Born … Suffered
“The Child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and with the grace of God.” Everything that could make child-life beautiful clustered in His character. Unusual moral beauty and intellectual faculty, modesty, humility and sweetness of disposition characterised His young life, as it unfolded in the gentle atmosphere of the carpenter’s home; and perhaps in the ecstasy of her motherly affection Mary almost forgot the sinister shadow which had for a moment darkened her soul.
From the time, however, of His first visit to Jerusalem, it seemed as though a new conception of life was breaking upon Him, as though another authority was being recognised, as though He were about to yield obedience to another voice. The same thought was accentuated when eighteen years after they sat together at the Marriage Feast at Cana, and in the tenderest manner He taught her that there were limits to the authority which her earthly relationship had permitted her.
On two other occasions Jesus spoke to her. 67 Once He refused to give up the work in which He was engaged at her call; and again, when a woman in the crowd, touched by His inimitable loveliness, magnified the mother that bore Him, He gently corrected her by saying that there was an even higher relationship for those who heard God’s Word and did it. It was as though He anticipated the superstition and reverence which in following centuries would gather around her name, and indicated that in the Kingdom of Heaven position was reached, not by adventitious circumstances, but by those qualities of heart and soul which may be acquired by all.
In these days it is most important to remember this. When asked to worship Mary, to pray to her as our Lord’s mother, to entreat her to exert influence upon her Son, let us remember with what strong emphasis He put aside the exercise of all motherly control, and said, in effect, that she stood only on the level of the other disciples, and that her position, like their’s, would be entirely determined by their attitude toward the will of God.