Reflection on the Gospel – Saturday, July 26, 2025

Feast of Saints Joachim and Anne

The Gospels don’t tell us anything about Mary’s parents—the mother of Jesus. But they do appear in the apocryphal gospels. Of course, Mary didn’t appear out of nowhere. Naturally, she had parents. We know absolutely nothing about them, but because of the virtues we see in Mary, we tend to assume that her parents must have been good people. Maybe even very good people. That’s why we ended up calling them saints—just based on intuition and supposition.

Though, to be honest, children don’t always turn out like their parents. Sometimes, from good parents come children who are a disaster, and from bad parents, almost miraculously, come honest, decent, kind people. And even among siblings, there can be huge differences.

Still, with Joachim and Anne, we’re convinced they were good people. We’ve even made them saints, even though we don’t really know anything about them. Maybe that’s because we tend to project onto them our own idea of what a good family should look like.

Given how little we know, it’s probably best to think simply: that Mary was born into a normal family for her time. That’s where she grew up and matured as a person. She must have learned something in that home about how to relate to God. It couldn’t have been otherwise in that culture. That’s how she was slowly prepared to face all the surprises her son Jesus would bring into her life. Obviously, her parents couldn’t have prepared her for everything she would go through. No parent can do that for their child. Sooner or later, parents have to accept—whether they like it or not—that their children will grow up and make their own decisions, follow their own paths, which may not always match what their parents hoped for.

Mary had to take on the challenge of raising her son and accepting that his path would be completely unique. But the most important thing is that she knew how to stay by his side—even when she didn’t fully understand him—all the way to the cross. Maybe that means she had been well taught by her parents to live in freedom and to raise her son with that same freedom.