07 He Went Down With Them and Was Subject Unto Them

VII HE WENT DOWN WITH THEM AND WAS SUBJECT UNTO THEM

Luke 2:51 Of all the Ten Commandments it was the Fifth that was the best observed and the best fulfilled in the house of Israel. Of all the beautiful pictures of patriarchal life that have been preserved to us none are more beautiful than the pictures of parental love and solicitude on the one hand, and the pictures of filial love and honor on the other hand. The tie between parent and child was much closer and was more lasting in those days than would be either possible or desirable in our day. But altogether apart from the primitive and temporary forms that this natural relation and this divine precept took on in the patriarchal and post-patriarchal communities, the parental love and care, and the corresponding reverence and obedience, in the households of Israel are an example to us to all time. In the consecutive order of the Decalogue the honor of our parents comes in after the honor and worship of God. But in the order of nature, and in actual life, the fifth commandment is the first fulfilled. A child’s father is much more than his mere father to him. His father is both his father and his god to every child. A little child cannot rise above his father, he cannot see beyond his father. To every child his father is the man of all men to him on earth or in heaven. There is nothing his father cannot do for him, if he pleases. There is no strength, no resource, no nobleness, no wisdom, with which every child’s own father is not endowed. The young heart that will yet rise to the love and the adoration of its Father in heaven, for a long time knows Him only by His paternoster name. And in all this "earthly fathers learn their craft from God." For God, for a long time, clothes every father on earth with all His own attributes and prerogatives and duties and dues. The divine throne, the divine scepter, the divine sword, are all as good as made over into every man’s hand into whose house a little child is born.

It is supposed by some, and the supposition is not without a certain ground to go upon, that Joseph died while Jesus was still increasing in stature of body and in strength of spirit. Bengel believes that about this time Mary was left an impoverished widow, and that Jesus and His brothers and sisters were left orphans, and were left altogether unprovided for. And as a consequence that special cares and special responsibilities and special labors were all from that time laid on the heart and on the hands of Mary’s eldest son. We are not told. But reverent thought and adoring realization have never been rebuked nor sent away without their proper reward. Whether Joseph was permitted to see his children attain to their full manhood and womanhood or no, we cannot tell. But in any case we cannot but think often of Mary, and cannot but picture to ourselves the life of memory and of wonder and of worship and of waiting that her whole remaining life must have been. And all the more if she was left a widow indeed and was left alone with her want and with her own thoughts about it all. But all that it has seemed good to the Holy Ghost to tell us about those eighteen years of our Lords life in His mother’s house is contained within the four corners of our present text. "And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but His mother kept all these sayings in her heart."

It may be taken as a certainty that this so indefatigable evangelist did his very best, and left no stone unturned, as we say, in order to fill up somewhat the long and silent and so mysterious spaces that lie between our Lord’s twelfth and His thirtieth years. But with all he could do Luke could collect little or nothing that was trustworthy or that was of much real value. There were not a few people still alive in Nazareth and round about who loved to sit and talk to Luke about Mary and her Child. But it did not come to much. They had really nothing to tell him beyond the deep and sweet impression that still survived in their aged and astounded hearts. There is really nothing for your neighbors to tell abroad about your dutiful and subject son. His mere obedience to you; his mere subjection to you; his mere filial honor to you, will not do much to fill up an intending biographer’s note-book. There is nothing in your retired and happy and peaceful household life to tell to the curious interviewer who stands pen in hand. There are no anecdotes that it would be worth his trouble to put into print. There is nothing dramatic, as we say; there is no such color nor movement in your family life for the outside world to talk about. "O yes, there is this," one of the oldest inhabitants, and the most willing to talk to Luke, would say. "It was reported in Nazareth in those days that He had said in the temple that He must be about His Father’s business. Well; we used to say to one another that that was what He always was in Nazareth also. Joseph’s business--I knew Joseph well in those days--it fell wholly into the hands of the eldest son, as is the way with us, and the whole widowed and orphaned house was laid on His shoulders. Six days He labored with all His might, and did all His work, and the seventh day was always to Him the Sabbath of the Lord His God. In it He never did any work. Yes; another thing I always remember to have heard said," the aged Nazarene would add--"He sat at the feet of all the older workmen, and took humble lessons from them, as no one else ever did, just as it was said to us that He had sat at the feet of the old doctors in the temple." That, and old impressions like that, was literally all that Luke could collect for love or money. Till we have more than one inquiring journey of his summed up in this one entry in his Gospel: "He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them."

