Ancestors of God

On the Feast of Saints Joachim and Anna

Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Lord once said to the Pharisees:

“I speak what I have seen with My Father, and you do what you have seen with your father.” They answered and said to Him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham… If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me… You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do” (John 8:13-20).

The one whose actions you demonstrate is your father and you are his son or daughter. Because of this, there’s a thing they say in the Bible: A person is a son of something.

• Sons of disobedience (Colossians 3:6) are disobedient people.
• A son of peace (Luke 10:6) is a peaceful man.
• Judas is called a son of perdition (John 17:12), a man who is lost.
• Jesus nicknames James and John “sons of thunder” because of their wrathful desires (Luke 9:51-56; Mark 3:17).

This is why is it so scandalous when Christ calls God his Father. He says:

“The works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of me…I and my Father are one.” Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, “Many good works I have shown you from my Father. For which of those works do you stone me?” The Jews answered him, saying, “We do not stone you for a good work, but for blasphemy, and because you, being a man, make yourself God” (John 10:25-33).

In Genesis chapter 1, we read repeatedly that all living things “bring forth after their kind,” and here the Pharisees understand that the son of a horse is a horse, and the son of a dog is a dog – the son is what his father is. And if anyone is the Son of almighty God, then what is he by nature?

In the Creed, we confess that Christ is the only-begotten Son of God: the one who has the nature of his Father, God. We call him “Light, of light; true God, of true God; begotten, not created, of one essence with the Father.” The Pharisees are right that if Christ is the Son of God, then he is by nature what God the Father is.

But in the four Gospels, the Lord uses another name for himself: He refers to himself often as the Son of Man. The one who has the human nature. A truly human being.

The Lord was born in a human body without a father in the flesh; he received his humanity, the nature of Adam, entirely from his Mother. The Church often calls her the fulfillment of the ladder that Jacob saw, connecting earth to heaven (Genesis 28) because by that ladder, in his Mother, God came down and entered our race.

To some folks our reverence and honor for the Mother of Christ looks as if we worship her like God. But, “the Orthodox Church has always emphasized Mary’s connection to humanity… the heart of Orthodox Christian East’s devotion, contemplation, and joyful delight has always been her Motherhood, her flesh and blood connection to Jesus Christ. The East rejoices that the human role in the divine plan is pivotal” (Sermon by Fr Alexander Schmemann).

Yesterday was the feast of the birth of the ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ our God. So today the Church continues that commemoration by remembering her parents, Joachim and Anna

The beginning of the Gospel is years before the Nativity or Annunciation; it’s when the elderly, childless Joachim and Anna have a miraculous baby daughter.

Where do those names come from? They’re consistent across our hymnody, our prayers and services, and also in the writings from all over the Christian world in the centuries that follow.

None of the details of the Virgin Mary’s life are secret. She’s an active member of the Lord’s earthly life, even though she stays out of the spotlight. She’s there at his first public miracle, at the wedding in Cana of Galilee when he turned water into wine. She’s there at his cross, when he gives her into the keeping of his disciple John, saying “Here is your mother.” She’s in the upper room when the risen Christ appears and says to the apostles, “Peace be to you all.” She’s there at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit sets the whole Church on fire. Saint Luke writes that his Gospel recounts “those things which have been fulfilled among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us” (Luke 1:1,2) and just who did the Gospel writers get the details of Christ’s conception and the events of Mary’s pregnancy from? From the Mother of the Lord, face to face.

If you want to know who were the parents of Elvis Presley, and you couldn’t look it up online, you could get in your car and go to Memphis and ask anybody who knew him personally. In the same way, these details about the birth and childhood of the Mother of God, and her falling-asleep and burial, were shared history among the apostles and the Christians in Jerusalem. No wonder the Christian literature of the following centuries has so much consistent detail. These were the insider stories that members of the Church at Jerusalem all knew. It’s ridiculous to suggest that the Church in Jerusalem just collectively forgot all these details about the nativity of the Lord God in the flesh.

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So, Joachim and Anna, elderly and childless, have been praying: Lord, if you will give us a child, then we will dedicate him to the temple, like the prophet Samuel.

And the Lord is pleased to answer their prayer – but the child he gives them is a girl. They raise her until she is three years old, and then bring her to the temple and commit young Mary to the care of the priests – including her uncle the priest Zecharias, who would later become the father of the prophet John the Baptist..

So the child Mary is brought up from the age of three in the temple courts, among the widows and maidens, including the prophetess Anna.

Here is an academic paper that is worth reading: It’s about the role of women in the temple: Mary in the Protevangelium of James: A Jewish Woman in the Temple? It turns out there was a unique position in the Jerusalem temple allotted to young girls who wove the temple curtains, to women accused of adultery, and to female Nazirites – women living vows of consecration like Saint Anna the prophetess.

We need to remember that by the time of Christ’s incarnation, the temple in Jerusalem was not just a single building for offering sacrifice; it had grown into a great complex the size of a city block or a modern shopping mall, and in a foreshadowing of later Christian monasticism, there were people who lived in the temple complex. Saint Luke writes:

There was also a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but served God with fasting and prayers night and day. (Luke 2:36-37).

Young Mary was no ordinary girl. Given miraculously to an elderly and infertile couple, she is raised in the temple of God, in prayer and worship, and her role models are prophetesses, priests, and consecrated men and women living out vows to God.

It’s about ten years later, when her elderly parents Joachim and Anna have passed away, and the young girl Mary has begun to become a young woman, that the priests at the temple decide it is not appropriate for a young woman to live there, so they choose a wealthy widower – Joseph – to be her protector. His wife has passed away long before, and his sons are already grown, and scripture calls him a tekton, a builder (Matthew 13:55; Mark 6:3). You could imagine a prosperous business, “Joseph & Sons, General Contractors.” So in the priests’ plan, the young virgin Mary would in time become Joseph’s second wife – except she is suddenly found to be pregnant, and she and Joseph both tell that angels have advised them this is a holy miracle.

And this is why the Gospels call her the betrothed, the engaged wife of Joseph. In eastern cultures a betrothal is a sacred and binding act, and it is shameful to break an engagement once it has been announced.

That’s why we read, “Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not wanting to make her a public example, was minded to put her away secretly” (Matthew 1:19-20).

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Listen to the dismissal blessing today: At the end of every Liturgy, you hear the priest ask the prayers “of the righteous and holy ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna.”  Why?  Because we need their prayers.

If you’re a parent, then Joachim and Anna are your intercessors! They set their baby girl on a course toward holiness, and provided for her a life that led her to know and love the Lord. The Church remembers them today on their feast day, but we ask their prayers at every Divine Liturgy because in God’s good pleasure they have become grandparents of the Lord God incarnate, and intercessors for all his people.

The Kontakion hymn for the birth of the Theotokos says:

By thy nativity, O most pure Virgin, Joachim and Anna are set free from barrenness; Adam and Eve are set free from the corruption of death. And we, thy people, being set free from the guilt of sin, celebrate and sing to you: The barren woman gives birth to the Theotokos, the Nourisher of our Life.

To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.