47. Tholuck and Lücke, however, hold the opposite view.
On the other hand, there was one thing which she had learned, and one thing which she
was to unlearn, after those thirty years of the Nazareth-Life. What she had learned - what
she must have learned - was absolute confidence in Jesus. What she had to unlearn, was
the natural, yet entirely mistaken, impression which His meekness, stillness, and long
home-submission had wrought on her as to His relationship to the family. It was, as we
find from her after-history, a very hard, very slow, and very painful thing to learn it;48 yet
very needful, not only for her own sake, but because it was a lesson of absolute truth.
And so when she told Him of the want that had arisen, it was simply in absolute
confidence in her Son, probably without any conscious expectancy of a miracle on His
part.49 Yet not without a touch of maternal self-consciousness, almost pride, that He,
Whom she could trust to do anything that was needed, was her Son, Whom she could
solicit in the friendly family whose guests they were - and if not for her sake, yet at her
request. It was a true earth-view to take of their relationship; only, an earth-view which
must now for ever cease: the outcome of His misunderstood meekness and weakness, and
which yet, strangely enough, the Romish Church puts in the forefront as the most
powerful plea for Jesus' acting. But the fundamental mistake in what she attempted is just
this, that she spake as His Mother, and placed that maternal relationship in connection
with His Work. And therefore it was that as, on the first misunderstanding in the Temple,
He had said: 'Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's busines s?' so now: 'Woman,
what have I to do with thee?' With that 'business' earthly relationship, however tender,
had no connection. With everything else it had, down to the utter self- forgetfulness of
that tenderest commendation of her to John, in the bitterest agonies of the Cross; but not
with this. No, not now, nor ever henceforth, with this. As in His first manifestation in the
Temple, so in this the first manifestation of His glory, the finger that pointed to 'His hour'
was not, and could not be, that of a n earthly parent, but of His Father in Heaven. 50 There
was, in truth, a twofold relationship in that Life, of which none other but the Christ could
have preserved the harmony.
48. Luthardt rightly calls it the commencement of a very painful education, of which the
next stage is marked in St. Luke viii. 19, and the last in St. John xix. 26.
49. This meets the objection of Strauss and others, that Mary could not have expected a
miracle. It is scarcely conceivable, how Calvin could have imagined that Mary had
intended Jesus to deliver an address with the view of turning away thought from the want
of wine; or Bengel, that she intended to give a hint that the company should break up.
50. Godet aptly says. 'His motto henceforth is: My Father and I.'
This is one main point - we had almost called it the negative one; the other, and positive
one, was the miracle itself. All else is but accidental and circumstantial. No one who
either knows the use of the language,51 or remembers that, when commending her to John
on the Cross, He used the same mode of expression, 52 will imagine, that there was
anything derogatory to her, or harsh on His part, in addressing her as 'woman' rather than
'mother.' But the language is to us significant of the teaching intended to be conve yed,
and as the beginning of this further teaching: 'Who is My mother? and My brethren? And