What are Christians supposed to be doing?

It’s a seemingly simple question, and you’d think that with our shared faith in an infallible Bible, we Christians would be agreed on the sort of things that we should aim for in life. And to be sure, Christians do agree on what you might call the fundamental directives of the Christian life. “What does the Lord require of you?” asks the Old Testament book of Micah. “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Those are beautiful directives. But behind them lurk a swath of practical questions that have caused confusion in the church for thousands of years. Is the purpose of our life to live a pure, untainted existence free of the touch (or even sight) of a sinful world? Is it to actively impose that divine justice and mercy on the world around us? Should we resist or even fight back against evil when it encroaches on our lives? Should we hide and wait patiently for Christ to return, trusting him to sort it all out?

There’s no easy answer to these questions, and the church has historically answered them in all kinds of contradictory ways—from the reclusive lifestyles of the desert fathers to the power-wielding Christian empires of late antiquity and the medieval era, Christians have replied to the question of “What does God want us to do?” with drastically different answers.

These questions were on my mind this fall when I received a copy of theologian N.T. Wright’s latest book The Day The Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (HarperOne, 2016). At the time I cracked open the book, I was (like many of my fellow American Christians) trying to find my way through a seemingly impossible maze of political choices. Simply asking “How would Jesus vote?” isn’t enough to help me answer my questions about the faith-fueled political controversies demanding my attention. Is it my sacred duty as a Christian to vote for the political candidate who will increase the influence of Christianity on our laws and culture? Or should I instead pick a candidate purely on their governing competence and simply focus on “loving mercy and walking humbly” in my personal life? Is a net “gain” for Christianity’s cultural influence negated if it requires compromising on other moral values? What’s the tipping point at which I’ve compromised “too much”? My questions are rooted in my privileged American experience, but they’re not fundamentally different from the questions asked throughout the ages and around the world by other Christians.

Like it or not, the Bible doesn’t provide a detailed list of 20th-century American Christian political and cultural priorities. Nor does N.T. Wright’s book tell us who to vote for. But Wright does shed light on the timeless question of how Christians are to be focusing their time and attention by highlighting the revolutionary changes that Christ’s death and resurrection—and the ways that Christ’s sacrifice challenged his own contemporary followers and challenges Christians two thousand years later. Talking about the book of Revelation—which presents a picture of God’s Kingdom that doesn’t match anyone’s expectations, in Bible times or today—Wright reflects on the strange power of a kingdom that paradoxically exerts power through weakness:

Jesus was not the kind of revolutionary who would call for twelve legions of angels, sweep all his enemies away in a moment, and leave nothing to do thereafter…. the revolution he accomplished was the victory of a strange new power, the power of covenant love, a covenant love winning its victory not over suffering, but through suffering. This meant, inevitably, that the victory would have to be implemented in the same way, proceeding by the slow road of love rather than the quick road of sudden conquest….

Did we really imagine that, while Jesus would win his victory by suffering, self-giving love, we would implement that same victory by arrogant, self-aggrandizing force of arms? (Perhaps we did. After all, James and John, as close to Jesus as anyway, made exactly this mistake in Luke 9:54 and again in Mark 10:35-40. Perhaps even Jesus’ mother thought the same way; her great Magnificat, in Luke 1:46-55, sounds quite like a battle hymn.) Once you understand the kind of revolution Jesus was accomplishing, you understand why it would then go on being necessary for it to be implemented step-by-step, not all at one single sweep, and why those steps have to be—every one of them—steps of the same generous love that took Jesus to the cross. Love will always suffer. If the church tries to win victories either all in a rush or by steps taken in some other spirit, it may appear to succeed for a while. Think of the pomp and “glory” of the late medieval church. But the “victory” will be hollow and will leave all kinds of problems in its wake. (p. 374)

Wright’s book is not all about politics, or about the American church specifically. It’s instead an invitation to step back and ponder what it means that the central, defining event of Christianity is an act of sacrificial love and suffering. When we look at God’s Kingdom through the lens of those values, we see that our job isn’t to fight for political power, or cling to cultural influence. The world isn’t slipping farther away from God than it already was, and God hasn’t tasked us with saving it on our own. Politics and culture are the waters in which we swim, and the way we interact with them should be defined by the same selfless love and grace that Christ modeled for us on the cross.

I haven’t done justice to Wright’s book, which covers many more topics than these. But if you’d like to check it out yourself, you can pick up a copy in the Bible Gateway Store. The publisher has generously made available a free discussion and study guide for The Day The Revolution Began, which you can download and peruse, either to help you think through the book as you read, or to give you a taste of the book’s contents and approach.

I think Wright’s voice is an important one for Christians to hear. But whether or not you investigate the book, I hope you’ll look at the cultural challenges you face—maybe that’s Election Day next week in the US or something entirely different—in a new light. Our job isn’t to “win”—at least, not in the sense that we usually think of winning. It’s to embrace love, service, and even suffering… and to know that God’s Kingdom is already coming about, and no empire or politician or power can stop that triumph of love.