S. The Mother of Jesus
The Mother of Jesus.
Mary, the mother of Jesus. Acts 1:14.
THERE is a well-known tendency of human thought to oscillate from one extreme to another. I think this tendency was exhibited in several points of what we call the Protestant Reformation. In certain important respects, we are all agreed that there was a real and thorough reformation. In certain other respects most of us think it was a very partial reformation. And there are yet several other respects in which it was a violent reaction from one extreme to the opposite extreme. It appears to me that this has been the case as regards the position of Protestants toward the mother of Jesus. The Romanists, we may say without uncharitableness, have come very near making her an object of worship. Their theologians make nice distinctions on the subject, but practically, for the ignorant mass, she is really an object of worship, a sort of goddess. The Protestant mind, starting back in horror from that terrible idolatry, has seemed to shrink sensitively away from ever saying a word or ever thinking for a moment about the mother of Jesus.
It is all natural enough, the growth of what we consider to be the grave Romanist error about Mary. The association? connected with all those who followed Jesus would naturally have caused the early Christians to feel a peculiar interest in her, as they ought to have done. And then the feeling which rapidly grew up, of a desire for human mediation between us and God between us*, and the Saviour himself and which led, in the course of the centuries, to praying to the saints for their mediation, would naturally cause the mother of Jesus to be regarded as the most influential of all these interceding saints. Moreover, the Roman Church, with that talent for governing which has characterized the Roman people through all their history, readily adapted itself to the tastes of mankind, to the tendencies of human nature in general, and to the special usages of the old Pagan Romans, introducing, for example, a number of festivals, so that there would be something corresponding to the ancient festivals to please the people. And as all Pagan nations had their female deities, there naturally arose a feeling which made the mother of Jesus a sort of female divinity. Then, when art came into use in the churches, when they introduced image worship, there was nothing more natural than that the mother and the babe in her arms should be the chosen subject of artistic representation in places of worship; that the great artists of Italy should not only find this most popular and remunerative for their pencil, but most pleasing for themselves. So galleries were filled with many charming delineations of the Virgin and child. I suppose, also, that the spirit of chivalry in the Middle Ages may have had something to do with this. There was then a high, romantic sentiment towards woman as such, and this may have caused Mary to be regarded as the representative woman, so that romance added itself to devotion. For these and other causes it has come to pass that not only in the Roman Church, but in the Greek and Armenian and Coptic Churches, and all through the East, they talk a great deal more about Mary than about her son. I have at home a great collection of Latin hymns of the Middle Ages, made by a German scholar, in which there are three times as many about Mary as about Jesus and the apostles all put together.
Now, I say the Protestant mind has violently reacted from all this, and it is not strange that we should shrink shuddering from what is practical idolatry, no matter how skillfully explained away. But isn’t it a pity that we should go to the opposite extreme as regards the mother of our Lord? Let us look, then, at what the Scriptures teach. It was said to her by the angel, “Blessed art thou among women,” and she said, “Henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.”
There is no ground there for worship. “ Blessed among women,” Elizabeth was called, and Jael, who killed Sisera. The meaning of Mary’s own saying is, all generations shall call me happy, shall felicitate me, shall recognize that my position is a happy one. There is no foundation for calling her “ the Blessed Virgin Mary,” as an act of worship, but there is a foundation for taking peculiar interest in what the Scriptures teach concerning her. It is not much that they do teach, and doubtless that is well, for otherwise it would have been perverted in the interest of that semi-idolatry we have been speaking about; but from what they do teach we may draw some useful lessons, and may, at the same time, get some interesting views of her son, who is, O wonder of wonders! our Divine Redeemer.
1. First recall Mary’s early life. Now, I could bring you some so-called manuals about the Blessed Virgin Mary, which would give you a great mass of detail about her early life, but unfortunately they are all late tradition; in fact, they are all pure fiction, and without the advantage of being well invented. They are commonly dull and stupid. But when we look to the Scriptures themselves, some things we do know about her early life. We know that instead of being at a convent at Jerusalem, as the silly traditions say, she lived at the little town of Nazareth. This village, nestling down in its deep and retired valley, is never mentioned in the Old Testament, and even Josephus, who writes about a dozen places within a few miles of it, never speaks of Nazareth. It was an insignificant and quite out of the way place, far from the bustling, noisy world. Yet here Mary was to rear the appointed Saviour of men. Out of silence and obscurity was to come in the appointed time the Saviour of mankind. Nor must you suppose it was a desirable community to live in. Those who wrestle with the giant vices that gather in great cities often dream that in a quiet little retired village it would be easy to do right but Arcadian, (simplicity and purity is seldom anything more than a dream.) Those people of Nazareth were singularly bad. ’
They showed towards Jesus himself a rudeness and ferocity to which we know of no parallel in his ministry. They rejected him rudely. They tried to take his life. And one of whom Jesus said that he was an Israelite in whom there was no guile, and who lived in a neighboring village, asked in astonishment, “ Can anything good come out of Nazareth? “ It was a bad place. And Mary lived among those rude people of Nazareth.
