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. Sure, the prosperity gospel extols materialism and the religious right celebrates militarism, but these are nothing but attempts to smuggle the idols of Mammon and Mars into Christianity. A synchronistic religion that attempts to amalgamate Jesus and American values may be popular, but it’s unfaithful to the Spirit who calls the people of God out of Babylon.

The earliest believers’ shared life of following Jesus together was called the Way, not because it was the way to heaven (the afterlife was never the emphasis), but because they had come to believe that following Jesus was the new and true way to be human. And because the lifestyle of the Way was such a radical departure from the way of the Roman Empire, it’s no surprise that people viewed the Way with great suspicion and often derided it as a cult.

The most radical thing about the early Christians wasn’t that they worshiped Jesus as God—the Greco-Roman world was awash in gods. Indeed, from the very beginning Christians did believe that Jesus was God, but the radical and dangerous thing about them was that they worshiped Jesus as emperor! This is what they meant when they confessed, “Jesus is Lord.” The titles “Son of God,” “King of Kings,” “Savior of the World,” “Prince of Peace, and “Lord of All” were already in circulation as imperial titles on Roman coins when the Christians began re-appropriating them in their worship of a Galilean Jew who had been crucified by a Roman governor. This was dangerous. This is why from time to time bishops were hauled before Roman magistrates, and some Christians ended up facing gladiators and wild beasts in the arena. It wasn’t the religion of the Christians that got them in trouble per se, but the political implications of their religion. Because the Christians belonged to a different cult than the Roman Empire, they developed a different culture and became a counterculture movement—a counterculture that the authorities sometimes deemed threatening and periodically sought to violently suppress.

The original Jesus movement was not a pietistic religion of private belief about how to go to heaven when you die. The original Jesus movement was a countercultural way of public life. It was the kingdom of Christ, and as such it was a rival to the kingdom of Caesar. This is what made the principalities and powers of Rome so nervous about the Way. Though it’s well known, it still needs to be emphasized that Jesus and his two most important apostles, Peter and Paul, were all executed by the Roman Empire. Why? Not for their religious beliefs about an afterlife, but because the kingdom of heaven they announced and enacted posed a challenge to the dominant myth that Rome had a manifest destiny to rule the nations and a divine right to shape history. Either it was Jesus who was the last best hope of the earth or it was Rome. But it couldn’t be both.

Is the use of Romans 13 to call for Christian support of American waging of war principled and consistent, or is it self-serving and inconsistent? Are we using Romans 13 to help clarify how Christians should live as “exiles” within an empire, or are we using Romans 13 to endorse the militarism of our favored empire?

we should never forget that the man who wrote Romans 13 was executed by the government for not submitting to the governing authorities out of fidelity to Christ!

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

If the world is to be changed by the gospel of Christ, it will not be changed on the battlefield or at the ballot-booth, but at the Communion table where sinners are offered the body and blood of Jesus in the form of bread and wine.

During our rest day in Frómista, I visited the thousand-year-old Church of San Martin three times. I was usually the only person there. I prayed through my morning liturgy of prayer. I sat with Jesus. I contemplated the crucifix. I tried to imagine the worshipers who gathered in this church a thousand years ago. Why did they come? They didn’t come to hear a motivational talk or a “practical” sermon; they didn’t come to hear a praise band. They came because it was a sacred place where the sacraments were present. These medieval worshippers inhabited a world that was imbued with the sacred. Sadly, we no longer live in that world but a secular world where the sacred has been almost entirely banished. Sitting in the thousand-year-old church I wrote these words in my journal: “Once the sacred has been lost to the wrecking ball of secularism, can it be recovered? If yes, how? If no, what now?” Of course I’m enough of a modern man to acknowledge that much of the pre-modern sense of the sacred was mixed with superstition—superstition that was often used as a means of manipulating the credulous masses. I don’t have an overly romantic attachment to the pre-modern period. Still I can’t help but view the loss of the sacred in modernity as a forlorn tragedy.

This crucifix conveyed peace to me. How odd that is! After all, a crucifix is on one level the graphic portrayal of a man being tortured to death. And yet it’s also the very heart of the good news. This is the mystery of the gospel.

Trite and tidy answers about the meaning of Good Friday are how we domesticate the cross. This is the bane of atonement theories. Instead of the crucifixion remaining the pivotal event in a compelling story, it’s turned into a sterile formula. The cross is diminished to one of the Four Spiritual Laws or a waypoint on the Roman Road. This is how the cross is sanitized and made mechanical. The storyline is lost and the scandal is swept aside.

it is precisely the powerlessness of God enacted by Jesus on the cross that saves the world.

