The evangelists record the welcome of his mother. Scripture is continually exalting motherhood. In the Decalogue (Exodus 20:12); in the description of the ideal mother in Proverbs, whose children “arise up, and call her blessed” (Proverbs 31:28); in the sublime passage where God himself takes  a mother’s love as the nearest thing to his own (Isaiah 66:13); and in the noble line of mothers that the portrait gallery of the Old and New Testaments presents, Hannah, and Ruth, and the lady of Shunem, and Elizabeth, and Salome, and Eunice, and many more—motherhood is acclaimed and exalted. But in lonely, unapproached honor stands Mary, the mother of Jesus. From these pages there shines out her devoutness. Out of all the women in the world God chose her to make the home in which the world’s Redeemer should be reared. It was at Mary’s knee that Jesus lisped his first childhood prayers. There shines out also her loneliness. She was lonely in the sublime destiny for which God appointed her, lonely in the deep, long thoughts she kept and pondered in her heart (Luke 2:19), lonely on the morning when Jesus left his boyhood home and turned his face to the world, loneliest of all on the day when “there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother” (John 19:25). There shines out also her glad self-sacrifice. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” she said to God (Luke 1:38); and even when the sword of which Simeon spoke was piercing her (Luke 2:35), her spirit could still exult in the beauty and strength and holiness of the Son whom God had given her.  

The Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ - James Stewart