Politics now carries a weight it was never built to bear. For many it has quietly become the new religion: it tells you who is righteous and who is wicked, who your people are and who your enemies, and it promises a kind of salvation if only the right side prevails. The signs are unmistakably religious, heresy and excommunication, purity tests, holy war, the casting out of the impure. And it is making us anxious and cruel, because a temporary human coalition simply cannot hold the freight of ultimate hope without collapsing into rage.
The factions in Jesus' day were every bit as fierce, Zealots who wanted revolution, Herodians who wanted accommodation, Pharisees and Sadducees each certain God endorsed their program. And he would not be enlisted by any of them. Handed a trap question about paying taxes to Caesar, he refused both the revolutionary and the collaborator answer. More pointedly still, he chose as disciples both Matthew, a tax collector who worked for the empire, and Simon the Zealot, who wanted to overthrow it, and made the two of them sit at the same table for three years.
He put a tax collector and a revolutionary at the same table, and called it the Kingdom.
His Kingdom, he said, 'is not of this world.' It does not arrive from the left or the right; it comes from above, and it relativizes every earthly allegiance without erasing our responsibilities in the world. This does not make Christians passive or apolitical. It makes them ultimately loyal to a King before a party, free to work for justice without idolizing a movement, and, hardest of all, able to love the neighbor who votes against everything they hold dear, because that neighbor also bears the image of God. In an age that asks you to hate the other side to prove you belong, refusing to is a quietly revolutionary act.