| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 7 |
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The first recorded appearance of Jesus, after entering on his public ministry, was at a wedding feast. This tells us of his interest in human joys. Many people seem to think that religion is only for times of sorrow. They say that Christ came to help us in our hours of pain and in our troubles. But it is suggestive that his first manifestation of divine power was not in healing a sick man, opening a blind man’s eyes, raising a dead child, but in making wine to prolong the joy of a feast. He is a friend for our happy hours quite as much as for our hours of sadness. Jesus wants still to attend the social pleasures that the young people have. If we have any feast or entertainments to which we cannot invite him, they are not fit for enjoyments for a Christian.
“The wine failed.” Earth’s pleasures always fail. They come in little cups, not in living fountains. The failing wine at the wedding feast is an emblem of every joy that is only human. It lasts a little while, and then the cup is empty. Human love is very sweet. But if there is nothing but the human, it will fail some time.
The record says that in this first miracle Jesus manifested his glory. The glory was no diviner when it took the form of power and wrought a miracle than it was when unrevealed. During the thirty years the divine life in Christ revealed itself in what no one regarded as supernatural – in the beautiful life that grew up in that home, with its attention to daily tasks and duties. The neighbours did not think of his gentleness of spirit, his graciousness of disposition, his purity and simplicity of life as revealing of divine glory in him. Then that day at Cana the glory was manifested, flashed out so as to be seen.
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