Whatever it means for the world to be saved, God does not do it through the worldly means of power involving politics, weapons, and war, but through the unconventional means of utter powerlessness—through the crucifixion of a Galilean Jew who preached the kingdom of God.

The gospel is not motivational talks about happy marriages, being debt free, and achieving your destiny. That all belongs to the broad world of proverbial wisdom. It’s fine as far as it goes, but it has little or nothing to do with the gospel. The gospel is about the cross and the cross is about a scandal. The cross is a scandal because it involves shame. But who is shamed by the cross? Is it the naked man nailed to a tree or the principalities and powers who in their naked bid for power put him there? To answer this question honestly is to enter deeply into the scandal of the cross.

Yes, the cross is where the world is forgiven, but not before the world is found guilty.

Violence is so prominent in the Bible because violence is the problem the Bible must address. The Bible looks honestly and unflinchingly upon the world as it is, and thus the pages of Scripture often drip with blood. But using the violent passages of the Bible to justify or normalize violence is like using the Bible to endorse slavery. Of course both have been done. Colonial interpreters and imperial theologians can and have forced the Bible to serve a violent lie. But on Good Friday the truth is told, for at Golgotha we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. A billion crucifixes have revealed God as nonviolent. To paraphrase Hans Urs von Balthasar, being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is. The violence of the cross is not what God does, the violence of the cross is what God endures. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Christ in order to forgive. This is what N.T. Wright has called a “paganized soteriology.”[7] The cross is not the violent appeasement of a pagan deity, but what God in Christ suffers as God pardons the world. 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.

In empires obsessed with “greatness,” armies and economies are always given cultic devotion.

We’ve all wondered how a terrorist can inflict such murderous cruelty on innocent people. But the terrorist has his logic. The terrorist will defend his actions by citing past abuses his people have suffered, and in the mind of the terrorist his means are justified by the ends he believes will be good. The terrorist always sees his actions as a response to previous violence and perceives his actions as primarily defensive. René Girard says, “the fact that no one ever feels they are the aggressor is because everything is always reciprocal ... The aggressor has always already been attacked.”[16] This is the defense that ISIS and Al-Qaeda give. And isn’t this precisely how President Harry S. Truman justified dropping two atomic bombs on cities full of civilians? Truman’s argument for killing 200,000 people was no more sophisticated than that we were attacked and atomic bombs brought a good end. The winners get their face minted on money and the losers get tried for war crimes, but it’s all the same logic.

In the body of Jesus the abuse virus did not replicate itself. In the body of Christ the abuse virus died. The blood of Jesus became the vaccine to cure our addiction to reciprocal abuse and retaliatory violence. Week after week we partake of the Eucharist so that we might be agents of healing in a wounded world. Christians are to be carriers of the new contagion of forgiveness. In a world where the capacity for retaliatory violence is nearly infinite, forgiveness is our only sane and saving option. In a world of conflict every side sees the righteousness of their own cause, but the only righteousness that can save the world is the righteousness that imitates Christ in forgiveness.

The wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side are the entry wounds of sin. But once sin entered into the body of Christ, sin itself died! Jesus took the virus of sin and transformed it into the remedy of forgiveness. This is the gospel of forgiveness.

The body of Christ is where sin goes to die. And we who have been baptized, have been baptized into the body of Christ. This is a great mystery, but the baptized now belong to the wound that heals the world.

If the church is to be an ambassador of the good news and an agent of healing in the world, the church is going to have to become serious about being something other than the high priest of religious nationalism. With so many churchgoers entangled in the tentacles of nationalism, it’s time for the church to actually be the church.

Christians can and should be productive citizens within the particular nation they happen to have residence; they should pray for political leaders and pay their taxes; they can vote and participate in public service and contribute to the public good. But they should not labor under the delusion that the nation itself can be Christian. Only that which is baptized can be Christian, and you cannot baptize a nation-state. This was the misguided and now abandoned aspiration of Christendom. And in the American experiment the United States deliberately broke with the Christendom practice of claiming to be a Christian nation with a state church. It was America that pioneered the experiment of secular governance. America is not a Christian nation; it never was and never can be. The only institution that even has the possibility of being Christian is the church. When we confuse the nation with the church, it may not do any particular damage to the nation, but it will do irreparable harm to the church. When we reach for the sword of violent power, we let go of the cross of Christian discipleship. To be Christian implies an intentional attempt to imitate the one who would rather die than kill his enemies. Whatever it means to be Christian, it would clearly preclude maintaining a trillion-dollar war machine. I’m sure the Joint Chiefs of Staff would agree that you cannot run the Pentagon according to the Sermon on the Mount.

