Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

The Jesus of the Gospels is far more suited for an F.B.I. Wanted poster than for being the poster child of American values. While the historical Jesus certainly wasn’t a hippie, he was obviously dangerous and subversive. After all, Rome didn’t crucify people for extolling civic virtues and pledging allegiance to the empire. In announcing and enacting the kingdom of God, Jesus was countercultural and counter-imperial. This is why Jesus was crucified. His crime was claiming to be a king who had not been installed by Caesar.

In a culture that venerates materialism and militarism, the only way to truly follow Jesus is to be countercultural.

The sword is never really countercultural, but the cross always is.

Any serious attempt to live out the Sermon on the Mount in the context of a superpower will cause you to be viewed by the majority as a freakish outlier—a Jesus freak, if you will. The Jesus way, when truly lived, has always been viewed with suspicion by people in power. So be it.

The kingdom of God does not come through political force and cultural dominance but through the counter-imperial practices of baptism and Eucharist.

It’s not the task of the church to “Make America Great Again.” The contemporary task of the church is to make Christianity countercultural again. And once we untether Jesus from the interests of empire, we begin to see just how countercultural and radical Jesus’ ideas actually are. Enemies? Love them. Violence? Renounce it. Money? Share it. Foreigners? Welcome them. Sinners? Forgive them. These are the kind of radical ideas that will always be opposed by the principalities and powers, but which the followers of Jesus are called to embrace, announce, and enact.

Enter every church you can. Pay attention to every crucifix you see. Ask this question: What does this mean? Don’t be too quick to give an answer.

at Golgotha we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies.

The violence of the cross is not what God does, the violence of the cross is what God endures.

God does not employ and inflict violence; God absorbs and forgives violence. The cross is where God in Christ transforms the hideous violence of Good Friday into the healing peace of Easter Sunday.

America, you don’t need to be great. May God bless you to be good.

Only that which is baptized can be Christian, and you cannot baptize a nation-state.

America is not a Christian nation; it never was and never can be.

Just as the book of Daniel spoke to second-century bc Jews living in the Seleucid Empire, so the book of Daniel speaks to twenty-first-century Christians

If our gospel is not heard as somewhat threatening to the one percent who are most privileged by the current arrangement of things, we may want to question if our evangelistic news is really gospel. If our gospel is not especially good news to the poor, Jesus and his apostles would not recognize it as the gospel of the kingdom they proclaimed.

Jesus’ triumphal entry was the anti-military parade. It was a mockery of Rome’s intimidating show of military power. Imagine a mock military parade where peace protestors are riding tricycles instead of tanks and you get the idea.

Looking for some dude on a horse, Jerusalem missed the Messiah who rode in on a donkey.

What we see on Palm Sunday are two parades. One from the west and one from the east. One where Caesar’s Prefect of Judea rides a warhorse and one where God’s anointed Messiah rides a donkey. One is a military parade projecting the power of empire—the Roman Empire. The other is a prophetic parade announcing the arrival of an alternative empire—the kingdom of God. One parade derives its power from a willingness to crucify its enemies. The other derives its power by embracing the cross and forgiving its enemies. One is a perpetuation of the domination systems of empire. The other is the only hope the world has for true liberation.

The purpose of life is not to win; the purpose of life is to learn to love well.

we must always be prepared to spend a night in the lion’s den if our allegiance to national interest comes into conflict with our allegiance to God’s kingdom—and