r, and so it is here.

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 l