You may or may not have a faith. That’s fine. What I’m asking for is simpler — just a willingness to see through a particular lens for a few minutes.
The lens is called shalom. It’s an ancient Hebrew idea that means something like: the world as it was meant to be. Not just peace — but every person fed, seen, protected, and free. The full flourishing of every human being. The way God would have it.
The prophets wrote about it. Jesus lived it. And both of them got in serious trouble with the political powers of their day for doing so — because shalom, taken seriously, is a direct threat to empire.
That’s what this is about.
What follows is a parable drawn from what is happening right now, in plain sight. It is theology. It is politics. It has always been both — and the moment we separate them is the moment power wins.
This is the way God wouldn’t have it.
The Way God Wouldn’t Want It
“When the righteous flourish, the people rejoice. When the wicked rule, the people groan.”
Proverbs 29:2.
In the beginning, there was enough.
Not excess. Not empire. Just enough — and the knowledge that enough, shared, becomes abundance. A table where all are fed. A field where the edges are left unharvested, because the hungry are coming and the land belongs to the One who made it, not to the one who works it. A community where the strong carry what the weak cannot, not as charity but as covenant. Where the stranger is welcomed because you were once a stranger. Where the widow is seen because God sees her. Where the child sleeps without fear because the village has decided: this child belongs to all of us.
This is shalom.
Not the shallow peace of an empty battlefield. Not the silence of people too tired or too afraid to speak. Shalom is the deep, systemic, relational rightness of a world ordered around the flourishing of every human being made in the image of God. It is what the Torah was building toward. What the prophets were mourning the loss of. What Jesus was announcing the arrival of, in a Roman-occupied backwater, to people who had almost forgotten it was possible.
The ancient Hebrews had a word for its opposite.
They called it Egypt.
The First Step Away
It begins, as it always does, not with a tyrant but with a fear.
A people look around and see their edges fraying. Their towns quieting. Their children leaving. Their certainties dissolving. The world they understood — the world that had a place for them, that honored what they knew how to do — seems to be disappearing. And no one in power seems to notice or care.
This is real. This is not invented. The fear is legitimate.
But fear, left unattended, does not stay still. It moves. It looks for somewhere to land, something to blame, someone to name as the cause. And in that searching, it becomes something other than fear. It becomes hunger — for a simple answer, a clear enemy, a strong hand, a return to a world that felt ordered and safe and ours.
This is the first step away from shalom. Not wickedness. Just fear, looking for relief in the wrong direction.
The Second Step Away
Into that fear walks a voice.
It is loud. It is confident. It has never, as far as anyone can tell, been afraid of anything — though this is a performance, not a truth. It says: I see you. I know what was taken from you. I know who took it. And I alone can fix it.
The voice does not come from nowhere. It has been built, carefully, over decades — first by money that should not have been lent, from sources that should have raised questions no one wanted to ask. Then by a camera and a script and an editor’s careful hand, cutting away every moment of confusion or weakness or failure, leaving only the image of mastery. A fiction, broadcast into ten million living rooms, repeated until it felt like memory.
The voice is not what it claims to be.
But the fear is real. And real fear will reach for almost anything that promises relief.
This is the second step away from shalom. Not the voice. The reaching.
The Third Step Away
The voice is given power.
Not unlimited power — not yet. There are still walls, still rules, still people who say no, this is not how it works, this is not who we are. And so for a time, the voice chafes. It tests the walls. It learns which ones hold and which ones bend. It watches. It waits.
And when the moment comes — when the people are asked to choose again — it does something no one in this tradition of self-governance has ever done. It refuses the verdict. It tells the crowd that the only legitimate outcome is its own victory. It sends the crowd toward the place where the counting happens.
An insurrection. In the land of the free. Broadcast live, like everything else.
And still — still — the people choose it again.
This is the third step away from shalom. Not the insurrection. The choosing, after.
The King
There is a king now.
Not in name — the old names are still used, the old ceremonies still performed. But in function, in intention, in the daily exercise of power: a king. And kings, as the prophet Samuel warned with terrible precision three thousand years ago, do one thing above all else.
They take.
They take your sons for their armies. Your daughters for their households. Your fields for their courtiers. Your harvest for their treasury. Your dignity for their spectacle. Your future for their dynasty.
Watch what is taken.
A tax on foreigners, they call it. A formula is invented — not by real economists, but by a desire for a conclusion that works backwards into a justification. The formula adds a $2,100 tax on every ordinary household.
The family elected is now self-entitled to receive. In their first year they receive $4 billion.
This is not coincidence.
This is the mechanism of empire, operating exactly as designed.
Foreign powers come bearing gifts. They receive, in return, the advanced tools of war and technology that keep smaller nations dependent on the largest one. This is not diplomacy. This is tribute flowing in both directions — and the king’s family stands at the center of every transaction, skimming the passage of power.
In the king’s domain gold goes up on the walls. Entertainment is king-directed. A grand ballroom is planned to be filled with cronies who have paid to be near the sun. An arch is planned for the boulevard of the republic.
Somewhere else, a family waits at a border. A woman is turned away from care. A child’s school lunch disappears from a budget. A coastal nation watches the water rise with no one answering its calls.
The king is busy. The king is counting.
What Dies in the Taking
Here is what shalom requires that empire cannot tolerate:
Shalom requires that every person counts. Empire requires a category of people who do not.
Shalom requires that the powerful carry the vulnerable. Empire requires the vulnerable to carry the powerful.
Shalom requires that the stranger be welcomed. Empire requires the stranger be feared — because a people busy fearing the stranger will not notice what is being taken from them.
Shalom requires that the land rest, that accumulation have a limit, that no dynasty can corner what belongs to the community. Empire requires the opposite: that the dynasty never rest, that the accumulation never stop, that the limit be moved, then moved again, then removed entirely.
Shalom requires truth — because a community that cannot agree on what is real cannot care for one another. Empire requires the management of reality: the invented formula called reciprocal, the fiction called the greatest businessman, the insurrection called a tourist visit, the taking called a gift.
When shalom dies in a society, it does not die all at once. It dies the way a language dies — one speaker at a time. One family that stops gathering. One neighborhood that stops knowing itself. One generation that grows up not knowing what was lost, because no one alive can remember it well enough to describe it.
This is the deepest implication of empire: not the poverty it creates, devastating as that is. Not the wars it starts, ruinous as those are. But the imagination it kills. The capacity of a people to believe that another way is possible. That the strong are not entitled to the harvest. That the stranger belongs at the table. That enough, shared, is abundance.
Empire teaches the opposite lesson so thoroughly, for so long, that the lesson begins to feel like nature.
The Question the Parable Asks
Jesus told parables and rarely explained them.
He trusted that a story, told truly, would find the place in a person that argument cannot reach. The parable of the prodigal son does not end with a systematic theology of forgiveness. It ends with a father running down a road, and an older brother standing in a field, unwilling to come in.
Which of these, Jesus asked after the Good Samaritan, was a neighbor?
He did not answer his own question. He let it land.
So here is the question this parable asks:
When a people have been given a vision of shalom — a world where every person counts, where the stranger is welcomed, where the powerful carry the weak, where enough is shared until it becomes abundance — and they are shown, plainly and repeatedly, a king who takes, who names enemies, who builds monuments to himself while cutting bread from the table of the hungry —
What does it mean that we chose him?
Not once. Twice.
What is it in us that preferred the king to the covenant? The taking to the giving? The strong hand to the open one?
This is not a political question. It is a formation question. It is a question about what we have come to believe, in the deepest places, about what human beings are for.
The Torah said: care for one another as you wish to be cared for, and you will be free.
The king says: there is not enough, and only I can protect your share of it.
One of these is shalom.
The other is Egypt.
We have chosen. The question is whether we know what we have chosen — and whether, knowing it, we are willing to choose differently.
The father is still running down the road.
The door is still open.
Peter Brandt writes at SeePhas.com, exploring the Journeys of Healing, Hoping, Flourishing, Belonging, and Seeing.
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