The Later Adult Life of Jesus

129:0.1Je­sus had fully and fi­nally sep­a­rated him­self from the man­age­ment of the do­mes­tic af­fairs of the Naz­a­reth fam­ily and from the im­me­di­ate di­rec­tion of its in­di­vid­u­als. He con­tin­ued, right up to the event of his bap­tism, to con­tribute to the fam­ily fi­nances and to take a keen per­sonal in­ter­est in the spir­i­tual wel­fare of ev­ery one of his broth­ers and sis­ters. And al­ways was he ready to do ev­ery­thing hu­manly pos­si­ble for the com­fort and hap­pi­ness of his wid­owed mother.

129:0.2The Son of Man had now made ev­ery prepa­ra­tion for de­tach­ing him­self per­ma­nently from the Naz­a­reth home; and this was not easy for him to do. Je­sus nat­u­rally loved his peo­ple; he loved his fam­ily, and this nat­u­ral af­fec­tion had been tremen­dously aug­mented by his ex­traor­di­nary de­vo­tion to them. The more fully we be­stow our­selves upon our fel­lows, the more we come to love them; and since Je­sus had given him­self so fully to his fam­ily, he loved them with a great and fer­vent af­fec­tion.

129:0.3All the fam­ily had slowly awak­ened to the re­al­iza­tion that Je­sus was mak­ing ready to leave them. The sad­ness of the an­tic­i­pated sep­a­ra­tion was only tem­pered by this grad­u­ated method of prepar­ing them for the an­nounce­ment of his in­tended de­par­ture. For more than four years they dis­cerned that he was plan­ning for this even­tual sep­a­ra­tion.