There is no part of the Roman Catholic discipline that appeals to me so much as their doctrine and life of obedience. Their habits of prayer and their vows of obedience take my heart very much. But then, as often as I hanker after those things for myself and for you, these lines of Keble’s always come to my mind to correct me-- We need not bid, for cloistered cell, Our neighbor and our work farewell. Nor strive to wind ourselves too high For sinful man beneath the sky; The trivial round, the common task, Will furnish all we need to ask, Room to deny ourselves, a road To bring us daily nearer God. That is to say, we do not need to leave our own home and to go and seek out some ecclesiastical superior to whom to submit and subject ourselves. We do not need to leave our own fireside for plenty of opportunities and duties and demands to take other people’s ways of things and to give up our own way. Our Lord’s subjection and submission were made perfect, and were thus made the pattern of our subjection and submission, just by His living day after day, day after day, for thirty years in the same small house with His mother and His brothers and His sisters. Like ourselves in our homes also, His mother and His brothers and His sisters would all insist that their way was the only right way in this and in that, and that His way was the wrong way. And as far as in Him lay they always got their own way in everything, right or wrong. At any rate His mother always got her way in everything so far as He was concerned. He always submitted to her commands and her wishes, not because she was always wise and right, but because she was His mother. And in like manner He never disputed or fell out with any of His brothers or sisters, because He every day read it on the tables of His own humble heart, not to look every man.. on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Follow peace with all men, was His daily meditation every day both at home and abroad. And when His mother’s house became divided, as the best houses will sometimes become divided, He would only go away the oftener to secret prayer till He came back saying to Himself, As much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, especially with those of your own mother’s household. No. He did not need to enter the Essene monasteries of the Dead Sea in order to practice a meek and a quiet heart, and in order to subject Himself to His superiors.

Neither did Jonathan Edwards need to leave his father’s manse, or his own, and immure himself in a modern monastery. No. 46. Resolved: never to allow the least measure of any fretting or uneasiness at my father or mother. Resolved: to suffer no effects of it, so much as in the least alteration of speech, or motion of my eye; and to be specially careful of it with respect to any of our family. No. 47. Resolved: to cultivate assiduously a temper good and universally sweet and benevolent, quiet, peaceable, contented and easy, compassionate and generous, humble and meek, submissive and obliging, and even patient, moderate, forgiving and sincere; and to do at all times, what such a temper would lead me to do; and to examine strictly at the end of every day and every week whether I had so done. Sabbath morning, May 5, 1723. And Miss Rossetti, whose lot was cast in a very different family life from that of Jonathan Edwards, once wrote these pungent lines on this subject: "Simple distaste will sometimes vitiate our observance of the Fifth Commandment. Our parents speak, and we wish they would be silent. Their manners are so old-fashioned and their taste is so barbarous. Their opinions are so obsolete. Their standards of things are so childish. They seem to know nothing that is suitable for our new day to know till we habitually take our stand on an attitude of sullen endurance, and of self-defense against them. We are critics and censors and not children. At best we gloomily tolerate what we cannot reform so as to satisfy ourselves."

"A man is no further holy than he is relatively holy," writes George Whitefield in his London Journal. Relatively; that is to say in all the several relationships of life. And holy; that is to say full of love in all the relationships of life, and full of all the relationship fruits of love, in kindness, in gentleness, in patience, in toleration, in consideration, in deference, down even, on occasion, to submission and subjection. And how interesting, and how rebuking, and how recovering it is to think we see our Lord no further holy than He was relatively holy. To see Him making and keeping Himself holy as a son, and as a brother, and as a fellow-workman, and as a fellow-worshipper. If I knew all the personal temperaments and all the peculiar tempers of all His brothers and sisters and kinsfolk and acquaintances, I could then undertake to tell you just what new tempers He put on every day and to what holiness of relationship He at last attained. I could then picture to you the great contributions He made every day to the holiness and the happiness and the peace and the good nature and the good humor of His mother’s house; ay, and to the houses of all her neighbors round about. But far better than the best reconstruction of Mary’s house with her first-born Son in it; let us rather go straight home to-night and begin to reconstruct our own house. And let us begin by imagining Him the eldest Son in our own house and we all in the same house with Him, as His mother and His brothers and His sisters. But better still, let us all go home and henceforth be that eldest son ourselves. There is plenty of room at home for our Christ-like walk and conversation there. Indeed, some of our houses will soon break up, and forever go to pieces, unless we save both ourselves and them, as Jesus so often saved His mother’s house. Let us resolve then on the spot, and where we sit, to go home and do henceforth as He ever did. And indeed it is to enlist us to do that, and it is to guide and support us in doing such Christ-like service at home, that we are here to-night, and are engaged on this so beautiful and so strengthening and so hopeful Scripture. For even hereunto were ye called, because Jesus Christ was made relatively holy for us, leaving us an example, that we should follow His steps. For we were as sheep in all these things going astray, but are now returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.