Besides knowing the place of her abode, we know of Mary that she was familiar with Scripture. For when the great time in her life came, and, inspired, she burst out into praise, almost every expression she uses is from the Old Testament. Her whole mind and heart were full of the sacred writings, so that their language came spontaneously to her lips. That is an important point; she was familiar with the Scriptures.
2. In the next place, think of Mary’s belief and rejoicing. There came to her the most wonderful promise that ever was made on earth, and the most incredible.
It seemed at first blush to be impossible, and the question she asked concerning it touched that very point.
She said: “ How can these things be? “ It is in that respect we see an instructive difference between Mary and Zachariah. Zachariah said: “ How shall I know this, seeing I am an old man and my wife is old?” He speaks as a man not disposed to believe and who insists upon having better proof. But Mary speaks as one who is disposed to believe, and asks only to have an apparent impossibility removed, that she may believe.
You see here two types of character, two states of mind, such as often exist with us in relation to the Scriptures.
There are people that present their difficulties in such a way as to show plainly that they are like Zachariah; they don’t much want to believe, and they insist on their difficulties and cherish them, and are not anxious you should remove them. There are others who have sore difficulty in the way of believing, so that we owe them our tender respect and sympathy, who are asking only that they may get rid of what seems to them to stand in the way, so that they may believe. God be gracious to all such! God help them out of their trouble! Mary believed, not “ because it was impossible,” as a Latin Father once rhetorically said;’ she believed notwithstanding it seemed impossible, because it was expressly ascribed to the power of God. “ The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” And Mary said: “ Behold the hand-maid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” We do not want to believe a thing that is impossible, but, like Mary, we have to believe what includes many elements that are incomprehensible. In the nature of things it must be so. There was much that Mary could not understand, and as the years came and went she did not understand them still. When the shepherds came after the babe had been actually born, and reported what the angels had said, we are told that Mary “ kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” She could not know the meaning. When Simeon, in the Temple, said such wonderful things about the child, we read that Mary and Joseph wondered about all these things that were told concerning him; and when the child showed such extraordinary knowledge at twelve years of age, we are told that Mary and Joseph were amazed. It was necessary that they should not understand it. If the reality as to what it was had forced itself upon them, it would have been impossible that they should have lived under the same roof. So Mrs. Browning makes her say, “ Bright angels, move not! lest ye stir the cloud Betwixt my soul and his futurity I I must not die, with mother’s work to do, And could not live and see.” In the very idea of an incarnation there are necessarily many things incomprehensible. My friends, if you take this Bible, which comes so strangely home to all our spiritual wants, which, in all seasons of conscious spiritual weakness, offers the very strength we need, which affords us that help against sin which is not found anywhere else in this world this Bible, which the more progress we make in trying to do right, seems the more sweetly adapted to all our spiritual wants if you take this Bible, you find that it reveals an incarnation, and that this, from the necessity of the case, involves many things that seem almost impossible. There must be ever so many allusions to things in which we can make no progress at all, as to comprehending their nature. We are in Mary’s position. “We are Hot expected to believe an impossibility, but warranted and bound to believe an assured fact, notwithstanding there be many things about it whose nature we cannot possibly comprehend.
It seems that this distinction might have value to any one troubled about these problems, and anxious to receive the truth.
Notice, fnrther, that Mary, in believing, rejoices. She said: “ My soul doth magnify the Lord; from henceforth all generations shall call me happy.” It was a wonderful thing, that young girl, the child of poverty, in that little out of the way village, daring to say that all coming generations should know of her and call her happy; but she said it, because God had promised. She said it with no idea of personal merit, with no thought of personal pride, but because God had promised. If one of you should stand here by my side, and we two should, with the most genuine humility in our power, say we think we are children of God, we hope we shall be blessed forever in Heaven, we are confident we shall dwell amid the purity and glory of the better world, there are some people ready enough I know not that there are such here present, but you find cases of that sort everywhere there are some people ready enough to say: “ You think a great deal of yourselves; you count yourselves favorites of heaven,” and all that.
