ittle taken aback by his children's needs as Mary was by
hers, and the little boys did not did not confine their demands to
bread--they wanted eggs and fish as well (Matt. 7:10; Luke 11:11,
12; and cf. John 6:9)--there was no end to their healthy appetites.
It is significant that he mentions the price of the cheapest flesh
food used by peasants (Luke 12:6). They also wanted clothes, and
wore them as hard as boys do. The time would come when new clothes
were needed; but why could not the old ones be patched, and passed
down yet another stage? And his mother would smile--and perhaps she
asked him to try for himself to see why; and he learnt by experiment
that old clothes cannot be patched beyond a certain point, and later
on he remembered the fact, and quoted it with telling effect (Mark
2:21). He pictures little houses (Luke 11:5-7) and how they are
swept (Luke 11:25)--especially when a coin has rolled away, into a
dusty corner or under something (Luke 15:8); and candles, and
bushels (Matt. 5:15), and beds, and moth, and rust (Matt. 6:19) and
all sorts of things that make the common round of life, come into
his talk, as naturally as they did into his life.

The carpenter's shop, we may suppose, was close to the house--a shop
where men might count on good work and honest work; and what
memories must have gathered round it! Is it fanciful to suggest that
what the churches have always been saying, about "Coming to Jesus,"
began to be said in a natural and spontaneous way in that shop?
Those little brothers and sisters did not always agree, and tempers
would now and then grow very warm among them (cf. Luke 7:39). And
then the big brother came and fetched them away from the little
house to the shop, and set one of them to pick up nails, and the
other to sweep up shavings--to help the carpenter. They helped him.
Like small boys, when they help, they got in his road at every turn.
But somehow they slipped back to a jolly frame of mind. The big
brother told them stories, and they came back different people. I
can picture a day when there was a woman in the little house, weary
and heavy-laden, and the door opened, and a cheery, pleasant face
looked in, and said, "Won't you come and talk to me?" And she came
and talked with him and life became a different thing for her. Are
these pictures fanciful--mere imagination? Are we to think that all
the tenderness of Jesus came to him by a miracle when he was thirty
years of age? Must we