Ecumenical Commemoration
July 26
also known as Saints Joachim and Anne, Saint Anne and Saint Joachim
The Parents of the Virgin Mary, honored by tradition under the names Joachim and Anne, are the grandparents of Jesus. The Gospels say nothing of Mary's parents; their names and story come instead from the second-century Gospel of James, an apocryphal text the church never received as Scripture. Yet the veneration of Mary's parents is ancient and tender, the church's instinct that the woman chosen to bear the Son of God was herself the child of faithful and praying people.
The story the church has loved to tell is not in the Bible. It comes from an old book called the Gospel of James, written perhaps around the year 150, which the church valued as devout legend without ever counting it as Scripture; and it should be read in that spirit, as a tradition rather than a record. It tells of a man named Joachim and his wife Anne, well-to-do and devout, who had grown old without a child, and bore that childlessness as a grief and a reproach. Joachim, the apocryphal Gospel of James relates, went out into the wilderness to fast and pray, vowing, "I will not go down either for food or for drink until the Lord my God shall look upon me." And Anne wept at home, crying out in her barrenness that she was not even like the birds of the air, "because even the fowls of the heaven are productive before You, O Lord."
Then, the story says, an angel came to Anne with the news given to so many barren women before her, to Sarah and Hannah and Elizabeth: "Anna, Anna, the Lord has heard your prayer, and you shall conceive." Joachim and Anne met again at the gate of the city and embraced, and in time their daughter was born, and they named her Mary and gave her back to God, presenting her in the Temple. The child who would bear the Savior of the world was herself, the tradition holds, a long-awaited and much-prayed-for gift.
Why does the church keep a feast resting on a story it knows to be legend? Because beneath the legend lies a truth the Gospels themselves imply: that Mary did not appear from nowhere, that she was formed in a home, taught to pray by a mother and a father, raised in the faith of Israel before ever the angel came to her. Joachim and Anne stand for all the hidden, faithful generations that prepare the way of the Lord, the grandparents and parents whose quiet devotion shapes the children through whom God will work. We do not know their names for certain, or anything sure about them. But the church honors them anyway, and in honoring them honors every household where holiness is handed down.
How we know Joachim and Anne is the candid answer that, by the standards of history, we do not. The New Testament never names or describes Mary's parents. Their names appear first in the Gospel of James, an apocryphal infancy gospel of about the middle of the second century, which the church did not receive as Scripture and which the Western authorities classed among the apocrypha. Everything told of Joachim and Anne, their wealth, their barrenness, the angelic announcements, the meeting at the gate, the dedication of Mary in the Temple, comes from that single text and the devotion that grew from it. Yet the tradition is genuinely old: Origen knew of the Book of James in the early third century, and the veneration of Anne is attested in the Christian East by the sixth. They are best understood not as figures of history but as figures of the church's love, honored for the sake of the daughter they are said to have raised.
In the Western calendar Joachim and Anne are kept together on July 26, and the Anglican calendars commemorate the day as that of the Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary; the Eastern church honors them as the Holy Ancestors of God, with the Synaxis of Joachim and Anna on September 9 and the Conception of Mary by Anne on December 9. Saint Anne became one of the most beloved saints of the medieval West, the patron of grandmothers and mothers, of married women and of couples longing for a child. A favorite scene in art shows Joachim and Anne meeting and embracing at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem, taken as the moment of Mary's conception. Their cult is rooted at the Church of Saint Anne in Jerusalem, by the Pools of Bethesda, and carried across the world to shrines like Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec; through it the church gives thanks for the faithful homes in which holiness is nurtured and passed on.
Further reading. Joachim and Anne left no writings, and there is no historical record of them; the whole tradition rests on the apocryphal Gospel of James, available in the public domain in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation of Alexander Walker. It is best read as the church has always read it, as devout legend rather than history.
Online resources. The Gospel of James (the Protevangelium) is freely available in the public domain at New Advent.
Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servants Joachim and Anne, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with them, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21