September 9 · Joachim and Anna

Joachim and Anna · Read aloud

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Yesterday the Church opened the door.

She kept a Great Feast. She sang that a girl-child had been born, and her name is Mary. She called it a day of universal joy.

Today is not that day again.

Today is the Afterfeast. The joy is still in the house. The hymns of the birth are still being sung. And today the Church does a particular thing she loves to do the morning after a Great Feast.

She gathers the people God used.

She gathers the parents.

The Church remembers more than one name on the ninth of September. She remembers the Martyr Severian of Sebaste, and Venerable Joseph of Volokolamsk, and the uncovering of the relics of Saint Theodosius of Chernigov, and other holy names. Those are true days. We will not tell those whole lives this morning.

This morning she asks us to look at the mother and the father.

Their names are Joachim and Anna. The Church calls them the Holy and Righteous Ancestors of God.

Do you hear that word — ancestors of God? Not because they are older than He is. Because the Son of God took flesh from their daughter. Their house became the house He entered. That is why the Church will not let the feast of her birth go by without turning, the very next day, and saying their names out loud.

Who are they?

Saint Joachim was the son of Barpathir, of the tribe of Judah, a descendant of King David. God had revealed to David that the Savior of the world would be born from his seed. Saint Anna was the daughter of Matthan the priest, of the tribe of Levi. Her family came from Bethlehem.

The couple lived at Nazareth in Galilee.

They were childless into their old age, and all their life they grieved over this. They had to endure derision and scorn, since at that time childlessness was considered a disgrace. They never grumbled. They fervently prayed to God, humbly trusting in Him.

That is who they are. Not a palace. Not a story the Gospels write down by name. A house in Nazareth that waited, and did not turn against God.

Once, during a great feast, Joachim took gifts to Jerusalem as an offering to God. The priest Reuben would not accept them. He considered that a childless man was not worthy to offer sacrifice to God.

Those are the Church's words. We will not invent others.

This pained the old man very much. He regarded himself the most sinful of people. He decided not to return home. He went and settled in solitude in a desolate place.

When Saint Anna learned what humiliation her husband had endured, she sorrowfully entreated God to grant her a child. In his desolate solitude the righteous Joachim also asked God for this.

The prayer of the saintly couple was heard.

An angel told them that a daughter would be born to them, who would be blessed above all other women. He also told them that she would remain a virgin, would be dedicated to the Lord and live in the Temple, and would give birth to the Savior.

We will not invent the angel's sentences. The Church has told us what the message was.

Obeying the instructions of the heavenly messenger, Saints Joachim and Anna met at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem.

That is the scene on the old panel we looked at. Two people who had waited a long time, gathered at a gate. God had not forgotten them. He had been preparing them.

Then, as God promised, a daughter was born to them, and they named her Mary.

We will not tell that birth this morning as if the Great Feast had come a second time. Yesterday the Church kept it. This morning it is enough to know the name, and the parents who received her.

The Church has a word for what she is doing this morning. She calls it a synaxis — a gathering. The day after she keeps the Nativity of the Theotokos, she comes together around the two who waited, who prayed, who received the child. She does the same kind of thing after other Great Feasts: the morning after Christ's Nativity she gathers His Mother; the morning after Theophany she gathers the Forerunner. Today she gathers Joachim and Anna, honoring them as her parents.

Do you hear what she is singing for them? Not only yesterday's joy. Their own memory.

"The divine Church radiantly keeps feast today, joyfully celebrating your honorable memory."

And again: "Anna is now no longer barren and nurses the All-Pure One! She rejoices and calls us all to sing a hymn of praise to Christ."

Saint Joachim died a few years later, at the age of eighty, after his daughter went to live in the Temple. Saint Anna died at the age of seventy, two years after her husband. The Church remembers this. We will not turn it into another feast this morning. We only say: they did the long work of waiting, and then they were taken, and the child they had given to God remained in His house.

The Church still asks their prayers, especially for houses that are waiting for a child.

The word we heard this morning is a weekday word, not a feast pair: "Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made." Joachim is of David's house, of Abraham's line. The priest said a childless man was not worthy. The promise was older than that refusal. The law, the Church reads, cannot make the promise of none effect.

And the Gospel is the Lord sending the twelve forth by two and two. A pair. A house they are to enter and abide in. Joachim and Anna were a pair who kept asking together when the Temple said no. Today the Church gathers them as that pair.

The psalm we held in the hand is not a lectionary appointment. It is a word that already knows their names: "who settles the barren woman in a house, as a mother rejoicing over children."

That is why the Church will not let yesterday's feast stand alone. She turns, the very next morning, and gathers the mother and the father. She says their honorable memory. She lets Anna call us to sing.

And today, so many hundreds of years later, on the day after the Great Feast, we say their names once more, out loud, together — holy and righteous Joachim and Anna, ancestors of God — and they are praying for us still.