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Chapter II
We have then a household—a widow with five sons and at least two, or very likely more, daughters. Jesus is admittedly her eldest son, and is bred to be a carpenter; and a carpenter he undoubtedly was up to, we are told, about thirty years of age (Luke 3:23). The dates of his birth and death are not quite precisely determined, and people have fancied he may have been rather older at the beginning of his ministry. For our purposes it is not of much importance. The more relevant question for us is: How came he to wait till he was at least about thirty years old before he began to teach in public? One suggested answer finds the impulse, or starting-point, of his ministry in the appearance of John the Baptist. It is a simpler inference from such data as we have that the claims of a widowed mother with six or seven younger children, a poor woman with a carpenter's little brood to bring up, may have had something to do with his delay. In any case, the parables give us pictures of the undeniable activities of the household.
A group of parables and other allusions illustrate the life of woman as Jesus saw it in his mother's house. He pictures two women grinding together at the mill (Luke 17:35), and then the heating of the oven (Matt. 6:30)—the mud oven, not unlike the "field ovens" used for a while by the English army in France in 1915, and heated by the burning of wood inside it, kindled with "the grass of the field." Meanwhile the leaven is at work in the meal where the woman hid it (Matt. 13:33), and her son sits by and watches the heaving, panting mass—the bubbles rising and bursting, the fall of the level, and the rising of other bubbles to burst in their turn—all bubbles. Later on, the picture came back to him—it was like the Kingdom of God—"all bubbles!" said the disappointed, but he saw more clearly. The bubbles are broken by the force of the active life at work beneath—life, not death, is the story. The Kingdom of God is life; the leaven is of more account than any number of bubbles. And we may link all these parables from bread—making with what he says of the little boy asking for bread (Matt. 7:9)—the mother fired the oven and set the leaven in the meal long before the child was hungry; she looked ahead and the bread was ready. Is not this written also in the teaching of Jesus—"your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things" (Matt. 6:32)? God, he holds, is as little taken aback by his children's needs as Mary was by hers, and the little boys did not did not confine their demands to bread—they wanted eggs and fish as well (Matt. 7:10; Luke 11:11, 12; and cf. John 6:9)—there was no end to their healthy appetites. It is significant that he mentions the price of the cheapest flesh food used by peasants (Luke 12:6). They also wanted clothes, and wore them as hard as boys do. The time would come when new clothes were needed; but why could not the old ones be patched, and passed down yet another stage? And his mother would smile—and perhaps she asked him to try for himself to see why; and he learnt by experiment that old clothes cannot be patched beyond a certain point, and later on he remembered the fact, and quoted it with telling effect (Mark 2:21). He pictures little houses (Luke 11:5-7) and how they are swept (Luke 11:25)—especially when a coin has rolled away, into a dusty corner or under something (Luke 15:8); and candles, and bushels (Matt. 5:15), and beds, and moth, and rust (Matt. 6:19) and all sorts of things that make the common round of life, come into his talk, as naturally as they did into his life.