On 9 September, the day after the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, the Church commemorates her parents, the holy and righteous Ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna. This order is kept at the great feasts: on the day after the feast, those closest to it are remembered. After the Nativity of the Lord, His Mother is commemorated, on 26 December. After the Baptism of the Lord, Saint John the Forerunner, on 7 January. And after the Nativity of the Theotokos, those who gave her birth.
Of the two, Anna has remained by far the better known. She has a day of her own, 25 July, when her dormition is kept; her name is borne by countless women; to her pray those who have no children. Even the kontakion of 9 September is addressed to her, calling her to rejoice. Joachim is named in every church, several times a day, and almost nothing is ever said about him.
The Gospels say nothing about him. What we know comes from the line of descent preserved by the Fathers and from an old writing called the Protevangelium of James.
Of the line of David
Joachim was of the tribe of Judah and came of the house of King David. He lived in Nazareth of Galilee, he had means, and it was his custom to bring to the Temple a double portion of what he gathered: one part as a sacrifice for himself, the other for all the people.
Saint John of Damascus, in his exposition of the Orthodox faith, in the chapter on the descent of the Lord, sets down the line thus: of Nathan, the son of David, was born Levi; Levi had Melchi and Panther; Panther had Barpanther; and of Barpanther was born Joachim, the father of the Theotokos.
The Gospel according to Matthew and the Gospel according to Luke number the descent of Joseph, not that of the Virgin. Saint John of Damascus gives the reason: the Hebrews did not reckon descent through the women, and the law forbade a man to take a wife out of another tribe. Joseph was a righteous man and of the house of David, and so he would not have betrothed the Virgin against the law, but took her because she was of the same tribe as himself. In showing the descent of Joseph, the Gospel showed hers as well.
And if the Virgin is of the house of David, then the promise given to David, that of his seed the King of the ages would arise, passes through her father. The Apostle writes of the Son of God that He was born “of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3), and this word stands precisely because the Virgin’s descent is what it is, Joseph not being the Lord’s father by nature. Through Joachim, Christ enters, according to the flesh, the line of the kings of Israel.
The gift turned away from the altar
What is known of his life comes from an old writing, the Protevangelium of James, which the Church has not received among the books of Scripture. Its substance, however, entered the hymns of the feasts and was used by the Fathers, and by that road it has come down to us. Whoever reads what follows does well to know where it comes from.
At a feast, when the sons of Israel were bringing their gifts, a certain Reuben stopped him on his way and told him that it was not fitting for him to offer first, since he had raised up no seed in Israel. (Some translations call this Reuben a high priest; the Greek text does not give him the rank.)
Joachim answered him nothing. He went from there to the record of the twelve tribes, the book in which the descent of every man was written, to see whether he alone had been left without offspring in Israel. He searched, and found that all the righteous had raised up offspring. Then he called to mind Abraham, to whom Isaac was given in old age, when by nature there was no longer any ground for hope.
In the world of Israel, childlessness was often reckoned a shame and a sign that the divine blessing was wanting. Joachim bore this reproach at the Temple itself, before those gathered for the feast. Yet those whom men judged for their barrenness were righteous before God.
The forty days
Joachim did not return home. He did not show himself to his wife, but went out into the wilderness, pitched his tent there and fasted forty days and forty nights, saying within himself that he would go down neither for food nor for drink until the Lord should visit him, and that prayer would be to him in the place of food and drink.
The reproach had been laid upon him before all the people, and he neither demanded justice of the priest nor carried the blame home to his wife. He took the reproach with him into the wilderness and turned it into prayer.
The number of the days is not set down at random. Forty days Moses remained on the mountain, forty days Elijah walked as far as Horeb, forty days the Lord fasted in the wilderness after His Baptism. It is the measure of a waiting no longer counted by any human clock, which lasts until God answers.
And God answered. The angel stood before each of them, in places apart, and announced to them that a daughter would be born to them through whom the whole race of men would be blessed.
The return to the altar
Immediately after the announcement, Joachim called his shepherds and gave order that there be brought to him ten she-lambs without blemish, to be offered to the Lord; twelve calves, to be for the priests and the elders; and a hundred goats, to be for all the people. Then he set out with his flocks toward Jerusalem.
