Tractates on the Gospel of John
214 ST. AUGUSTINE 'These are my brothers.' and 'Whoever shall do the will of my Father, he is my mother and brother and sister.'"
(2) Therefore Mary also, because she did the Father's will. It is this in her that the Lord has magnified, because she did the Father's will, not because flesh begot flesh. Pay attention, my beloved people. For that very reason, when the Lord, working signs and prodigies and showing what lay hidden in his flesh, stirred admiration in the crowd, certain admiring souls said, "Happy is the womb that bore you." And he said, "Rather, happy are they who hear the Word of God and keep it." This is to say, "And my mother whom you have called happy is happy for the reason that she keeps the Word of God, not that the Word was made flesh in her and dwelt among us,'^ but that she keeps the very Word of God through which she was made and which was made flesh in her."
(3) Let men not rejoice in temporal offspring; let them exult if they are joined in spirit to God. We have said these things because of what the Evangelist said, that he dwelt with his mother and his brothers and disciples in Capharnaum for a few days.
4. What comes next? "And the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and he went up to Jerusalem." The Evangelist tells another thing, as it occurred to the memory of one who was proclaiming [the gospel]. "And he found in the temple them that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and moneychangers, sitting. And when he had made a kind of scourge of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, also the oxen and the sheep, and he poured out the money of the changers and overturned the tables. And to them that sold the doves he said, 'Take these things away from here, and do not make the house of my Father a house of business.'" (2) What have we heard, brothers? Look, that temple was still a symbol, and the Lord drove out of it all who were seeking their own goods, who had come to market. And what were those men selling there? What men needed in the sacrifices of
13. Cf. Mt 12.46-50; Mk 3.31-3514. Cf. Lk 11.27-28. 15. Cf.Jn 1.14.