Verse 48
Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us?
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Perplexity in presence of mystery
This question of the mother of Jesus reveals an experience of the human heart which is very common, which is most common in the best hearts and those who feel their responsibility the most. The Virgin Mary is the perpetual type of people who, entrusted with any great and sacred interest, identify their own lives with that interest and care for it conscientiously; but who, by and by, when the interest begins to manifest its own vitality, and to shape its own methods, are filled with perplexity. They cannot keep the causes for which they labour under their own care. As His mother asked of Jesus, so they are always asking of the objects for which they live, “Why hast thou thus dealt with us?” Such people are people who have realized responsibility more than they have realized God. Just as Mary felt at the moment when she asked this question, that Jesus was her Son more than that He was God’s Son, so there is a constant tendency among the most earnest and conscientious people to feel that the causes for which they live and work are their causes more than that they are God’s causes, and so to experience something which is almost like jealousy when they see those causes pass beyond their power and fulfil themselves in larger ways than theirs. For such people, often the most devoted and faithful souls among us, there must be some help and light in this story of Jesus and His mother. (Phillips Brooks, D. D.)
A parent’s wonder
The first and simplest case of this experience is that which comes nearest to the circumstances of our story. It comes in every childhood. It comes whenever a boy grows up to the time at which he passes beyond the merely parental government which belonged to his earliest years. It comes with all assertion of individual character and purpose in a boy’s life. A boy has had his career all identified with his home where he was cradled. What he was and did he was and did as a member of that household. But by and by there comes some sudden outbreak of a personal energy. He shows some disposition, and attempts some task, distinctively his own. It is a puzzling moment Mike for the child and the parent. The child is perplexed with pleasure, which is almost pain, to find himself for the first time doing an act which is genuinely his own. The parent is filled with a pain which yet has pride and pleasure in it, to see his boy doing something original, something which he never bade him do, something which perhaps he could not do himself. The real understanding of that moment, both to child and parent, depends on one thing--upon whether they can see in it the larger truth that this child is not merely the son of his father, but is also the son of God. If they both understand that, then the child, as he undertakes his personal life, passes not into a looser, but into a stronger, responsibility. And the parent is satisfied to see his first authority over his son grow less, because he cannot be jealous of God. It is a noble progress and expansion of life when the first independent venture of a young man on a career of his own, is not the wilful claim of the prodigal, “Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me,” but the reverent appeal of Jesus, “Wist ye not theft I must be about My Father’s business?” (Phillips Brooks, D. D.)
Divine as well as human education
Who is there of us that is not aware that his soul has had two educations? Sometimes the two have been in opposition; sometimes they have overlapped; sometimes they have wholly coincided; but always the two have been two. Our own government of ourselves is most evident, is the one which we are most aware of, so that sometimes for a few moments we forget that there is any other; but very soon our plans for ourselves are so turned and altered and hindered that we cannot ignore the other greater, deeper force. We meant to do that, and look! we have been led on to this. We meant to be this, and lo! we are that. We never meant to believe this, and lo! we hold it with all our hearts. What does it mean? It is the everlasting discovery, the discovery which each thoughtful man makes for himself with almost as much surprise as if no other man had ever made it for himself before, that this soul, for which he is responsible, is not his soul only, but it is God’s soul too. The rex-e-lation which came of old to the Virgin Mother about her Child--not your Child only, but God’s Child, too; yours, genuinely, really yours, but, behind yours and over yours, God’s. That is the great revelation about life. When it comes, everything about one’s self-culture is altered. Every anticipation and thought of living changes its colour. It comes sometimes early and sometimes late in life. Sometimes it is the flush and glow which fills childhood with dewy hope and beauty. Sometimes it is the peace which gathers about old age and makes it happy. When ever it comes it makes life new. See what the changes are which it must bring. First, it makes anything like a bewildering surprise impossible. When I have once taken it into my account that God has His plans for my soul’s culture, that these plans of His outgo and supersede any plans for it which I can make, then any new turn that comes is explicable to me, and, though I may not have anticipated it all, I am not overwhelmed, nor disturbed, nor dismayed by it. I find a new conviction growing in my soul, another view of life, another kind of faith. It is not what I had intended. I had determined that as long as I lived I would