To hear the well-known stories of Daniel as children’s Sunday School lessons is safe and easy—romantic tales about fiery furnaces and lions’ dens from a time long ago in a world far away. What’s not safe and what’s not easy is to pull those stories into our present context and take the imaginative leap to be Daniel in the lion’s den, to be Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, to be Jewish exiles on Babylon’s Main Street. What’s not easy or safe is to ask what it means to be a Christian in a culture that doesn’t want you to actually live according to the Jesus way. In a culture that may wear a thin veneer of Christian civic religion but in truth venerates Mars and Mammon, what does it look like to maintain fidelity to the Prince of Peace who says you cannot serve God and money?

The Bible repeats itself because history repeats itself. Just as the fabulously wealthy Pharaoh had been haunted by dreams of scarcity in the days of Joseph, now the fabulously powerful Nebuchadnezzar is haunted by dreams of insecurity. Just as Pharaoh had to have a Jewish slave (Joseph) interpret his bad dream, now Nebuchadnezzar needs another Jewish slave (Daniel) to interpret his bad dream.

It’s fascinating to notice that the dreams of the prophets and the nightmares of kings are often one and the same. For example, Isaiah sees a day when “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains”[14] and we call it a dream; when Nebuchadnezzar sees the same thing, he calls it a nightmare. Whether you interpret the kingdom of heaven as an optimistic dream or a haunting nightmare depends on what you’re hoping for. Those looking for a heaven-sent revolution that rearranges the social order for human flourishing see it as a hopeful dream, but those deeply invested in maintaining a status quo of privilege for the elite see it as a dreadful nightmare.

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.

Until we see America as a kind of New Babylon instead of a kind of New Israel, it will be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for Christians to faithfully embody the holy otherness of the kingdom of Christ.

This needs to be made clear: America is not an extension of the kingdom of Christ, America is a continuation of Babylon. America may (or may not be) a gentler, kinder Babylon, but it’s a Babylon nonetheless. To put it another way, King Jesus is not the best version of Caesar; King Jesus is the anti-Caesar. This is what “Jesus is Lord” has always meant.

The citizens of Jerusalem were well aware of how dangerous life can be when a powerful ruler with a fragile ego is afraid.

When contemporary superpowers adopt the ways of ancient tyrant kings, no matter how pragmatic the motives, we need to be honest about the fact that innocent people, even children, will be killed. We should always remember that the ends never justify the means; rather, the means are the ends in the process of becoming. If the means are death-dealing, the ends aren’t going to be life-affirming. You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace.

once we have seen the Holy Family as refugees fleeing a violent Middle East despot, it must forever influence how Christians view modern-day refugees in similar situations—in the eyes of God, they too are a kind of holy family.

One of the remarkable things about the Bible is that it doesn’t paper over atrocity or shy away from giving vivid depictions of the brutality of life in the time of tyrant kings. We need to read the Bible as honestly as it is written and not try to domesticate it into the saccharine clichés of sentimental Christmas cards. For the light of the gospel to shine truthfully, we need to be honest about the darkness in which it shines.

Jesus’ invasion by birth into the dark time of tyrant kings gives us a choice: we can trust in the armed brutality of violent power or we can trust in the naked vulnerability of love. It seems like an absurd choice, but only one of these ways is the Jesus way. We have to choose between the old way of Caesar and the new way of Christ. It’s the choice between the sword and the cross. We have to decide if we’ll pledge our allegiance to the Empire of Power or the Empire of Love, but we can’t do both. Following the Jesus way of loving enemies and doing good to those who hate us isn’t necessarily safe and it doesn’t mean we won’t ever get hurt, but it does mean the darkness won’t prevail.

If we are unwilling that we or our children should ever have to suffer for the name of Jesus, we concoct a Christianity where martyrdom is out of the question. And when martyrdom is no longer considered a possibility, we turn Christianity into a safe and anodyne civil religion in service of the empire. This is not the risky and robust Christianity of Peter and Paul, of Perpetua and Felicity, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Óscar Romero. For the Christian, martyrdom is always on the table—we signed up for the possibility of martyrdom with our baptism. In fact, in our baptism we have already died with Christ. But because the one who was crucified forgiving his enemies is the King of Glory raised from the dead, Christians believe that no matter what darkness and hate may do, in the end light and love will win.

The limitation of tyrant kings is that they can only control those who are afraid. The principalities and powers are adept at harnessing the fear of death—the fear of loss in all its forms—to control those who make their place of privilege possible. But those who have disarmed fear by being formed in maturing love (“perfect love casts out fear”[13]) are beyond the control of tyrant kings—even tyrant kings who would kill babies.

