She Knew the Time of Her Visitation
MASS Gaudeamus
LESSON Proverbs 31: 10-31
GOSPEL St Matthew 13: 44-52
PROPER LAST GOSPEL St Luke 19:41-47
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
“If thou also hadst known, and that in this thy day, the things that are to thy peace.”
These words are spoken by Our Lord over Jerusalem in the Gospel of the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, commemorated in today’s Mass and read as the Proper Last Gospel. He draws near to the holy city, beholds its Temple, its priests, its sacrifices and its ancient glory—and He weeps. Jerusalem had received the Law, the prophets and the promises. It had been prepared through long centuries for the coming of the Messias. Yet when the hour of visitation arrived, the city did not recognise Him. The Treasure stood at its gates, and Jerusalem did not know the Treasure.
Saint Anne, whose feast the Church keeps today, stands before us as the luminous opposite of that unfaithful city. Jerusalem received the visitation of God and failed to recognise it. Anne received the visitation of God and bowed before the mystery. Jerusalem possessed the Temple but turned it into a marketplace. Anne made her humble household into a sanctuary. Jerusalem clung to what was earthly and lost what was eternal. Anne surrendered what was dearest to her and thereby became the mother of the Mother of God.
This is the greatness of Saint Anne: she knew that God had visited her.
The Church’s Collect expresses her dignity with almost breathless simplicity. God bestowed such grace upon blessed Anne that she merited to become “the mother of the mother of Thine only-begotten Son.” She stands at the threshold of the Incarnation. Before the Annunciation at Nazareth, before the Word was made flesh, before Our Lady spoke her perfect Fiat, there was the hidden preparation of Mary in the house of Joachim and Anne.
The canonical Gospels do not recount the earthly life of Our Lady’s parents, yet ancient Christian tradition, especially the second-century Protoevangelium of James, preserves the memory of their childlessness, their prayer, the birth of Mary and her presentation in the Temple. Saint Anne and Saint Joachim had known sorrow and humiliation. In ancient Israel, childlessness was regarded not merely as a private grief but often as a public reproach. Yet they persevered. They continued in prayer and good works even when Heaven seemed silent.
Then Mary was given to them: the child of promise, the dawn before the rising of the Sun, the immaculate vessel from whom the eternal Word would take flesh.
What must Saint Anne have felt as she looked upon that child? Every Christian mother knows something of the awe with which a newborn child is received. Here is an immortal soul entrusted to human hands, one who belongs finally not to his parents but to God. Yet the mystery placed in Anne’s arms was greater still. The child before her had been preserved by a singular grace from every stain of original sin. In that little face lay the future of Israel; in that frail body, the flesh from which the Redeemer would take His own sacred humanity.
Saint Anne did not need to comprehend the whole design of Providence. She needed only to recognise that the child given to her was God’s gift and therefore God’s possession.
This is why the Epistle speaks so fittingly of the valiant woman. “Who shall find a valiant woman?” Her strength is not noisy. It does not consist in self-display or domination. She rises in the night; she cares for her household; wisdom is upon her lips; the law of clemency is upon her tongue; she looks well to the paths of her house; her lamp is not extinguished in the darkness.
Modernity has taught us to despise hidden labour. It admires whatever is conspicuous, profitable, public or applauded. It scarcely knows how to honour the life spent forming children, guarding a home, caring for the weak and transmitting the Faith. Yet God chose precisely such hidden fidelity as the soil in which the salvation of the world would take root.
Before Our Lady stood beneath the Cross, she had stood beside her mother. Before she wrapped the Divine Infant in swaddling clothes, she had herself been clothed and tended by Saint Anne. Before she taught the Child Jesus the psalms according to His human nature, she had heard those psalms from the lips of her own parents. Before she answered the Archangel, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” she had learnt obedience in a holy home.
Saint Anne’s house was the first school of the Magnificat.
There Mary learnt that greatness in the sight of God is found in humility. There she learnt the silence in which the Divine voice may be heard, the recollection in which grace may be received, and the obedience by which the creature enters freely into the designs of the Creator.
