26 July 2022 – Memorial of Joachim and Anne, parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary – Tuesday of the 17th week in Ordinary Time – Jeremiah 14:17-22

     In our reading from Jeremiah, 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 many people are not 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 drought.  I wonder if some of the people in 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.  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 in Tupelo 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. I explained to him that we also have the teachings of the Magisterium and Tradition.  A lot of what we know about Mary and Jesus is filled in by what the Magisterium and Tradition teaches us, by what was passed down to us from the Early Church. As we celebrate the lives of Anne and Joachim today, may 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 the prophet Jeremiah today.