The mystery of Christ’s Incarnation is fathomless; we can never exhaust our contemplation of the mystery whereby the Only-begotten of the Father became man in time. And as we celebrate the feast of St. Anna, the mother of the all-holy Theotokos, we are reminded of one of the many small miracles of the Incarnation: Christ, when he was conceived of Mary, accepted not just a Mother but an entire lineage, as the genealogies included in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke drive home. He entered fully into the story of humanity, including the story written in our bodies, in our blood, in our DNA. He came to redeem not the abstract, but the concrete: human beings in all our folly, in all the dimensions of our fallen reality, including the often-inglorious reality of our family histories. His own family history was not spotless—David and Bathsheba, Judah and Tamar, Rahab the harlot. But just as he came to redeem the concrete, so does his redemption take concrete form: out of the chaos of history and genealogy, he chose a pure-hearted couple, Joachim and Anna, to give miraculous birth to the spotless Maiden whom he desired as Mother, the most holy Theotokos and Ever-virgin Mary.
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