Tuesday in the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 26, 2022

The Feast of Saints Anne and Joachim

Sirach 44, 1; 10-15

Now will I praise those godly men, our ancestors, each in his own time: These were godly men whose virtues have not been forgotten; Their wealth remains in their families, their heritage with their descendants; Through God’s covenant with them their family endures, their posterity for their sake.  And for all time their progeny will endure, their glory will never be blotted out; Their bodies are peacefully laid away, but their name lives on and on. At gatherings their wisdom is retold, and the assembly proclaims their praise.

Often with children, parents and other family members will study carefully their faces in order to see some physical trace of his or her heritage: the color and shape of the eyes, the contours of the nose, the curve of the smile.  We delight on finding these shared traits because they reinforce for us the feeling of connection we have with past generations.  We feel connected.  As the child grows, the presence of certain talents and abilities may be noticed as well, usually to the delight of the one who detects them.  Similarities of this kind could be found in the Lord Jesus as well, for he had taken the flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary and thus inherited much of his appearance and innate talents and traits from her heritage.  It is humbling to think that the Son of God could have his grandfather’s hands and feet and his Mother’s smile, but in becoming incarnate such would be inevitable.  He would have also inherited his handedness through Mary, as well: whether he was right- or left-handed.  His blood type, too — the very rare AB+, to go by the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin, the “universal” blood type which anyone can receive in transfusion.  The Lord Jesus would also have received the sound of his voice this way, and whether or not he could sing well.  If he had any ability with his hands, such as to mold objects from clay, this would have come from his Mother and her parents as well.  As An infant, Jesus would have heard his Mother chatting with him and singing to him, and from him he would have picked up any accent that would have been noticed by the Judeans.  From his Mother, too, he would have heard nursery stories that she had heard from her mother which he could have used for material for his parables.  From his own skill, it would seem that Mary and probably her parents before her had a gift for story-telling.  

Like their contemporaries and their ancestors, Anne and Joachim would have yearned for the coming of the Messiah, for the salvation of Israel, for the righting of all wrongs at the great judgment to come.  They would have lived in or near Nazareth and were Galileans by birth, though their grandparents or earlier forebears came from Judea and were part of the Jewish effort to resettle the uninhabited region of the north after returning from the Babylonian Exile.  They would have played with Jesus as an infant and as a child, and would have heard from Mary and Joseph of the signs of his divinity.  They would have died happy, knowing that their salvation was near.

We give thanks to God for the connections that bind us to our families as we praise him for the gift of Saints Anne and Joachim, who raised their child Mary in her virtue and wisdom to be the Mother of God.