If it threatens the wellbeing of children, followers of Jesus oppose it. Nothing less is truly pro-life. This is why a consistent pro-life Christian ethic opposes the death-friendly practices of abortion, capital punishment, torture, war, predatory capitalism, environmental exploitation, unchecked proliferation of guns, neglecting the poor, refusing the refugee, and keeping healthcare unaffordable for millions. Using an anti-abortion position to provide moral cover for pro-death practices and policies advantageous to the principalities and powers should not be confused with a pro-life ethic derived from the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. As early as the second-century Didache, Christians have said abortion is incompatible with Christian ethics. But those same second-century Christians also said war is incompatible with Christian ethics. If we rightly claim that abortion for convenience is incompatible with Christian ethics because Christ was once in the womb, we must also recognize that refusing refugees is incompatible with Christian ethics because Christ was once forced to seek asylum in a foreign land. Christians must have their ethics informed by Christ, not by the vested interests of tyrant kings.

For in the kingdom of God, greatness is not achieved by reaching for the stars, but by love’s willing descent into lowliness, meekness, and humility. The new King, the King of Kings, will not sit atop an elaborate pyramid scheme, but will stoop to wash the feet of his disciples.

What does the kingdom of God look like? It looks like Jesus. It looks like the sick being healed, the poor being fed, the demonized being delivered, and the dead being raised. It looks like outsiders given a seat at the table and hypocritical gatekeepers given their comeuppance. It looks like forgiveness for sinners and a feast for all. If you can embrace the newness, it looks like a party where water turns to wine. If you resist the newness, it looks like judgment day when the whip comes down and tables are flipped. As the great theologian Origen of Alexandria (184–254) said, “Jesus is the kingdom in person.”[14] So if it doesn’t look like Jesus, it’s not the kingdom of God. And if it’s not the kingdom of God, we must never pledge our ultimate allegiance to it.

The gospel of the kingdom is not partisan—it will not serve the partisan interests of a particular political party—but it is intensely political. It’s political because it poses a direct challenge to the principalities and powers and the way the world is arranged.

There’s something romantic and appealing about has-been empires that have relinquished their lust to rule the world and are now content to simply enjoy life. Faded glory and noble decay can be a nice segue to good living.

it’s in times of utter despair that the prophets do their most outlandish acts of hoping against all hope.

After five centuries of waiting, Zechariah’s donkey-riding King of Peace had arrived in Jerusalem, but Jerusalem’s blind faith in the ways of war made it impossible for them to recognize it. Their expectation of a militant Messiah prevented them from seeing the things that make for peace. Looking for some dude on a horse, Jerusalem missed the Messiah who rode in on a donkey.

Isn’t part of what makes the world the world and not the church, the fact that the world still holds to the old ways of war, while the church follows the king who refused to ride the warhorse? At least isn’t it supposed to be that way?

If we fail to understand life as a gracious gift from God, we get a lot of things wrong. When life is viewed as a competitive game of acquisition, the strain to stay on top can lead to pathological anxiety and a litany of foolish decisions. Life is not a game; life is a gift. The purpose of life is not to win; the purpose of life is to learn to love well.

Jesus overthrows satanic empire, not by violent revolution, but by the power of the Holy Spirit, by establishing the kingdom of God in a world once ruled by Satan.

If a Christian can go her whole life believing in the devil as a literal person and have no theological problems with that, I have no inclination to change her mind. But as a pastor I have met too many people who are theologically troubled by the mythological notion of a personal Satan. Sometimes their theological troubles are put as simply as this: “If all our woes are because of the devil, why doesn’t God just kill the devil?” Good question. Years ago I heard a famous preacher say, “If I were God, the first thing I’d do is kill the devil. Then I’d invite all the demons to his funeral and kill them too.” Behind the levity of this quip there lurks some serious theological conundrums. Why doesn’t God just destroy the (d)evil? Because the satanic phenomenon is inextricably connected with who we are. God cannot simply destroy the devil in one fell blow without destroying us too. Jesus came to destroy the devil, but the devil will not be destroyed like Osama Bin Laden was destroyed by Seal Team Six. It takes more than a bullet to the head to kill the devil. Jesus destroys the devil by calling us out of rivalry, accusation, violence, domination, and empire, into heaven’s alternative of love, advocacy, peace, and liberation—this is what the Bible calls the kingdom of God.

“The guards trembled and became like dead men.” The once-dead man in the tomb is no longer dead, and those who formerly used the fear of death to shape the world now tremble and become like dead men. The fear-mongers are afraid and the death-dealers are dead. Everything is reversed! The angel tells the two Marys to “fear not” and then escorts them over the “dead” soldiers to see the empty tomb. The soldiers aren’t really dead (because heaven doesn’t use the banished weapon of death), but the old way of arranging the world is dead and the kingdom of Satan is coming down. This is Easter.

Whatever kind of sinner Dostoevsky was, he wasn’t a hypocrite, and this enabled him to perceive and write important things in powerful ways.