believe something very different from this which I now feel rising and taking possession of me. It seems at first as if my soul had been disloyal to me, and had turned its back faithlessly upon my teaching. I appeal to it, and say, “Soul, why hast thou thus dealt with me?” And it answers back to me, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? Did you not know that I was God’s soul as well as your soul? This is something which He has taught me.” Then again, the true man will have one great purpose in living, and only one. He will try to come to harmony with God, to perfect understanding of what God wants and is trying to do. Let me not be trying to make one thing out of this soul of mine while He is trying to make entirely another! As Mary went back with her Son, realizing, out of His own mouth, that He was not only her Son, but God’s; as she settled down with Him to their Nazareth life again, must not one single strong question have been upon her heart, “What does God want this Son of His to be? O let me find that out, that I may work with Him.” And as you go into the house where you are to train your soul, realizing, through some revelation that has come to it, that it is God’s soul as well as yours, one strong and single question must be pressing on you too--“What does God want this soul of mine to be? O, let me find that out, that I may work with Him.” And how can you find that out? Only by finding Him out. Only by understanding what He is, can you understand what He wants you to do. And understanding comes by love. And love to God comes by faith in Jesus Christ. (Phillips Brooks, D. D. )
Christ’s strange dealings with His people
The words may usefully remind us that the dealings of the Lord Jesus with those who sincerely love and serve Him are often very strange. Not only does He try them by ordinary troubles, such as loss of health and loss of friends, but sometimes He takes away from them all spiritual comfort, and leaves their souls dark and disconsolate. Once they had joy and peace in believing, but they have it no longer now. Perhaps it is that they have grown lukewarm and self-sufficient, and He withdraws Himself from them for a time, to make them seek Him with greater earnestness. Where this is the case, people must go on seeking till they find. The dryness and hardness of our minds in prayer may be a sore distress to us, but we must not give over praying: we must be content to seek Him sorrowing. Where we cannot pray as we would, we must pray as we can. We must not “faint,” but determine to make ourselves heard at heaven’s gate. And then it shall be “but a little,” and we shall find Him whom our soul loveth. And when we have found Him, we must be careful to hold Him, and “not let Him go.” One who knows the Saviour’s love, and lives in habits of holy intercourse with Him, must, as it were, keep His eye upon Him constantly by Christian watchfulness and an effort to realize His presence everywhere. Let such an one lose Him by wilful disobedience, or careless self-indulgence, or by relaxing in prayer and in the effort to believe, and there will be nothing but “sorrowing” till He is found again. Most merciful is it of God, when we are living without Christ, to hedge up our way with thorns, to make conscience uneasy, worldly pleasures unsatisfactory, and even religious exercises disappointing and irksome. Anything is wholesome, however bitter, which drives us to His side, and keeps us there. (Dean Goulburn.)
The manliness of Christ
There is something at first sight wilful indeed, possibly courageous, but not manly, in a boy of twelve staying behind his parents in a strange city without their knowledge or consent; something thoughtless, almost ungracious, in the words of reply to Mary’s question. The clue to this apparent divergence from the perfect manly life is given with rare insight and beauty in Mr. Holman Hunt’s great picture--at any rate, the face and attitude of the boy there seemed for the first time to make clear to me the meaning of the recorded incident, and to cast a flood of light upon those eighteen years of preparation which yet remained before He should be ready for His great work. The first sight of Jerusalem and of the Temple has stirred new and strange thoughts within Him. The replies of the doctors to His eager questionings have lighted up the consciousness which must have been dimly working in Him already, that He was not altogether like those around Him-the children with whom He used to play, the parents at whose knees He had been brought up. To the young spirit before whose inward eye such a vision is opening all human ties would sink back, and be for the moment forgotten; and, when recalled suddenly by the words of His mother, the half-conscious dreamy answer, “How is it that ye sought Me?” &c., loses all its apparent wilfulness and abruptness. And so, full of this new question and great wonder, He went home to the village in Galilee with His parents, and was subject unto them; and the curtain falls for us on His boyhood and youth and early manhood. But, as nothing but what is most important and necessary for understanding all of His life which we need for our own growth into His likeness is told us in these simple narratives, it would seem that this vivid light is thrown on that first visit to Jerusalem because it was the crisis in our Lord’s earthly life which bears most directly on His work for our race. If so, we must, I think, allow that the question, once fairly presented to the boy’s mind, would never again leave it. Day by day it would come back with increasing insistency, gathering power and weight. (Thomas Hughes.)
