It is not easy to be the mother of genius.Mary never quite understood this strange son who came and went and who wandered all over the land and whose name was mentioned with the awe of admiration or the hatred of vengeance whenever three Jews met together by the roadside.
But she was by far too wise to stand in the way of one who seemed to know so well what he was doing.
And if she sometimes failed to appreciate the Prophet,she never ceased to love her son.
This time,when her boy came back from his first trip into foreign lands,she had good news for him.
There was to be a wedding in the family and they had all been invited.
Jesus said that he would be glad to go,but he was no longer alone.There were his new friends who had followed him to Nazareth.He made it plain that he regarded them as his brothers and as such he took them along when he went to Cana.
This was the beginning of that close and intimate friendship which lasted until the day of the crucifixion.
Several hundred years later,when a touch of the miraculous was added to every event in the life of Jesus for the benefit of the simple-minded barbarians who had to be gained for his straightforward message of a loving God,the story of a pleasant family gathering,where everybody had been happy and where Mary for the last time had enjoyed the sight of her son in the midst of his friends and relatives,was not considered sufficiently convincing.It had been adorned with a mysterious tale which the painters of the Middle Ages used repeatedly as a popular subject for their pictures.
According to this new account,the sudden arrival of so many extra guests had caused a shortage of wine.
The waiters had been in great distress.There was nothing but water,and no Jew or Greek or Roman would have dreamed of offering water to the strangers within his gate.
The servants had rushed to Mary,who was a careful housewife and who might perhaps know what to do.
Mary in turn had spoken to her son and asked for his advice.
Jesus,lost in deep thought,had been somewhat irritated by this interruption on account of a matter of mere food and drink.But he was a very human person and appreciated the importance of details.He had understood the embarrassment of his host whose careful arrangements had been upset by the unexpected appearance of half a dozen uninvited guests.
To save his relatives from their predicament,he had quietly changed the water into wine and the dinner had been finished to the satisfaction of all.
As the ages went by,similar bits of magic were continually added to the original stories.That was quite natural.
People have always loved to connect superhuman power with those whose memory they worship.
The Greek gods and heroes had all performed a score of miracles.The old Jewish Prophets had made iron float upon the waters and had walked across deep rivers and occasionally had even been able to interfere with the regular order of the planetary system.
In China,in Persia,in India,and in Egypt,wherever we turn,we meet with strange records of supernatural feats which have been common among the earliest inhabitants of those far-away lands.
This proves that the need for an imaginary world wherein the impossible becomes the self-evident is very general and not restricted to a particular country or race.
But to many of us,the influence which Jesus exercised upon the world was so astonishingly profound and inexplicable that we are willing to accept him without the doubtful embellishments of conjuration and exorcism.
In this we may be entirely wrong.
But as the reader can find full deions of all the miracles in a thousand other books,we shall content ourselves with a sober relation of those events which occurred when Jesus left his family for the last time and began to teach that gospel of mutual forbearance and love which led to his death on the cross.
