A curious politics is emerging here: the early Christians weren't trying to overthrow or even reform the empire, but they also weren't going along with it. They were not reformists offering the world a better Rome. They offered the dissatisfied masses not a better government but another world altogether*. In a world gone respectably insane, Christians, as they lived God's kingdom, embodied revolutionary subordination toward the kingdoms of the world, exemplified in the suffering humiliation of the crucified Messiah, the slaughtered Lamb who exposed the greed and violence of the world as he died naked on a cross.*You might say they were not trying to fit their "new wine" (or life) into the old wineskins of the world's structures (Matt. 9:17). Jesus' way would not work in (or would burst) the world's crusty old patterns.
These paragraphs are from Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw (p. 160).
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