25 July
On 25 July the Church celebrates the dormition of Saint Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary. She and her husband, Joachim, asked God for a child for almost fifty years and were not given one. Anna gave birth only in old age, long after the time for bearing children had passed, and the daughter she bore then would carry the Son of God in her womb. For this the Church calls them both the Ancestors of God, and honours Anna as one who prayed for many years without receiving an answer and did not abandon her prayer.
The Family She Came From
Saint Anna was born of the tribe of Levi, the priestly tribe, while Joachim descended from the tribe of Judah, of the house of David. In their household the two orders through which God had carried Israel until then came together: the priesthood and the kingship.
Tradition holds that Anna’s father, the priest Matthan, had three daughters: Mary, Sobe and Anna. From the first was born Salome; from the second, Elizabeth, the mother of the Forerunner; and from Anna was born the Virgin Mary. This explains the angel’s word to the Virgin, who spoke to her of Elizabeth and called her “your kinswoman” (Luke 1:36).
Her name comes from the Hebrew Hannah and means grace. From Anna would be born the one whom the angel called full of grace (Luke 1:28).
Joachim pastured his flocks himself and divided their yield in three: one part he gave to the poor, to widows and to strangers, one part he brought to the Temple, and from the third he kept his household. He did this from his youth, and God multiplied his flocks. This ordering of their life should be remembered, because everything that followed fell upon two people who walked in the commandments of the Lord.
Fifty Years Without a Child
Joachim and Anna grew old together without being given a child. In Israel, barrenness weighed more heavily than a sorrow of the household: it was reckoned a sign that God’s blessing had departed from that person, and whoever had no descendants remained outside the promise given to Abraham. To this was added a loss we overlook today. Every house in Israel hoped that from it the Messiah would arise, or at least someone who would live to see Him; having no children, these two lost that portion as well. Even the people who loved them looked on them with pity.
The Feast of the Dedication of the Temple was approaching, which is kept for eight days toward the end of November or the beginning of December, and the sons of Israel were bringing their gifts to Jerusalem. When Joachim came with his own, the high priest Reuben would not receive them, telling him that it was not fitting for a man whom God had not blessed with descendants in Israel to bring sacrifice to God. Joachim went out weeping from the court of the men. He then asked to see the registers of the twelve tribes, to learn whether he alone had been left without a descendant in all Israel; he searched them and found that all those recorded there had raised up descendants. Then he remembered Abraham, to whom God gave a son at the end of his life.
He did not return home, lest the neighbours who had been present and had heard the high priest’s rebuke should mock him in the same way. He went far off into the mountains, to his flocks, pitched his tent there, and said that he would not come down for food or water until God looked upon him, and that prayer would be his food and drink. He remained there forty days, in fasting and prayer.
Anna was left alone, and she wept for two things at once: her barrenness and the absence of her husband. When the feast drew near, she took off her garment of mourning and went down into the garden. She sat beneath a laurel tree and asked the God of her fathers to open her womb as He had opened Sarah’s. Lifting her eyes, she saw a sparrow’s nest in the laurel and, weeping over her barrenness, she compared herself in turn with the birds of heaven, with the beasts of the earth, with the waters and the fish within them, with the earth itself: all bear fruit before the Lord, only she bore none.
At that same time the angel stood before each of them, in separate places. He told Joachim that God had seen the reproach unjustly brought upon him, “for God punishes sins, not the things of nature”; and that He closes the womb precisely so that, opening it wondrously, it may be known that the child born in this way comes as a gift from Him. He then reminded him of the succession of barren women from whom God had brought forth fruit: Sarah, who bore Isaac in old age, Rachel, who bore Joseph, and the mothers of Samson and Samuel. Anna was thus entering an ancient order which Scripture repeats from generation to generation, and which did not stop with her: years later, again from a closed womb and again in old age, the Forerunner was born of Elizabeth, her sister’s daughter. From Sarah came Isaac, from Anna the Virgin, from Elizabeth the one who showed the Lord to the world.
To Anna the angel announced that she would conceive and bear, and that the fruit of her womb would be spoken of throughout the world. She promised then that if a child were given her, whether a boy or a girl, she would bring it as a gift to the Lord, and the child would serve Him all the days of its life. With the same words, centuries earlier, the other Anna had promised — the mother of the prophet Samuel, barren as well, praying in the house of the Lord (1 Samuel 1:11). It is the same name and it is the same vow.