Yet, in fact, the profession would be made not in self complacency, but in simple, humble reliance on a divine promise. And why should not a human heart trust a divine promise, as then, so now and henceforward and for ever more, and trusting a divine promise, rejoice in a divine hope?
3. In the third place, think of Mary training her child.
We know something of the nature of that training. We have read of young Timothy, that from a child he knew the Holy Scripture that his mother and grandmother had taught him, and had learned to share the faith that was in them. That is a picture we may transfer to the humble home of the carpenter in Nazareth. That child needed to be trained. Do we not read that he grew in wisdom and stature? If he increased in wisdom, there was need of education. We find that the mother trusted him almost without bound. And we know that he was really what children so often imagine themselves to be, wiser than his parents. Yet, he went down with them and was subject to them. The human mind has to grow. If there was a real incarnation, the human mind had to grow. It needed to be developed. There was room for education. There was demand for it. Yea, and he himself, toward the close of his ministry, must have meant the same thing as to the capacity of the human mind to contain knowledge, when he said: “Of that day and hour knoweth no man, not even the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but the Father only.” The human mind cannot know all things. And our Lord’s human mind could not hold all knowledge. Such is the declaration of the record, that his mind grew in wisdom as his body grew in stature, and Mary was the mother that trained him. It seems idle sometimes for a poor toiling mother to indulge in the romantic ideas which poets and novelists write about a mother’s high mission; and yet it is good for such a one, amid trial and sacrifice and suffering and struggles, to remember, and comfort herself in remembering, that hers is a high mission. After all, the noblest thing that is done in this world is when a mother does in truth and wisdom and fear of God train up a child. Let us all stand back in her presence. Let us call upon all men whose aspirations are the highest, whose work is the noblest, to stand aside and acknowledge cheerfully, “Hers is the best work, hers is the no blest work done in the world.” And if that be the case, it must be a work of sacrifice and suffering, for there is nothing good ever done on earth save with sacrifice. Let the toiling mother solace herself with the thought that all motherhood has been dignified and made sublime by the young mother in the little town of Galilee, who was training in an humble home that child that was to be the Saviour of the world and the glory of the universe.
It was a unique task no doubt, and yet I say it has ennobled all motherhood, and any struggling, sorrowing mother may take comfort in the thought that she is engaged in a like good work. Blessed be God! what mother here knows of the high possibilities that are before her child? What Christian mother can fail to know of that supreme possibility, that blessed certainty, that she trains up a spirit immortal when she brings up a child in the fear of the Lord.
But, now, please observe that Mary must have trained this child in the knowledge of God’s word. My friends who are parents, we abuse everything; and so we abuse the benefits of the Sunday-school. There is grievous danger that we parents shall turn over to the Sunday-school our parental duty of training our children in God’s word. It is one of the perils of our time. Though we have those in the Sunday-school to help us in the task, and ought to be heartily thankful for their help, yet the work is ours nonetheless, and the work will, for the most part, remain undone unless we do it the work of training our children in the knowledge of God’s word.
Let us train them to look at God’s word as the guide of their life. I read somewhere of a mother whose husband was a grossly wicked man, who used to cry out against all things religious, and declared that he believed not in God; yet she reared up a number of children by his side, and they all became Christians. Some friend asked if she would tell how she managed this. She said, “ I never set my word against their father’s, but when he says anything against God’s service, I hunt up a passage and say, ’ Your father says so and so, but here is what your heavenly Father says/ and then I read it to them.” That was all the secret she had, but what a blessed secret!
Parents, learn to have the Scriptures on your tongue’s end for the benefit of your children. Good old John Wesley was a trifle superstitious, after the fashion of his time, when he used to open the Bible at random and make use of whatever text he happened first to light upon. Far better than that is it for us to have the mind so full of the Scriptures, their teachings so familiar to our thought, that whenever we need one of them it will come by natural association of ideas. And so Mr. Moody has taught all of us that if we can get some happy quotation of Scripture, it will be worth more than all our wisdom in explaining a difficulty to an inquirer.