The man who had been turned away from the altar returns to the altar with a double gift. And of that gift there partake the very priests who had refused him, and the people before whom he had been shamed. This man did not hold the wrong done to him in remembrance.
At the gate of the city, which was called the Golden Gate, Anna came to meet him. The icon depicts this meeting under the name of the Embrace at the Golden Gate.
The promise fulfilled
Anna had vowed that the child, whether son or daughter, would be given to the Lord and would serve Him all the days of its life. When the child was three years old, Joachim said that she should be brought to the Temple, lest the promise remain unfulfilled and their gift be found unacceptable. They brought her with lamps and gave her to the priests. That day the Church keeps on 21 November, the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple.
For fifty years he asked for a child. After three years he gave her back.
His end
Some years after the child was brought to the Temple, Joachim departed to the Lord, being eighty years old. Anna was left a widow, left Nazareth and went to Jerusalem, to be near her daughter and to pray in the house of God; after two years she also reposed, being seventy-nine.
Joachim did not live to see Him for whose sake his daughter had been given to him. He died before the Annunciation, before Bethlehem, before the Son of God became man of his daughter. He stood, as did all the righteous of the Old Covenant, one step short of the fulfilment, holding the promise in his hands and not seeing the thing promised. The Righteous Simeon would receive the Child in his arms and ask to depart in peace; the Child’s grandfather had gone before.
The name heard at every dismissal
At the end of every service the priest says the dismissal, the last petition, in which he calls down the mercy of God for 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. They are commemorated also at the Proskomedia, when the priest takes out the particles for the saints.
The patron saint changes from one church to another, the saint of the day changes from one day to the next, and their names remain. The reason lies in the very title the Church gives the two of them. She calls them Ancestors of God, because of their line was born the One who is God. In the dismissal the saints are named according to how near they stand to Christ, and nearer to Him according to the flesh than the parents of His Mother there is no one; through those who have the greatest boldness the Church asks for mercy.
This order confesses the Incarnation. He who was incarnate did not take flesh in appearance only, but was truly born, of a particular line and in a particular house, and the faithful hear this said aloud as they leave the church, evening after evening and day after day.
The place of the names within the sequence differs a little from one local Church to another. The Romanian Service Book commemorates them last, after the patron saint and the saint of the day, immediately before the words “and of all the saints”; in Greek and Antiochian usage they are said earlier, and in Slavic usage between the patron saint and the saint of the day. The difference comes from the local redactions of the service books and touches only the order, for the commemoration itself is made everywhere alike.
Joachim left behind him no written teaching and no saying that has been preserved. He left a daughter. And the Church, for centuries, says his name at the end of every service, as though telling us each time where the Mother of our Life came from.
Holy and righteous Ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna, pray to God for us.
The sources of what is written here
The Protevangelium of James. From here come: the refusal at the altar and the words of Reuben, the search in the record of the twelve tribes, the remembrance of Abraham, the forty days in the wilderness and the saying that prayer would be his food and drink, the ten she-lambs, the twelve calves and the hundred goats, and the decision to bring the child to the Temple at three years old. The writing is not among the books of Scripture; the Church has received from it only what entered the hymns of the feasts and the homilies of the Fathers.
Saint John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, Book IV, the chapter concerning the genealogy of the Lord and the holy Theotokos. From here come the line Nathan–Levi–Panther–Barpanther–Joachim and the explanation of why the Gospels number the descent of Joseph.
The Lives of the Saints. From here come the ages: eighty years for Joachim, seventy-nine for Anna, two years after him, and her removal from Nazareth to Jerusalem. It should be said that in many places Anna is written to have reposed at seventy; that figure agrees neither with his age nor with the nearly fifty years of their marriage, and the Lives of the Saints give seventy-nine.
The hymns of the day. The troparion is the common one of the righteous, in the second tone, and the kontakion, also in the second tone, is addressed to Saint Anna. These were taken from a synaxarion collection and not from the printed Menaion, and remain to be checked against it.