Sent to Show Holy Love: Seeking the Welfare of Babylon in an Age of Division
Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash
When times become difficult, we have a natural tendency to turn inward. We focus on ourselves, our families, our churches, and the communities closest to us. Our circle of concern begins to shrink.
I remember the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Grocery store shelves were empty, basic necessities were difficult to find, and uncertainty seemed to permeate nearly every aspect of life. People were understandably concerned about having enough for themselves and their families. Yet those circumstances also revealed something about our instincts when the world becomes frightening. Fear can make us increasingly concerned with protecting what is ours, sometimes at the expense of those around us.
At its best, however, the Christian tradition offers a remarkably different response.
In the fourth century, the Roman emperor Julian, an opponent of Christianity, complained that Christians were caring not only for their own poor but also for those outside their religious community. Writing to a pagan religious leader, he lamented that the Christians supported "not only their own poor but ours as well" (Julian, Letters 22). Imagine that! An emperor who opposed Christianity was embarrassed by the generosity of Christians toward people who did not even share their faith.
Throughout Christian history, we find remarkable examples of this kind of love. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other Christians resisted the Nazi regime at tremendous personal cost. Christian abolitionists, including John Wesley, challenged slavery despite powerful economic and social pressures to preserve it. In each case, Christian convictions compelled believers to seek the good of others, even when doing so came at significant personal expense.
I also think of my wife, Alida, during the pandemic. Once things had settled down a bit, she began walking around our neighborhood, keeping an appropriate distance, introducing herself, sharing her phone number, and asking a simple question: "Is there anything I can do to help you?"
That simple gesture deepened relationships, created opportunities to serve, and opened doors for us to share the love and good news of Jesus Christ. Nothing spectacular. Just a Christian woman seeking the good of her neighbors.
I wonder whether this is something the contemporary church needs to recover. When our communities are divided, when our neighbors do not share our convictions, and when the surrounding culture seems increasingly hostile to Christian faith, does our circle of concern shrink? Or does the love of Christ move us toward our neighbors?
Jeremiah 29:4–7 offers a compelling vision of what it means for God's people to express holy love in public.
Faithfulness in Babylon
Jeremiah's letter was addressed to the people of Judah who had been carried into exile in Babylon. These were not immigrants seeking new opportunities or travelers exploring a foreign land. They were conquered people who had been forcibly removed from their homeland. Far from Jerusalem, the temple, and the lives they had known, they understandably longed to return home.
Some prophets were promising that their exile would soon end. Jeremiah, however, delivered a very different message. The people would remain in Babylon far longer than they anticipated, and God expected them to establish lives there.
The letter begins with a striking declaration from the Lord addressed to the exiles whom he had sent from Jerusalem to Babylon (Jer. 29:4).
From the perspective of the exiles, the Babylonians had carried them away. They had been conquered, displaced, and forced to live in circumstances they never would have chosen. Yet God declared that they were sent by him.
This does not mean that Babylon's actions were righteous or that every painful circumstance is specifically arranged by God. Rather, it means that even in the midst of terrible circumstances, God's purposes for his people have not come to an end. Even in Babylon, God did not abandon them. Even in Babylon, they still had a calling.
And what does God command them to do?
"Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce" (Jer. 29:5).
The exiles were waiting for God to tell them how to escape Babylon as soon as possible. Instead, he told them to play the long game, to build houses and plant gardens. They were to put down roots in a place they never wanted to be, investing in a community they did not choose and living faithfully in circumstances they could not control.
There is something especially important here for Christians living in a time of cultural uncertainty and division.
When the world around us seems increasingly hostile to our convictions, we are often tempted toward one of two responses. The first is withdrawal. We turn inward, seeking to protect our families, congregations, and institutions from a culture we increasingly regard as threatening. The second is control. We become convinced that faithfulness requires gaining enough influence, authority, or political power to make the world conform to our understanding of what it ought to be.
Jeremiah offers another possibility.
What if Christian faithfulness requires neither running away nor having our way? What if God is calling us to be faithfully present in communities that do not share our convictions, building, planting, cultivating life, and contributing to their flourishing?
Christians do not have to control the world around them to be faithful to the God who has sent them into it.
Yet God's command went further. He does not merely tell the exiles where to live. He tells them whose good they are to seek.
Seeking the Welfare of Babylon
In Jeremiah 29:7, God gives his people an extraordinary command: "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."
Consider the remarkable nature of this command. God tells his people to seek the welfare of Babylon. Not Jerusalem. Not some friendly neighboring nation. Babylon! The very empire responsible for their suffering and displacement.
God does not simply command the exiles to tolerate their captors or avoid unnecessary conflict. Nor does he instruct them merely to care for their fellow Israelites. He calls them to actively seek the good of the city itself.