The Mother and Son
There has descended into Mary’s humble home a treasure too great for heaven itself to contain. What wonder if she fails to understand the value of this Divine Son; if she wholly mistakes the meaning of His absence? What wonder if she applies to His case the common-place rebuke, “Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing”? Nay, but we may be told it was inexcusable in one who remembered the marvels of His birth, and all that then occurred, to chide Him for resorting to the Temple, and to be astonished that He sat with doctors and heard and questioned them. Twelve years of meek obedience in common household tasks and duties had passed since His birth. Miracles, which are meant to witness to doctrines, were not, we may be sure, performed to startle the carpenter’s humble family, and she had forgotten in some measure the significant tokens of the past, and the dutiful boy was to her the future carpenter, the support of her age, the inmate of her home, or of some frugal home like hers, to the end, and the air of authority sat easy upon her, for her right had not been disputed. But other rights asserted themselves now. The light within Him breaks forth now from behind the Tell of flesh. “How is it that ye sought Me? Wist ye not,” &c. Other claims and ties supersede, or soon shall do so, the calm family life. He shall dwell with that Father who, in His baptism, His transfiguration, His death, will attest that this One is the Son of God. He shall seek for brethren and for children in all whom the ties of a common faith in His Father unite to Him. His work shall not be with the axe and hammer in Joseph’s workshop, but it shall lie in turning souls from darkness to light, from death to life, from the power of Satan unto God. What wonder if the mother after the flesh cannot at once train her ear to the full compass of this new revelation. She will acquiesce, but not till she has painfully learned the plan of God in the life of battle with all forms of evil, which He shall lead, in the face of Satan and his host, where she is not; where she shall be met, if she venture into its sphere, by words of strangeness, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John 2:4). Some have entertained angels unawares; but the King whom angels serve is a sojourner under her roof; she has to unlearn the speech of a mother, and learn that of a worshipper of the adorable Son of God and her Redeemer. She must cease to command and to admonish, and kneel with the rest of us before the Cross that was raised for all our guilty race alike. (Archbishop Thomson.)
Sorrow for grieving a mother
When Garibaldi saw any one looking at his mother’s picture the tears started into his eyes. He felt remorse at having, by his adventurous life, been a source to her of cruel anxiety. He believed in the power of her prayers to preserve him from the effects of his own temerity, and on the field of battle, or in the storm at sea, he never lost courage, because he thought he saw her kneeling before God and imploring for him the Divine protection.
A mother’s solicitude
The parents of Robert Moffat were both pious, and his mother’s heart was set upon his “knowing from a child the Holy Scriptures.” When about to leave Inverkeithing, in Fifeshire, where he was in service in the Earl of Moray’s gardens, for a situation in Cheshire, she earnestly besought him to promise, before going, that he would read the Bible every day, morning and evening. Sensible of his own weakness, and of, perhaps, his boyish disinclination, he parried the question. But at the last moment she pressed his hand. “Robert,” she said, imploringly, “you will promise me to read the Bible, more particularly the New Testament, and most especially the Gospels--those are the words of Christ Himself; and then you cannot possibly go astray.” There was no refusing then; it was the melting hour. “Yes, mother,” he answered, “I make you the promise.” He knew, as he remarked in relating the circumstances, “that the promise, once made, must be kept. And oh,” he added, “I am happy that I did make it!” (Hand and Heart.)
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