most. To many, in all generations, who have been weeping over departed
joys, He says again, though with a different application, turning not
away from but to Himself mourning eyes and hearts, 'Woman, behold thy
Son'--not on the cross nor in the grave, but on the throne--'Son,
behold Thy mother.'

III. Lastly, this relationship requires always the subordination, and
sometimes the sacrifice, of the lower ones.

We have to think of Christ here as Himself putting away the lower
claims, in order more fully to yield Himself to the higher. It was
because it would have been impossible for Him to do the will of His
Father if He had yielded to the purposes of His brethren and His
mother, that He steeled His heart and made solemn His tone in refusing
to go with them.

That group that had come for Him suggests to us the ways in which
earthly ties may limit heavenly obedience. In regard to them the
situation was complicated, because Jesus Christ was their kinsman
according to the flesh, and their Messiah, according to the spirit.
But in them their earthly love, and familiarity with Him, hid from
them His higher glory; and in them He found impediments to His true
consecration, and would-be thwarters of His highest work. And, in like
manner, all our earthly relationships may become means of obscuring to
us the transcendent brightness and greatness of Jesus Christ as our
Saviour And, in like manner as to Him these, His brethren, became
'stumbling blocks' that He had decisively to put behind Him, so in
regard to us 'a man's foes may be those of his own household'; and not
least his foes when they are most his idols, his comforts, and his
sweetnesses. If our earthly loves and relationships obscure to us the