Shocked and disturbed this Advent 

By Johnny Zokovitch

It is fitting that this week of Advent, we find ourselves poised between two Sunday gospels that feature John the Baptist. This past Sunday, Matthew introduces John in camel’s hair and leather belt, eating locusts and wild honey, preaching repentance in anticipation of the coming kingdom of heaven, and, most strikingly, taking the Pharisees and Sadducees to account, calling them a “brood of vipers” whose presence at his baptism in the Jordan River is more performative than substantial. This coming Sunday we’ll hear of John’s imprisonment and his sending of his disciples to Jesus to question whether he is, in fact, “the one who is to come.” 

What’s particularly apt is how John is portrayed as the pinnacle of the prophetic tradition in Scripture, the heir, as Matthew makes abundantly clear, to Elijah, the prophet par excellence in the Hebrew Scriptures. 

Which brings us to Fr. Steve Josoma and St. Susanna’s parish in Dedham, Massachusetts. 

St. Susanna – which includes a long-standing, thriving Pax Christi chapter – sets up a large outdoor Nativity scene each Advent season. This year, the Nativity scene is missing the baby Jesus, as well as his parents Mary and Joseph. At the center of the display is an empty manger and a large sign that reads, “ICE WAS HERE.” 

St. Susanna’s seems to be embracing the Church’s prophetic vocation – following in the footsteps of John and the Hebrew prophets – critiquing provocatively and creatively the horrific policies of the current administration and the deadly enforcement of those policies that devastate the immigrant community in the United States. 

The Nativity display appears to take to heart the special message on immigration that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued last month, asserting that they were “disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement” and in grief “when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.”

The people of St. Susanna’s are announcing that same message to immigrant communities that the bishops affirmed: “We stand with you in your suffering, since, when one member suffers, all suffer (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:26). You are not alone!” The bishops note “with gratitude” clergy and lay faithful – like Fr. Josoma and the members of St. Susanna’s – who are already accompanying and assisting immigrants, and they encourage “all people of good will to continue and expand such efforts.” 

So why then is it that the Archdiocese of Boston has asked Fr. Josoma to remove the Nativity scene, with an archdiocesan spokesperson calling it “politically divisive?”  

Like John the Baptist getting under the skin of the Pharisees and Sadducees (and much to his detriment, Herod), St. Susanna’s has apparently upset the acting director of ICE, the executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, and been lambasted on social media. 

This isn’t the first time that St. Susanna’s has done this with their Nativity display. Past displays have raised the question of how the Incarnation reflects upon what is happening in the world, with special attention to gun violence or climate change. In 2018, when immigrant children were photographed held in cages, St. Susanna’s display depicted the Christ child in a cage. (None of those past displays were asked to be taken down by the previous archbishop, Cardinal Sean O’Malley.)

One of the assumed reasons that the Church features John the Baptist during Advent is to connect the Incarnation – what happens in the barn – with the prophetic tradition that Jesus inherits from John the Baptist. Matthew paints John as the new Elijah, the actual Elijah earning the nickname “Disturber of Israel” from King Ahab, who bore a great share of Elijah’s criticism. Denouncing evil and challenging the powerful – whether King Ahab, the Pharisees and Sadducees, or the Trump administration – is part and parcel of the prophetic vocation, a vocation that St. Susanna’s has embraced. Whether with words or a Nativity display, shocking one’s audience and thereby disturbing an unjust status quo is the coin of the prophet. 

In his own message in the December 7 bulletin, Fr. Josoma calls to mind another prophetic figure from more recent history, Jesuit Fr. Alfred Delp. 

“Father Delp sees the season of Advent as the time for being deeply shaken, a time for humanity to wake up from the disembodied stupor it had been swallowed up into. Advent is the time not only to remember the birth of the Christ Child, but to participate in this unfolding and ultimate revelation of God that began in the Holy Night,” Fr. Josoma writes.

He then follows with a quote from Delp (pictured left), reflecting in Advent before his execution by the Nazis: “We run the risk of concealing Christmas behind bourgeois customs and sentimentality, behind all those traditions that make this holiday dear and precious to us. Yet perhaps the deep meaning is still hiding behind all those things. What this celebration is about is the founding of a final order for the world, a new center of meaning for all existence. We are not celebrating some children’s holiday, but rather the fact that God has spoken His ultimate Word to the world…

“Unless a man (sic) has been shocked to his depths at himself and the things he is capable of, as well as the failings of humanity as a whole, he cannot possibly understand the meaning of Advent.”

Like being shocked by a Nativity display with a missing Holy Family and a sign proclaiming, “ICE WAS HERE.”

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