The
people of Israel are suffering, yet they are not afraid to ask God why. They cry out to God: Have you cast Judah
off? Is Zion loathsome to you? The
people acknowledge their own sins and the sins of their fathers, sins that were
committed against God. They
ask God to remember the covenant that he made with them, to forgive them in
honor of his own name.
We
live in a society where so many people aren’t willing to acknowledge the wrongs
that they have done. It is
so much easier to blame the system, to blame someone else, to sue someone, to
not take responsibility. The
people in the Old Testament were confronting God in the midst of suffering from
a great draught. I
wonder if some of the people of California and the American West who are in the
midst of a terrible drought ever cry out to God in the same way.
In the midst of this acknowledgement by the
people of Ancient Israel, we celebrate today the memorial of St Joachim and St
Anne, the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They
are not mentioned by name in the Bible, but they have been honored since the
days of the early Church. Tradition tells us that Joachim and Anne were an older couple without children
when they were given the gift of a daughter.
When their daughter, Mary, was with child herself, both Joachim and Anne
were notified separately by an angel of the Lord of this good news, which was
the same way Joseph and Mary both heard the news of the upcoming birth of Jesus. C. Since their daughter was specifically
chosen for this special role in the history of salvation, we can only imagine
the holiness and example of faith that Anne and Joachim gave her as she grew up
in their home. We
celebrate the lives of Anne and Joachim and the example of faith that they are
for us.
I
remember having a conversation with a young man from Shreveport, Louisiana who
was helping us paint the church after the tornado. He was of an Evangelical Protestant
background; he asked me in a lot of questions about our Catholic faith. He
could not get over that we in the Catholic faith don't go by Scripture alone,
but rather have the teachings of the Magisterium and Tradition to help us with
what the Church teaches of the faith. A lot
of what we know about Mary and Jesus is filled in by what the Magisterium and
Tradition teaches, by what was passed down to us from the Early Church. Let
us celebrate the lives of Anne and Joachim today. We
give thanks for their place in the history of salvation. Let
us do so in the same spirit of humility in which the people approached God in the
Old Testament reading from Jeremiah today.
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