now removed to Capernaum. It shows us the thoughtful, loving
mother, as, forgetful of herself and full of solicitude for Him, who,
she fears, will tax Himself beyond His strength, she comes out to
persuade Him home. But what is the meaning of that strange answer, and
the significant gesture? "Mother," "brethren"? It is as if Jesus did not
understand the words. They are something He has now outgrown, something
He must now lay aside, as He gives Himself to the world at large. As
there comes a time in the life of each when the mother is
forsaken--left, that he may follow a higher call, and be himself a
man--so Jesus now steps out into a world where Mary's heart, indeed, may
still follow, but a world her mind may not enter. The earthly relation
is henceforth to be overshadowed by the heavenly. The Son of Mary grows
into the Son of man, belonging now to no special one, but to humanity at
large, finding in all, even in us, who do the will of the Father in
heaven, a brother, a sister, a mother. Not that Jesus forgets her. Oh,
no! Even amid the agonies of the cross He thinks of her; He singles her
out among the crowd, bespeaking for her a place--the place He Himself
has filled--in the heart of His nearest earthly friend; and amid the
prayer for His murderers, and the "Eloi, Eloi" of a terrible forsaking,
He says to the Apostle of love, "Behold thy mother," and to her, "Behold
thy son."
And so the Virgin Mother takes her place in the focal point of all the
histories. Through no choice, no conceit or forwardness of her own, but
by the grace of God and by an inherent fitness, she becomes the
connecting-link between earth and heaven. And throwing, as she does, her
unconscious shadow back within the Paradise Lost, and forward through
the Gospels to the Paradise Regained, shall we not "magnify the Lord"
with her? shall we not "magnify the Lord" for her, as, with all the
generations, we "call her blessed"?