By Patrick Schmadeke
Evangelization in the World Today
(Author’s Note: We learned on Jan. 10 that the detained man referred to in this story has been released and rejoined his family. The column was written prior to this resolution.)
As I write this, two days before Christmas, I reflect on an experience from this morning. Today, in our diocese, a holy family (as it was described by a member of our diocesan clergy) was separated by federal agents at a county jail. ICE personnel had tackled a man in a grocery store (and place of employment) a few months ago, detaining him for non-violent crimes. The future of this husband and father had been uncertain ever since.
We who gathered were set against a familiar December scene: brisk morning air, winter-salted sidewalks, and curbs covered in snow and ice. The group included the detained man’s wife, one-year-old child, mother-in-law, two diocesan clergy, and other men and women. We stood together outside the county jail for the better part of an hour as we waited, wondered, and worried about the man’s future. We hoped he would be released back to his family and community. We hoped to see him join us on the winter-salted sidewalk. We held hope, two days before Christmas, that a holy family would be made whole again. We left, however, worried he was one step closer to deportation as ICE agents intervened in his release. As is their policy, the county jail declined to afford the wife, mother-in-law, child, and detained man a face-to-face visit. I don’t know where to look now except to Jesus.
Jesus’ self-proclaimed program is clear: bring good news to the poor, announce liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free (Luke 4:18-21). His message was met with scorn on that day in Nazareth. I saw his message met with scorn, or at least disregard, this morning.
Taken on the level of human relations, Jesus’ message disrupted the social order of his time. Any society has a balance (just or unjust) of social relations. The poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed had a place in the social order of Jesus’ time — that place was the shadows. Jesus’ mission to dis-place them, so they might be seen again and healed, would also dis-place and heal those who benefited from the order as it stood. So his fellow Nazarenes tried to discredit him: “isn’t this the son of Joseph?!” (4:22).
In addition to the social order, Jesus’ message also disrupted, or better yet, restored, the human-divine order. Recounting the prophets Elijah and Elisha, Jesus tells his fellow-Nazarenes that it was not the people of Israel that these prophets were sent to, but rather, outsiders (a widow in the land of Sidon and a Syrian leper). As a disrupter, Jesus recalibrated expectations: love of God and love of the outcast are one. These loves form a coherent whole. Offended, his fellow Nazarenes tried to throw him off a cliff (4:29).
This scene sets the stage for Jesus’ public ministry, but it also informs the tensions of our own time. I see two parallels. First, like in Jesus’ time, we rely on a dynamic social order to organize our living in community. But, not all are included in constructing the social order — for example, the poor, captive, blind, and oppressed — so the order becomes unjustly fixed. Second, religion functioned in Jesus’ time to give credibility to the existing social order. But, just as God once sent Jesus, today God sends prophets to attend to the needs of outsiders — and baptism calls us all to be prophets.
I don’t have any ethical or theological explanations to justify what I saw this morning. I did see that the poor, captive, blind, and oppressed are still among us. But I also saw prophets today. They were amongst a huddled mass yearning to breathe free. They stood in the breach between humanity and dis-humanity, between family and disorder. On the winter-salted sidewalk, these prophets embodied the solidarity of the Word who pitched his tent among us, and took on flesh with his holy family.
(Patrick Schmadeke is director of evangelization for the Diocese of Davenport.)
