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On the Feast of Saints Joachim and Anne, Grandparents of Jesus

We live in an age that is somewhat obsessed with genealogies. Various companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe offer you the chance to mail in a sample of your DNA for an opportunity to discover more about your family tree, or where your ancestors came from (although giving one’s genetic info to a private firm amy not be the greatest of ideas). Hey, inquiring minds wanna know.

All of this is is really an attempt to answer fundamental questions of the human experience: Who am I? Where do I come from? No matter what the answers to those questions are from a physical/historical point of view, ultimately we all came from God (who created all things and gave us all an immortal soul at the moment of conception), and are going to God (provided we pass from this world in a state of Grace — that is, in God’s friendship).

And that’s where the modern ancestry craze meets the Bible, which is filled with genealogies. When reading them, like the genealogy of Jesus contained in Matthew 1, for example, one can at times feel like one is reading a phone book (remember those?). But biblical family trees are important, especially when it comes to that of Jesus. They remind us that God works through very imperfect people (just like you and me), living in a very imperfect world, to bring about his designs.

Today is the Feast day of Ss. Joachim and Anne, the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As such they are important members of Jesus’ family tree, according to the flesh. We know their names only through extrabiblical traditions and documents such as the noncanonical Protoevangelium of James, which may — or may not — give us any real, historical information about Mary’s early life. That’s another post for another day. Such traditions say that they resided in Sepphoris, which was near Nazareth.

I think one of the main takeaways of today’s feast is that Joachim and Anne belong to the so-called “hidden life” of Jesus. Jesus lived an ordinary life for the vast majority of his life on Earth prior to his public ministry, and there’s certainly a message there for us. Jesus sanctified his everyday work, worship, and family activities, and that included his relationship with his grandparents. As Fr. Steve Grunow writes in the Word on Fire blog:

Their role in Christ’s life? We can only guess. What we do know is that Christ must have had grandparents, and if the role that most grandparents play in our lives is any indication, their impact on him was likely quite profound.

Perhaps they were part of a nexus of relatives that nurtured him and helped him to negotiate and understand the world. Did he help his grandfather up from his bed and lead him to sit in the cool shade of a tree? Did he soothe his grandmother’s gnarled and calloused hands? Did he beg from them stories about the old days or for tales about his mother when she was just a little girl? Maybe their deaths were the first deaths that touched him deeply. Was it in their aged faces that he saw how brief, fragile, and wonderful life in this world really is? Did he ask of them their thoughts about God? Did they know his secret?

I am often taken by how quickly the mystery of the Incarnation can be emptied of its true content and dulled in its impact. As children, the tale of Christ’s Holy Birth can hold us enrapt at attention. But since it is a story that we identify as familiar, it can wrongly be thought of as just one more of many seasonal tales. This perception on our part is a grave mistake because the Incarnation is not just a story, it is the story — a story that describes the most surprising and uncanny event that has ever or will ever happen. God accepted for himself a human nature and lived a real human life. This means that he accepted, not just a human nature in the abstract, but as it is embedded in the real circumstances of this world. God chose a family for himself. He submitted himself to having to learn about life in the context of a particular culture at a particular time and place. Because the human nature he chose was real, God in Christ called two people his grandmother and grandfather…

This is a great day to pray for our own grandparents, and for their repose if they have passed into eternity. I’m always amazed by how many people I meet who say that it was a grandmother or grandfather who introduced them to a living relationship with Jesus Christ. And if you’re a grandparent yourself, don’t underestimate the spiritual impact you can have on those around you.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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Lessons From Big-City Jesus

Sepphoris Theatre

Here’s my latest piece for Catholic Answers Magazine. Hope you enjoy this look at the big city next door to little Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown – and how it may have influenced him.

My favorite basketball player growing up was the legendary Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics. The media (and Larry himself) liked to play up his humble, small-town roots, dubbing him the “Hick from French Lick,” the small Indiana town where Bird grew up. He was just a kid from the sticks who made good.

For centuries, preachers have similarly accented the alleged small-town roots of Jesus. Nazareth, where Jesus grew up, is usually portrayed in homilies as a type of isolated backwater, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the empire.

Now, it’s certainly true that in Jesus’ day Nazareth was relatively tiny, with a population somewhere between 200 and 400. But recent archaeological excavations around Nazareth, which today is a relatively bustling city of about 60,000, have quashed the quaint myth that Jesus grew up among “country bumpkins” removed from major centers of commerce and culture.

