Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

The contagion of violence drives the logic of expositional escalation until so many are dead it’s exhausted for a time. But only for a time. This is what John the Revelator portrays with the four horseman of the Apocalypse.[17] The white horse of conquest is followed by the red horse of war (because people resent being conquered), followed by the black horse of famine (because war is the most senseless waste of resources), and the pale horse of Death is always the final wraith rider. The endless repetition of this cycle is what we sanitize as “world history.” So when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday he rides a donkey, the colt of a donkey—anything but a horse! On Good Friday Jesus puts an end to the vicious cycle of retaliatory violence that has kept the world from healing.