22 (T. V. Tymms) ; Ixxxi. 33 (H. M. Burge). Churchman's Pulpit : Sermons to the Young, xvi. 78 (A. P. Stanley). Sunday Magazine, 1876, p. 850 (R. H. Smith) ; 1885, p. 734 (F. R.
Havergal) ; 1895, p. 136 (B. Waugh).
««4
Always at Work.
And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business ?— Luke ii. 49 (A.V.).
1. We know how it sometimes happens that a scene which has been for years familiar and beloved suddenly greets us with a new impression. We have ceught it from some unexpected angle, or a flying light has shoe over it, oringmg out some colour or some effect of perspective or of contrast that we never before hit upon. There it is, the old habitual place, which we fancied that we knew by heart, and yet there is a look in it to-day which we had never suspected, which we had always missed. A touch of beauty, a flash of significance, has given it a new consecration. The novelty of the effect is heightened by the very fact that it is brought out of material so intimately known.
Now, is not this often the case with the Four Gospels ? Those wonderful books — how well we seem to know them ! From our earliest memories the familiar rhythms have sung " the old, old story " in our ears. We turn the pages only to pass the eye along its habitual and anticipated sequences. And then, by a sudden stroke now and again, a fresh gleam of light falls, and some fragment of the gospel story starts into swift and radiant promi- nence. We had read that bit a thousand times before, yet it lay unmarked; pleasant, indeed, and helpful, one perhaps among many that we liked, yet with no special note. But to-day it stands out as if alone. A peculiar force lies about it. A splendid meaning breaks from it. How is it we can have passed it over so easily ? How is it we ever missed its vivid interest ?
Some such prominence has fallen in our day on the scene recorded by St. Luke to which the text refers. So strangely alone it is, this tale of the boyhood of Jesus, plucked out of the heart of that silence which broods round the long hours of the Lord's growth at Nazareth. Ah, how we pine to penetrate within
126 ALWAYS AT WORK
that shrouding silence — the silence during which the blessed Plant sprang up out of the dry ground. Would that we might follow the unrecorded process in the mystery of which He passed from the unconscious impotence of the Babe, passive in the manger, swathed in swaddling-clothes, to that full, ripe, conscious manhood of His ministry — complete, self-mastered, sure-footed ; clear in aim, in purpose, in decision ; calm, measured, deliberate, and determined. Between the two moments lies the whole story of the upward growth.
2. If the veil of silence has fallen on so much that we cannot but desire to look into, with what an outbreak of relief do we fasten on this solitary story which the diligence of St. Luke has been guided to rescue out of all the hidden mystery of growth, for our loving attention ! Here he has been allowed to bring before us, not merely the broad or secret process by which His human nature won its advances, but a most signal moment of its increase, when it arrived at a new level, as it were, at a bound.
Such a moment is never forgotten, the moment at which the boy ceases to see through the eyes of others, ceases to speak, to think, as others do about him ; when he sees with his own eyes, and faces his own world, and seeks for his own interpretation of it. Such moments, when they come, are full of a great awe ; we are rapt into a solitude of our own, in which we forget our earlier interests, which have become as a very little thing. We are absorbeil in the passion of a spiritual discovery ; we are caught up, young though we be, into the solemnity of those swift and sudden intuitions which have the
Power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence.
Many a man or woman can recall echoes of such times. Perhaps, long after we have forgotten them, we drop upon some fervid or grave resolution, written with our unformed hand, in a youthful diary, the record of some such momentous awakening. We smile as our eyes fall on that record, yet smile with a sigh of sad regret that, with all wiser intelligence, we have not retained the intense and earnest seriousness which makes sacred that old scrawl
ST. LUKE II. 49 127
3. TTie words of our text, then, are the only words recovered from the childhood of Jesus. All the precious memory that Mary kept in her heart appears to have died with her.
She told it not; or something sealed The lips of that evangelist.
Legends survive, enough; offspring of crude if devout imagina- tions, and so obviously spurious that there has never been any serious attempt to include them in sacred writ. In thirty years, one saying, and one only, survives. These are the first recorded words of Jesus, and every syllable is precious. The poet Wordsworth says that the child is father of the man; and surely in these words of Jesus we get a hint of all that the man Jesus is ever to become. As in a mountain lake one sees reflected the mountains and the forests and the procession of the clouds, so in this single sentence of Jesus is mirrored the entire New Testament land and sky.