God works both suddenly and slowly, patiently. When St. Ignatius of Loyola asks retreatants to gaze on the world with the Trinity in the Incarnation meditation, our prayer focuses on the Second Person leaping into the world. Salvation history plays out as an election, made by God, at an opportune moment, a singular instance in history.
Today’s memorial reveals how much slow, hidden preparation precedes that decisive moment. Celebrating Joachim and Anne―two figures absent in the New Testament canon but who appear in the apocryphal protoevangelium of James―acknowledges how the Lord guided Joachim and Anne, then Mary and Joseph, and, finally, coming to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We celebrate how patiently the Lord works in history, in families. Rather than a rash, arbitrary choice, the incarnation is the crowning of the Lord working through generations of people who are humble, without need of being recorded in the annals of history.
The Gospel shows Jesus himself to be the one making those preparations, sowing seeds whose fruitfulness will not be fully known until the end of time. May we, too, dedicate ourselves to showing Christian love without need for recognition and with a love of humility, the virtue which thrives in obscurity. After all, it is through those whose life is hidden in Christ that God entered the world in the first place.