The angel also gave Joachim a sign: he would meet his wife at the gate of Jerusalem called the Golden Gate, because it was overlaid with gold. Anna went up with her handmaids and stood a long while before the gate, waiting. When she had begun to grow anxious from so much waiting, she lifted her eyes and saw Joachim in the distance, coming with his flocks; she ran to meet him and embraced him about the neck. The icon depicts this meeting under the name of the Embrace at the Golden Gate.
This account does not come from the Gospels. It was preserved by ancient writings which the Church did not receive among the books of Scripture, the most important of them being the Protoevangelium of James. Even so, their substance entered the hymns of the feasts and was used by the Fathers — among them Saint John of Damascus, Saint Germanus of Constantinople, Saint Leo the Wise and Saint Gregory Palamas — and through this liturgical reception it has reached us. Whoever reads the life of Saint Anna does well to know where what he reads comes from: from the Tradition which the Church has sifted and kept, not from the Gospel text.
The Fruit of the Promise
The day after the meeting at the gate, Joachim brought his gifts to the Temple, and returning home, Anna conceived by him. On 9 December the Church celebrates this conception, the day on which her barren womb was opened. The wonder lay in the opening of that aged womb, while the conception was accomplished according to the order of nature, of man and woman. The Church has carefully guarded this distinction: there has been only one seedless conception, that of the Lord, in the womb of the Virgin.
The Virgin Mary was born, and Joachim and Anna fulfilled what they had promised: at three years old they brought her to the Temple and dedicated her to God. Anna gave back the gift for which she had prayed into old age. The measure of her holiness is seen here: she asked for many years without weakening, and when she received, she did not keep for herself what she had received.
The Dormition
The sources do not agree about the years. Some say that Joachim fell asleep first, at about eighty, a little while after the Virgin had been brought to the Temple, and that Anna followed him some years later, in Jerusalem. What Tradition holds without wavering is that both fell asleep before the Annunciation.
Saint Anna therefore did not live to see with her own eyes the fulfilment of what the angel had said. She heard that from her daughter all mankind would be blessed, left her at the Temple, and departed this life still carrying a promise not yet fulfilled.
The tomb of the two is shown to this day in Jerusalem, in the crypt beneath the church of Saint Anna, near the pool of Bethesda; that place is honoured as the house of Joachim and Anna and the birthplace of the Virgin.
The word the Church sets at the head of the day is “dormition.” It uses it for few commemorations: for the Theotokos on 15 August, for Saint John the Evangelist on 26 September, and for Saint Anna today. The word is old — Scripture used it earlier for the end of the righteous, who “slept with their fathers” — but the Resurrection of the Lord gave it its ground: sleep calls for waking, and He who rose from the dead made that waking possible. This is why the day does not bear in the calendar the name of death.
The Commemoration at the End of Every Service
The veneration of Saint Anna is not confined to the three days marked in the calendar. At the close of every service the priest pronounces the dismissal and asks God’s mercy through the prayers of the saints, and in that sequence the names of the holy and righteous Ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna, are heard every time. The saint of the temple changes from one church to another, the saint of the day changes from one day to the next, and the names of these two remain. They are also commemorated at the Proskomedia, when the priest removes the particles for the saints.
This ordering confesses the Incarnation. The name the Church gives the two is “Ancestors of God” — that is, the forebears according to the flesh of God incarnate. In pronouncing them as the faithful leave the church, the priest leaves in their hearing the truth that the Son of God was born of a woman who herself had a father and a mother, in a family with a lineage and a house in Nazareth. The Lord did not appear to the world in semblance; He entered the human race through the door by which every man enters.
The order of the names in the dismissal follows nearness to Christ. After His Mother, those closest to Him according to the flesh are her parents, and the Church asks for mercy through those who have gained the greatest boldness before Him.
The placing of these names within the sequence varies slightly from one Church to another. The Romanian Liturgikon commemorates them last, after the saint of the temple and the saint of the day, immediately before the words “and of all the saints”; in Greek and Antiochian usage they are pronounced earlier, before these. The difference comes from local redactions of the service books and concerns only the order; the commemoration itself is made the same everywhere.
Her Relics and Her Veneration
According to tradition, the relics of Saint Anna were brought from Jerusalem to Constantinople in the eighth century and placed in a church raised in her honour; portions of them were then distributed throughout the Orthodox world.