4. I pass on to say a word as to a later point in Mary’s history. She seems to have unwarrantably interfered in the ministry of her son. At the wedding at Cana she suggested for him a course of action, and he said: “ Woman, what have I to do with thee,” or rather “What have we to do with each other?” There was nothing harsh in this, but there was an intimation that they had entered into new relations, that he who had been to her as a child to its mother could not be controlled by her in his public action, and she must draw back. A year or two later, when Jesus was teaching all the morning in a crowded house, and there were so many questions to be answered that they had not time for the mid-day meal, we read that “his friends” went forth to seize him, for they said, “ he is beside himself.” Now, put the Gospel histories together, and it appears that those friends were his mother and his brothers; and when they sent him a message over the heads of the crowd in the house, that his mother and brothers were without and wanted to see him, the answer, too, is very remarkable. He said: “ Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? “ And he looked around in a circle upon those that sat about him and said: “ Behold my mother and my brothers; for whosoever shall do the will of God, he is my brother, and sister, and mother.” His kindred were seeking to interfere with his work, and said he was beside himself. No wonder men call Christian earnestness fanaticism. Jesus himself, the founder of it all they said he was crazy. His own mother and his brothers said this because he was in earnest. What a comfort there is for all of us in the application he made of their request: “Whosoever shall do the will of my Father in Heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother.” How does a man love his brother?
Think of the warm affection with which a man cherishes his brother. Then think of the tenderness with which a manly nature loves a sister. Then add to these, yea, compass them all around with the love that a real man has for his mother a love that will ever grow as he grows older and now consider. Jesus has said it may include you and me, with all our unworthiness “Whosoever shall do the will of God is as dear to me as brother, and sister, and mother.” The Scriptures contain many wonderful things, but what more wonderful than those words?
5. There is one other theme, of which I know not how to speak Mary at the cross. Description is here dumb. Imagination stands in mute wonder. There are many points of view from which to look at the cross, and one not the least instructive, no doubt, would be to try to place yourself in imagination beside that sorrowing mother, through whose heart now according to old Simeon’s prediction long before a sword was passing, a sword of cruel suffering and death. You would remember how suffering is the inevitable consequence of sin in this world, how suffering was the necessary condition of human salvation, even that poor mother’s suffering as she looked upon her atoning son. Then remember how out of his death came life again, and out of that sorrow came springing joy. I cannot speak of that; who can? But you might sit down sometime and think it all over. Try to stand beside the mother at the cross, try to imagine how she felt, and try, also, to imagine how he felt towards her; for amid all the strange sorrow of that dark hour, he that was dying thought of his widowed mother, and felt, as every true man feels, that he must make some provision for her future. Yea, amid that great event of the universe, with that darkness settling down upon all his soul as the sin-bearer, he made provision for his widowed mother. Yet, what a simple provision it was! He had a loving friend, and to him he said: “ Take her; do you be her son and she will be your mother,” and that was all.
6. And now, finally, think a moment of Mary in heaven. If ever there comes a pang to the glorified ones, methinks Mary must look down with unutterable grief upon the thousands and millions that almost worship her instead of worshiping her son, the Saviour.
“ centuries That roll, in vision, your futurities My future grave athwart, Whose murmurs seem to reach me while I keep Watch o’er this sleep, Say of me as the Heavenly said ’ Thou art The blessedest of women! ’ blessedest, Not holiest, not noblest no high name, Whose height misplaced may pierce me like a shame, When I sit meek in heaven! “
MRS. BROWNING, The True Mary.
It is not unnatural, it is because they have forgotten that he, the divine one, is himself human. The human heart longs after human sympathy, and the consciences of guilty men make them wish for a human mediator between themselves and the God they shrink from. Luther tells us that in youth, with his Romish education, he was afraid of Christ. He never heard a word said about Christ, save as the babe in the mother’s arms, or the sacrifice on the cross, or the Judge in the last day. His idea was that he must call upon the saints, and especially upon the Virgin Mary, to pity him and intercede for him with Christ. When people have such views of Christ, no wonder they seek some human mediator. The only cure for it all is to know that Christ the divine was truly human, that Mary was no more truly human than was Jesus, the Son of Mary. Truly divine and also truly human, he is able to sympathize with us in our infirmities, to lay a hand of love and pity upon our poor sinful heads, and yet, with the other hand, to lay hold upon the very pillars of God’s throne, and to be our Advocate with the Father, our one Mediator, all the Mediator we need or should desire. O Jesus, son of Mary, and yet Son of God, before the mystery of thine Incarnation we bow, and trusting in the mystery of thine intercession, we pray thee make us, make us, wholly thine!