Miracles of Our Lord | Page 4

present condition of her mind, or rather
the nature of the thought and expectation which now occupied it. Her
hope and his intent were at variance; there was no harmony between his
thought and hers; and it was to that thought and that hope of hers that
his words were now addressed. To paraphrase the words--and if I do so
with reverence and for the sake of the spirit which is higher than the
word, I think I am allowed to do so--
"Woman, what is there in your thoughts now that is in sympathy with
mine? Also the hour that you are expecting is not come yet."
What, then, was in our Lord's thoughts? and what was in his mother's
thoughts to call forth his words? She was thinking the time had come
for making a show of his power--for revealing what a great man he
was-- for beginning to let that glory shine, which was, in her notion, to
culminate in the grandeur of a righteous monarch--a second Solomon,
forsooth, who should set down the mighty in the dust, and exalt them of
low degree. Here was the opportunity for working like a prophet of old,
and revealing of what a mighty son she was the favoured mother.
And of what did the glow of her face, the light in her eyes, and the tone
with which she uttered the words, "They have no wine," make Jesus
think? Perhaps of the decease which he must accomplish at Jerusalem;
perhaps of a throne of glory betwixt the two thieves; certainly of a
kingdom of heaven not such as filled her imagination, even although
her heaven-descended Son was the king thereof. A kingdom of exulting
obedience, not of acquiescence, still less of compulsion, lay germed in
his bosom, and he must be laid in the grave ere that germ could send up
its first green lobes into the air of the human world. No throne,

therefore, of earthly grandeur for him! no triumph for his blessed
mother such as she dreamed! There was nothing common in their
visioned ends. Hence came the change of mood to Jesus, and hence the
words that sound at first so strange, seeming to have so little to do with
the words of his mother.
But no change of mood could change a feeling towards mother or
friends. The former, although she could ill understand what he meant,
never fancied in his words any unkindness to her. She, too, had the face
of the speaker to read; and from that face came such answer to her
prayer for her friends, that she awaited no confirming words, but in the
confidence of a mother who knew her child, said at once to the servants,
"Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it."
If any one object that I have here imagined too much, I would remark,
first, that the records in the Gospel are very brief and condensed;
second, that the germs of a true intelligence must lie in this small seed,
and our hearts are the soil in which it must unfold itself; third, that we
are bound to understand the story, and that the foregoing are the
suppositions on which I am able to understand it in a manner worthy of
what I have learned concerning Him. I am bound to refuse every
interpretation that seems to me unworthy of Him, for to accept such
would be to sin against the Holy Ghost. If I am wrong in my idea either
of that which I receive or of that which I reject, as soon as the fact is
revealed to me I must cast the one away and do justice to the other.
Meantime this interpretation seems to me to account for our Lord's
words in a manner he will not be displeased with even if it fail to reach
the mark of the fact. That St John saw, and might expect such an
interpretation to be found in the story, barely as he has told it, will be
rendered the more probable if we remember his own similar condition
and experience when he and his brother James prayed the Lord for the
highest rank in his kingdom, and received an answer which evidently
flowed from the same feeling to which I have attributed that given on
this occasion to his mother.
"'Fill the water-pots with water.' And they filled them up to the brim.
'Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast.' And they bare
it. 'Thou hast kept the good wine until now.'" It is such a thing of course
that, when our Lord gave them wine, it would be of the best, that it
seems almost absurd to remark upon it. What the Father would make

and will make, and that