One of the most important of these digs took place at Sepphoris, which is located about four miles north of Nazareth. Sepphoris, which Roman historian Josephus called “the ornament of all Galilee,” was the largest and one of the most important cities in the area. In fact, a highway linking the two other major regional centers—Caesarea Maritima and Tiberias—was not far from Nazareth and Sepphoris.

Considering its proximity to Nazareth, it’s highly likely that Jesus would have traveled to Sepphoris on many occasions. In fact, according to an early Church tradition, the Blessed Virgin Mary hailed from Sepphoris. One could easily imagine Jesus, Mary, and Joseph making the trip to see Jesus’ grandparents, Joachim and Anne, on many an occasion.

It is also possible that Joseph and Jesus worked in Sepphoris during its period of heavy expansion under Herod Antipas from 4 B.C. to A.D. 39. The Greek word tekton—which the Gospels employ to describe Jesus’ and Joseph’s occupation—actually means much more than “carpenter.” It refers to a highly skilled laborer who would have been proficient in working with stone as well as wood and other materials. (In fact, it is likely that Joseph and Jesus would have had architectural abilities as well. One might even say they were the equivalent of modern-day engineers.) Antipas had originally intended to make Sepphoris his headquarters, and he installed some beautiful architecture there in the Greco-Roman style, including magnificent colonnaded streets and an impressive theater (more on that later).

The Sepphoris excavations are also important for debunking a popular skeptical theory. The scholar (and ex-Catholic priest) John Dominic Crossan argues that, in his early life, Jesus came under the sway of itinerant Cynic philosophers in Sepphoris who greatly influenced his teaching. But excavations at the city dump have determined that, at the time of Jesus, Sepphoris’s inhabitants were anything but pagan.

Only in strata (layers of cultural remains in the earth, representing different eras) dated after A.D. 70 do we find pig bones and other evidence of Hellenizing influences, consistent with growth in the city’s non­-Jewish population following the failed Jewish revolt of 66­-70. It seems the citizens of Sepphoris in Jesus’ time kept to a kosher diet.

Furthermore, coins minted in Sepphoris prior to 70 do not depict the image of the emperor as a deity, which would have offended devout Jews, even though such currency was common elsewhere in the empire. After the year 70, this is not the case. Also, stone vessels and miqva’ot (ritual bathing pools) used for Jewish purification rites, as well as menorahs, have also been found from the pre­-70 period.

In short, Sepphoris was in all likelihood a mostly—if not completely—Jewish city at the time of Jesus. It is therefore improbable that Jesus came under the sway of pagan Cynics during his early life in and around Nazareth. His teaching, like the area he hailed from, was thoroughly Jewish.

Sepphoris is also a potential boon for understanding and clarifying certain aspects of Jesus’ teachings. We know that Jesus was a master at pointing out profound lessons from the everyday world (for example, his many agricultural parables). I believe there is a high probability that Sepphoris was a part of that world and that it figures prominently in Jesus’ preaching—especially as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. The “city set on a hill [that] cannot be hidden” (Matt. 5:14) may have been inspired by Sepphoris, which was elevated. Its evening lights would have been visible to the inhabitants of Nazareth.

Excavations at Sepphoris also reveal a splendid public theater, carved out of the local bedrock and initially seating about 2,500. Could it be that Jesus and Joseph worked on its construction? But Jesus’ references to “hypocrites” (Matt. 6:2, 5, 16; 7:5; 15:7; 16:3; 22:18; 23:13-15, 23, 25, 27-29; 24:51; Luke 6:42; 11:44; 12:1, 56; 13:15), an originally innocuous word that referred to “actors” or “play-actors,” may have been expropriated from the theater at Sepphoris. Jesus used the term to excoriate the people-pleasing, insincere piety of some scribes and Pharisees.

Jesus likewise admonishes his disciples not to practice their piety “before people, in order to be seen by them” (Matt. 6:1). The term translated as “to be seen” is the Greek word theathenai, from which we derive the English word theater. Jesus teaches his followers not to “be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others” (Matt. 6:5). This may allude to an actor who stands and performs a soliloquy on stage.

In contrast, Jesus encourages us to live not for the applause of others but rather for the applause of One: God alone.

Church Fathers, such as St. Jerome, referred to the Holy Land as the “Fifth Gospel” because it helps put the life of Jesus in context. It helps us to understand many of Jesus’ teachings and activities. It also helps us understand how the four written, canonical Gospels are indeed trustworthy, because they exhibit verisimilitude—that is, that they cohere with the way things actually were in the Israel of Jesus’ day. That’s why archaeological discoveries like those at Sepphoris shed so much light on the teachings of Christ.

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