The home is never spiritually neutral. Before children can explain the Faith, they absorb an understanding of reality from the life around them. They learn whether prayer is essential or optional; whether Sunday belongs to God or merely to convenience; whether marriage is a covenant or an arrangement; whether sacrifice is noble or absurd; whether purity is beautiful or embarrassing; whether the Church is a mother to be obeyed or a burden to be endured.
A Catholic household may possess crucifixes, statues and holy pictures, yet still allow its habits and imagination to be ruled by the world. It is possible to give children every material advantage and leave them spiritually destitute. It is possible to prepare them carefully for examinations, careers and social success, while neglecting confession, catechism, mental prayer and the discernment of vocation.
Saint Anne teaches parents that a child is not a possession. A father and mother do not receive an immortal soul in order to mould it according to their own ambitions. They are custodians of one purchased by the Precious Blood of Christ. Their first duty is not to make the child successful in this world, but to prepare him for the next.
Parents naturally say, “I want my child to be happy.” Yet apart from God we do not know what happiness means. The world calls comfort happiness, independence happiness, wealth happiness and freedom from suffering happiness. Saint Anne knew better. She knew that the happiness of the creature consists in belonging to the Creator.
For this reason, the ancient tradition of Mary’s presentation in the Temple expresses the deepest truth of Saint Anne’s motherhood. She received Mary from God, and she gave Mary back to God.
Here the Gospel of the feast opens before us. “The kingdom of Heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field.” Again, it is like a merchant who finds one pearl of great price and sells everything in order to possess it.
Saint Anne found the Treasure. She received the pearl beyond all price. Yet she could possess that gift rightly only by surrendering it.
This is one of the great laws of the spiritual life. Whatever we grasp selfishly, we begin to lose. Whatever we return to God, we receive anew in a higher manner. Abraham received Isaac and was commanded to offer him. Anna received Samuel and brought him to the sanctuary. The Blessed Virgin received the Son of God and offered Him in the Temple, and at last upon Calvary. Love reaches perfection not by possessing the beloved for oneself, but by willing that the beloved belong entirely to God.
Saint Anne therefore speaks with particular force to parents whose children may be called to the priesthood or religious life. There are mothers and fathers who pray for vocations in general but recoil when God calls from their own home. They admire the cassock, the habit and the cloister from a safe distance, yet regard the Divine call as a deprivation when it touches their own family.
Saint Anne teaches them that no greater honour can be bestowed upon a household than that God should ask something from it for Himself. A vocation is not a family tragedy. It is a visitation. The danger is not that God may call; the danger is that He may call and not be recognised.
And now we return to Jerusalem.
Our Lord wept because the city “had not known the time of its visitation.” Christ still weeps over souls and families that fail to recognise Him. He weeps over homes in which His name is seldom spoken; over children instructed in every worldly subject but left ignorant of the Faith; over parents who fear worldly failure more than mortal sin; over Catholic families that preserve an outward identity while their habits are governed by comfort, distraction and human respect.
God’s visitations do not always arrive with signs and wonders. They come in the child entrusted to us, the duty placed before us, the vocation quietly stirring, the illness that calls us to surrender, the opportunity for confession, the demand that we forgive, the neglected prayer we could resume. Grace passes close to us, often in humble form, and the tragedy is that we do not know the hour.
In a few moments, the Treasure hidden in the field will be placed upon this altar. The King over whom the angels rejoice will come beneath the lowly appearances of bread and wine. The Sacrifice of Calvary will be made sacramentally present. The One whom Saint Anne’s daughter bore in her womb will be offered to the Father and given to us in Holy Communion.
May we not fail to recognise Him.
May Saint Anne obtain for us the wisdom to know the time of visitation, the courage to surrender what God asks, and the fidelity to guard what He entrusts. May she teach our mothers to form saints, our fathers to govern their homes in justice and charity, our grandparents to preserve the inheritance of Faith, and our children to hear the call of God without fear.
May our homes become sanctuaries rather than marketplaces, schools of the Magnificat rather than echoes of the world. May wisdom be upon our lips, clemency upon our tongues, and may our lamps remain burning through the night.
Then, when the final net is drawn to shore and the angels separate the just from the wicked, may we be found among those who recognised the Treasure, sold all to possess it, and gave back to God everything He had first given to us.
Saint Anne, mother of the Mother of God, pray for us.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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