Reflection: Anne & Joachim
Sermon Texts
Genesis 17:1-8
Luke 1:26-33
Today we are celebrating the feast day of the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They aren’t mentioned in the bible, but there is an early Christian tradition that their names were Joachim and Anne — this tradition comes from an early Christian writing about the origins of Jesus which is called the Proto-Gospel of James. The emphasis of this story is the holiness and righteousness of Mary and of her whole family. The writer was really of the belief that if Jesus was holy, then certainly Jesus’ mother must have been holy; and so her parents also must have been holy, and so-on.
So the story tells us that Joachim and Anne were righteous and devout Jews, very wealthy, who were childless and advancing in age. They pray to God for a child, and an angel visits each of them announcing that they will conceive a child. Miraculously, Mary is conceived and born. Rather astonishingly, they leave Mary at the Temple from age 3 until the age of 12. Of course, once she reaches age 12 they realize they have to get her out of the temple — because you can’t have a menstruating woman in a holy place, God forbid.
So they summon all of the “holy widowers” to come to the temple, and each one should bring their staff. They say a prayer over the staffs and hand them back, and the last staff they hand back is the one that belongs to a man named Joseph, and when they hand it back to him, a dove flies out of the rod and lands on Joseph’s head. So they tell him that this is a sign, and he is to take this virgin Mary under his protection. He refuses — he says he is an old man and has sons of his own, and she’s just a child. [So if you’ve heard the tradition that Jesus’ siblings are really Joseph’s children from a previous marriage, this is where that comes from.] The priests basically threaten Joseph — remember in the Book of Numbers when Dathan didn’t listen to the priests and the earth swallowed him and his whole house? It would be a shame if that happened to you. So he takes her in.
The narrative continues, and I won’t relate the whole story to you. But the main thrust of the story is that everything about Jesus’s human side was divinely controlled by God to be holy, pure, separate — and especially distinct from all of that icky women stuff, very misogynistic. This writing came from a time where Christians wanted to emphasize the divinity of Christ — his other-ness — and so we have an emphasis on the BVM being pure and holy.
But around the time of the middle ages, pious perceptions of Mary changed. While people never really stopped thinking of her as holy, they began to see her as a saintly companion to human suffering — especially the suffering of women and of parents. Christ also is a model of human suffering, but Christ’s divinity sometimes makes it difficult for people to relate to him. So devotions to Mary arose because she was a figure very close to Christ, but still entirely human and whose joys and sufferings were very relatable. In later days, another aspect of Mary became relevant in the church — Mary’s poverty, and the revolutionary nature of her ministry especially as expressed in the Magnificat.
All three of these strands of Marian devotion are still popular throughout the church — Mary the pious virgin, Mary the patient and suffering parent, Mary the bringer of societal upheaval. So while some might take pride in the pious story of Joachim and Anne, others might simply celebrate the parents of Mary — whoever they might have been — who raised an amazing woman who piously accepted a painful yet revolutionary ministry.
