This Advent reminds us that “God-is-with-us.” Just not as we might expect.

By Johnny Zokovitch

In St. Louis, where I live, 300 people have been picked up by ICE since August. Just this past week, two people were arrested by ICE agents and sent to a detention center in St. Genevieve, over an hour away from their homes and families. The church where I work is offering material and moral support to more than 30 immigrant families who are afraid to attend church, shop for groceries, send their children to school or sports, go to work, or venture out from their homes for nearly any reason lest they too be grabbed off the street, detained, and deported.

This weekend, the people of God find ourselves entering into the season of Advent, a time often marked as a period of waiting and listening, of preparation for the entrance into history of a baby who will embody both peace and God’s presence with us. But the gospel that we read this Sunday from Matthew offers none of the reassurance or comfort that we sometimes associate with the season.

Matthew’s words (24:37-44) land less like a far off prophecy of some supernatural rapture and more like an accurate description of what is happening, for instance around immigration, in our own country at this very moment. Changing the words slightly drives the point home:

“Two men are driving to work; one is taken and one is left.
Two women go to drop their children off at school; one is taken and one is left.”

This gospel ushering us into Advent rings out too as a warning to those of us who have eyes but don’t see, ears yet don’t hear. What awaits those among us who are like the people in the days of Noah – pre-flood – oblivious to people in our own communities being systematically disappeared? Do the uber-rich and powerful busy eating and drinking and making merry on super-yachts in Venice at the wedding of a modern-day corporate robber baron feel the threat carried in those first raindrops, soon to become a flood that will sweep them away?

Scripture scholar and theologian Karl Barth challenged us to “hold the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” the implication being that the word of God becomes a living word when we use it as a lens to see clearly what is happening in the world around us, reading the signs of the times through the lens of our faith. It is that process of theological reflection and social analysis that our discipleship requires of us.  

Any of us would understand, especially at this time of year, that our hearts might long for the joy and comfort of silver bells and silent nights and stockings hung by the chimney with care. But woven into the hopeful anticipation inherent in this Advent season are also alarm bells calling us to a prudent awareness of what is happening here and now. 

While this Sunday opens with Isaiah’s promise of a day when people “shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again,” Matthew has Jesus deliver a harsh dose of reality to those of us who would be his disciples, demanding that we “stay awake!”

Author Annie Dillard writes, “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

As we enter into this season with tidings of peace, joy and hope, let us not forget that the birth of this child we so earnestly long for also promises disruption and upheaval. Such is always the case whenever God breaks into history. 

O come, O come Emmanuel, God-with-us. Just not always as we expect.

Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis.