Beyond Herod Comparisons: Practicing Prophetic Imagination in an Age of Royal Consciousness

I just finished chapter 5, “Criticism and Pathos in Jesus of Nazareth” from Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination. And my mind is reeling from it all. I am not sure what to do with the paradigm shift occurring in my innermost spaces, but reflective writing often helps. I would appreciate all comments, corrections, or creative alternatives you might offer.

So what am I feeling?

First, gratitude: someone finally explained in a way I could understand how the empire works, not only out there in marble buildings and official statements, but in, over, and through me, in habits of mind and reflexes of the heart.

Second, extreme discomfort: because Brueggemann does not let prophetic work remain spiritualized or elitistized as a form of superior righteous anger. He insists that the characteristic idiom of prophetic criticism is anguish, not rage, and that the royal culture is numbed, unable to face endings, and defended by denial.

The problem is not simply that leaders do bad things. The deeper problem is that royal consciousness trains whole communities to stop feeling, stop grieving, stop noticing what suffering costs. When numbness becomes a civic virtue, truth becomes a threat to empire.

So, before we talk about any one leader, we should name a more durable adversary: empire as a form of consciousness. Empire is a story we tell ourselves about what is normal, necessary, and justified. It is the belief that order must be preserved, even if it requires casualties we learn not to count. It is the habit of calling pain “the price we pay” and then learning not to look closely at who pays it.

This is why the easy move, correlating whatever current leader is in power to Herod and Caesar, often fails to do the deeper work. It can be accurate in places, but more often it can become a shortcut that lets the church keep its emotional distance. If the problem is one man or woman, then our solution is simply opposition to that one person. If the problem is a formation, a system, a principality or power, a royal consciousness that disciples people into numbness, then the church has to do more than protest a person or an administration. The church has to reform its imagination of what ought to be, what the kindom (not a misspelling) of heaven might look like in regard to what Jesus imagined it to look like in heaven.

Brueggemann’s claim about Jesus is profound: Jesus presented the ultimate criticism of royal consciousness, and the way of that criticism was decisive solidarity with marginal people, including the vulnerability required by that solidarity.

It is important to go deeper into what solidarity means to make any further applications.

Jesus does not critique empire as a commentator. He critiques it as someone who refuses its numbness and enters the pain it creates. He makes the hurt visible. He makes the groans audible.

And he does this not as a technique, but as a way of life. He forgives in a society where forgiveness functions as social control. He reclaims Sabbath as freedom when Sabbath has been weaponized as enslavement. He eats with the outcasts when purity codes exist to keep people segregated. He touches the unclean, dignifies women, confronts debt and taxation, and speaks about the temple’s coming destruction because religious guarantee had become part of the royal settlement.

This is the shape of prophetic imagination in Jesus: not merely denunciation, but an alternative consciousness embodied in public.

What does that mean for America, here and now, as if I have any idea?

As of December 18, 2025, when I began this article, the United States is governed by President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The White House describes its priorities in terms like “securing our borders,” “unleashing American energy dominance,” and “restoring peace through strength.” And today, as I am writing this, news outlets report a record U.S. arms package for Taiwan, framed as deterrence and stability, and condemned by China as destabilizing.

I can hear the royal grammar, as highlighted by Brueggemann, in these phrases, regardless of which party speaks them, because all parties convey the same themes: strength, dominance, security, deterrence, and control. Sometimes these words name real responsibilities of governance. Sometimes they function as liturgy, a repeated script that trains the public to accept what it must not feel too deeply.

Brueggemann puts it bluntly: empires live by numbness. Empires expect numbness about the human cost of war. Corporate economies expect blindness to the cost of production in terms of poverty and exploitation. In other words, a society can remain “stable” only if it learns not to hear certain groans.

I recently did some thought work on the American ideal of the Pursuit of Happiness. The pursuit of happiness has become a civic sacrament for many. By it, we learn to measure the good life in terms of comfort, control, and consumption, and we baptize that measurement as normal. Civil religion then offers a kind of spiritual anesthesia. It sacralizes the nation’s story so that the nation’s pain, and the pain caused in the nation’s name, can be reframed as destiny, necessity, or virtue.

That is royal consciousness in Americanese. It is what Brueggemann shines a spotlight on.

So, what are the obvious ways to apply Brueggemann beyond a simplistic “the one in office” comparison?

Here are several, each rooted in Bruegemann’s description of how Jesus dismantled royal consciousness and how alternative community emerged in the first century.

1. Move from identifying villains to naming formations

Herod was not merely a bad king. Herod was a portrait of desperate denial, the pseudo-king who cannot face endings and therefore lashes out to preserve the old order.

Our task is not first to locate “the Herod” of our day, but to locate the Herodian reflex in ourselves and our institutions: the reflex to preserve what is dying by sacrificing the vulnerable, the reflex to call cruelty “policy,” or the reflex to maintain control rather than tell the truth because the Herodian reflex has been instilled in us for many more years than any one person has been in charge of our administration.

In practice, that means the church asks different diagnostic questions. Not “Which leader is most like Herod?” but “Where are we being trained into numbness by the system, and who benefits from that numbness?”

2. Recover grief as public speech

In Matthew’s birth narrative, Brueggemann highlights the juxtaposition of Herod’s rage and Rachel’s grief. The royal apparatus cannot or will not grieve. The prophet must grieve because the prophet’s grieving is done while the people are still numb, to awaken them from their numbness.

This is not sentimental. It is political in the deepest sense, because grief names what the empire needs us not to name.

What might this look like for the Church of the Brethren?

It could be as concrete as organizing a public lament, not as a performance, but as truthful worship. The Church of the Brethren, most notably On Earth Peace, is a mobilizer for this.

OEP organizes lament for the dead and wounded in wars that become background noise. Lament for families torn apart, whether by deportation, addiction, incarceration, or economic insecurity. Lament for the land itself, when extraction is called “dominance” and creation is treated as fuel.

I am not suggesting lament as a substitute for action. Rather, lament is the beginning of action, because lament breaks the spell of numbness.

Brueggemann says the point is to permit the community to engage its own anguish, which it prefers to deny. That is prophetic work.

3. Practice compassion as a form of critique

This is perhaps the most counterintuitive line in the chapter: compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism.

Compassion is not merely kindness. It is a public refusal to accept hurt as normal.

Empires accommodate charity. They fund or defund it as a means of crowd control. They co-opt good intentions. They can even celebrate “service” as long as service never questions the system that produces the need. But solidarity with pain, the willingness to be made vulnerable by suffering with others, that is harder to manage.

The Brethren already have a vocabulary for this: mutual aid, simplicity, service, peace, community. The question is whether those practices function as spiritual hobbies that reinforce numbness or as an alternative consciousness that interrupts numbness and brings awakeness.

If compassion is critique, then a Brethren response to royal consciousness is not simply a matter of quiet service. It is service that builds communities where the groans are heard and acted upon.

4. Treat forgiveness as liberation from social control

Brueggemann notes that Jesus’s readiness to forgive threatened the machinery of social control in a society that managed forgiveness as power.

America is a society with an enormous apparatus for punishment and permanent consequences, and a fragile apparatus for restoration. In such a society, forgiveness is never merely personal. It is structural reimagination.

A Jesus-modeled response asks: how do we become a people who practice restoration in a culture addicted to retribution?

This can look like prison ministry, yes. It can also look like advocacy for humane sentencing, support for re-entry, and congregations that take risks on people who are trying to begin again.

Forgiveness becomes a way the church says: You are not fated to live forever with the worst thing you have done, and we will build a community that makes that claim credible.

5. Reclaim Sabbath as resistance to the economy of extraction

Brueggemann reads Jesus’s Sabbath actions as liberation, because Sabbath had become enslavement under the management of those who benefited from it.

In our time, Sabbath is all but extinct. The First Day, or the Seventh, depending on your theological bent, is just another day for a different kind of extraction. But just as in Jesus’s day, it must be reimagined and reinstated as a day about refusing an economic story that says our worth is based on our productivity and that our accumulation provides our security.

The pursuit of our happiness becomes a royal consciousness when it requires denying other people’s exhaustion. Sabbath becomes prophetic imagination when it refuses to participate in that denial.

A Brethren community can witness by building patterns of life where rest is protected, where enough is celebrated, where consumption is desacralized, and where “the good life” is measured by communion rather than control.

6. Take debt seriously as a spiritual and political reality

Brueggemann insists Jesus’s language about debt is not metaphorical, and he ties it to heavy taxation and economic loss among peasants.

Debt is one of an empire’s most powerful tools of quiet domination. It disciplines the imagination. It narrows futures. It tells people to accept what they should challenge because the bills must be paid.

A Jesus-shaped response does not only preach contentment. It also imagines Jubilee.

For a local church, this might mean debt counseling, benevolence that is designed as liberation rather than dependency, partnerships that address medical debt, and advocacy for policies that stop treating human beings as revenue streams.

In a royal consciousness, debt is leverage. In a prophetic imagination, debt is a sign that the community is out of alignment with God’s economy.

7. Refuse civil religion’s guarantee

Brueggemann says Jesus’s temple critique struck at the heart of a guaranteed doctrine of election, a sense that the shrine and the nation were assured.

That is precisely what civil religion offers America: guarantee. We are chosen. We are destined. Our violence is righteous. Our prosperity is proof.

A Brethren response must be gentle but firm: the gospel does not offer national guarantee. It offers cross and resurrection. It offers truth that dismantles illusions, and hope that rises from honest grief.

Now, what if someone says, “Like it or not, the current administration is the owner of our royal consciousness”?

My answer: royal consciousness is never owned by one administration. It is older than administrations and more resilient than elections. It changes its clothing, not its agenda.

Still, because administrations do wield real power, the church cannot pretend politics are irrelevant. The question becomes: what is a Jesus-modeled response that avoids both naïve compliance or reactive anger?

Here are the insights I see in Brueggemann’s description of Jesus.

First, Jesus refuses the empire’s numbness. He makes suffering visible and audible.

Second, Jesus practices an alternative in public: table, healing, forgiveness, Sabbath, boundary-crossing solidarity.

Third, Jesus critiques without contempt, because his critique is empathetic. He grieves, even over the city that will kill him.

Fourth, Jesus accepts vulnerability as the cost of truthful solidarity, and that vulnerability is not a tactic. It is the content of the witness.

So a Brethren response to the present moment might look like this:

We will not be organized by outrage alone.
We will not be anesthetized by slogans of strength.
We will not confuse dominance with security.
We will not call cruelty “realism,” nor call numbness “maturity.”

We will grieve what is being lost, because grief tells the truth.
We will stand with the people who are being rendered helpless and harassed, because compassion is critique.
We will build tables where enemies become neighbors.
We will practice forgiveness as social liberation.
We will treat Sabbath as freedom for all.
We will confront debt as a spiritual wound and a political tool.
We will reject civil religion’s guarantee and return to the cross-shaped imagination of Jesus.

And we will do it locally, patiently, and publicly.

Because the point is not to win an argument about one leader. The point is to become an alternative community with an alternative consciousness for the sake of dismantling what dehumanizes.

I finished Brueggemann’s chapter with one pressing question in my head: Can the church become the place where the groans are heard?

If the groans become audible, he says, the consciousness of domination is already jeopardized.

That may be the beginning of prophetic imagination in our day.

Not the thrill of naming the bad leaders.

But instead….
The courage of refusing numbness.
The tenderness of grief made public.
The risk of compassion that becomes critique.

In a time when strength is celebrated and vulnerability is mocked, the church has a strange and holy opportunity: to practice the politics of Jesus, which looks like solidarity, forgiveness, Sabbath freedom, and tables big enough to threaten the empire simply by being real.