On the Holy Mountain, on the slopes beneath the peak of Athos, above the sea, stands the skete that bears her name — the largest of the sketes of the Mountain, under the Great Lavra. There the left foot of Saint Anna is kept, and to her reliquary have climbed, for centuries, spouses to whom no child has been given.
Nearby, on the path leading toward Katounakia, lies Little Saint Anna, and below it, toward the sea, a few caves. There Saint Joseph the Hesychast settled in January 1938 together with Father Arsenios: they built a chapel of Saint John the Forerunner and three cells of wood, wattle and clay, and around them seven strugglers gathered over the years. For thirteen years Elder Joseph kept there, under the patronage of Saint Anna, the severe rule of vigil and of the prayer of the heart, until in 1951 the infirmities of the brotherhood brought him down to New Skete. From his disciples arose the brotherhoods that renewed six of the monasteries of the Holy Mountain, and he himself fell asleep in 1959, on the very day the Mountain was keeping, by the old calendar, the Dormition of the Mother of God: the one who had struggled under the mother’s protection was taken on the feast of the daughter.
In Romania her patronage is borne, among others, by the monastery at Rohia and by the monastery above the Danube, at Orșova.
What This Day Asks of Us
To Saint Anna have come, for centuries, those to whom no child has been given, and the Church sends them there. Anna prayed for fifty years without receiving an answer and did not abandon her prayer. When it was given her, she brought the gift back to the Temple. Her prayer was heard because it was the prayer of someone who had remained God’s own through the years in which God was silent.
Not every request receives the answer we expect, and the lives of the saints were not written to persuade us otherwise. Saint Anna teaches us how one remains in prayer when the answer is late and those around us reckon God’s silence a judgement upon us.
From what Anna did after she received, we also learn what is to be done with a gift. The child asked for over half a century did not remain in her house: at three years old she brought her to the Temple and left her there, as she had promised. For parents this teaching is hard: children are received from God and remain His, and the parent raises them for Him. And not only children — everything we obtain through prayer remains the possession of the One who gave it, and the sign that we have truly received it is that we are able to give it back.
But Saint Anna does not belong only to the childless. Her whole life was spent at home: beside her husband, with the household and the flocks, with almsgiving apportioned by rule, among neighbours who reckoned her abandoned by God. Her road did not pass through the desert and did not end in martyrdom; it was the road of a married woman who bore her household and kept her prayer. By this road she came to be among the greatest saints of the Church, and the Church did not leave her to remain a saint sought out only in need: it placed her name, together with Joachim’s, at the end of every service, in the hearing of all. Whoever lives out life in marriage and in the cares of every day has in her the witness that from this life, just as it is, holiness is worked.
At the end of her life, all Saint Anna had was a daughter left at the Temple and a promise not yet fulfilled. With that she fell asleep. A few years later, from that daughter was born the Saviour of the world.
Sources
Narrative sources — ancient writings not received into the canon of Scripture, but received into the liturgical Tradition: the Protoevangelium of James, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the Gospel of the Nativity of Mary.
Fathers who refer to these accounts:
- Saint John of Damascus, Homily II, On the Nativity of the Mother of God, 2 — P.G. 96, 708
- Saint Germanus of Constantinople, Sermon on the Entrance into the Temple of the Theotokos — P.G. 98, 313
- Saint Leo the Wise, Homily on Her Who Sprang from a Barren Womb — P.G. 107, 1
- Saint Gregory Palamas, Homilies, Homily 37, “On the All-Venerable Dormition of Our Most Pure Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary” — P.G. 151, 461 (the subject of the homily is the Dormition of the Theotokos; it is cited here for its references to Joachim and Anna)
Hymnography:
- Menaion for July, 25 July — the service of the Dormition of Saint Anna
- Menaion for December, 9 December — stichera at Vespers and at the Canon of Matins
- Menaion for September, 8 September — Oikos at the Canon of Matins
- Saint Romanos the Melodist, On the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, Tone IV, strophes 2–3
- Saint Ephraim the Syrian, Hymns on the Nativity, Hymn 14
Edition used for the narrative: Viața Preasfintei Născătoare de Dumnezeu și Pururea Fecioarei Maria, edited by Archim. Constantin Chirilă, translated from English by Nun Theodora Videscu and Constantin Fădur, Doxologia, Iași, 2013, chapter I, pp. 21–29. The quotation from the angel’s word to Joachim: p. 25.