The Hebrew word translated "welfare" is shalom. Although frequently rendered as "peace," shalom encompasses much more than the absence of conflict. It conveys a vision of well-being, security, wholeness, and flourishing. God commands his people to seek this kind of flourishing for Babylon.
Centuries later, Jesus would instruct his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matt. 5:44). We can already hear something of that same extraordinary love in God's command to the exiles.
These people had every reason to resent Babylon. They suffered because of Babylon. Yet God called them to pray for the city and contribute to its flourishing.
Moreover, their own well-being was now bound up with the well-being of the people around them. They could not simply separate their future from the future of their neighbors. Their flourishing was connected to the flourishing of the community in which they lived.
This has profound implications for Christian engagement in public life.
It is relatively easy to seek the good of people we already love. We naturally care about our families, congregations, and those who share our convictions. But what about the neighbor whose political beliefs are the opposite of ours? What about the person whose religious convictions we find deeply mistaken? What about those who have treated us unfairly, or even those we might consider our enemies?
Do we genuinely desire their flourishing? Or do we sometimes find ourselves hoping they will fail?
Do we pray for their good, or do we mostly pray that God will change their minds?
Seeking the welfare of Babylon did not mean that the exiles were to abandon their covenant identity, embrace Babylon's gods, or accommodate its injustices. The biblical prophets certainly did not hesitate to condemn Babylon's arrogance, violence, and oppression (see Isa. 47:6–11; Jer. 50:29–32; Hab. 2:8–12). God's people could seek Babylon's flourishing without endorsing Babylon's wickedness. Likewise, seeking the welfare of our neighbors does not require Christians to surrender their convictions or affirm everything their neighbors believe or do.
Sometimes love requires challenging injustice, confronting wrongdoing, or speaking difficult truths. Yet even then, our aim must be to seek what is genuinely good, rather than simply defeating those with whom we disagree.
I wonder whether Christians have sometimes become so concerned with winning the culture around us that we have forgotten our calling to love the people within it, people created in the image of God.
We can hold deep convictions about truth and morality while genuinely seeking the good of those who disagree with us. We can confront injustice without surrendering to hatred. We can participate in public life without treating every disagreement as a battle to be won or every opponent as an enemy to be defeated.
As Thomas Aquinas taught, to love is to will the good of another (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 26, a. 4). But I would add something more: love must not only will the good of the other; it must also do good to the other.
God does not merely send us into places. He sends us to people made in his image, whose good we are called to seek.
Holy Love in Public
What does it actually look like to seek the welfare of our communities?
Jeremiah's instructions are remarkably ordinary. Build houses. Plant gardens. Establish families. Seek the welfare of the city. Pray for its people.
God does not provide the exiles with an elaborate strategy for transforming Babylonian society. Instead, he calls them to establish lives there, invest in their community, and contribute to the well-being of their neighbors.
Their faithfulness to God is to become visible through the ordinary ways they inhabit the world.
Sometimes we imagine that expressing Christian faith in public must involve dramatic declarations, grand initiatives, or extraordinary acts of courage. Occasionally, faithfulness does require these things. More often, however, holy love takes shape through the ordinary practices of everyday life.
It appears in caring for a struggling neighbor, giving generously to those in need, treating employees with dignity, exercising authority responsibly, and making decisions with genuine concern for those who will be affected by them.
Notice that Jeremiah does not separate prayer from action. God commands the exiles both to seek the welfare of the city and to pray for it. Their prayers are to be accompanied by lives that contribute to their neighbors' flourishing, while their actions are sustained by dependence upon God.
John Wesley understood this relationship particularly well.
For Wesley, holiness was never simply a matter of private religious experience, personal piety, or avoiding particular sins. Holiness was fundamentally about love: love for God and love for neighbor (Wesley, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” §I.9). And that love necessarily took shape in the way Christians lived their lives.
Wesley emphasized the works of mercy, including feeding the hungry, clothing those in need, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and caring for the poor (Wesley, “On Visiting the Sick,” introduction, §§1–3). These were not optional activities reserved for Christians with a particular interest in charitable ministry. They belonged to the ordinary Christian life.
Remarkably, Wesley understood these works of mercy not only as expressions of God's love but also as means through which God's grace continues to transform us (Wesley, “On Zeal,” §II.5).
When we care for our neighbors, we are not merely expressing the love of God. We are also placing ourselves in the path of God's transforming grace.
This vision of holiness has implications extending far beyond individual acts of charity. Holy love ought to shape the way Christians lead, exercise power, steward resources, and participate in the shared life of their communities.
It ought to influence decisions made in churches, institutions, businesses, and neighborhoods. It ought to shape how we pursue justice, care for vulnerable people, and engage those with whom we disagree. It ought to inform decisions about budgets, personnel, and institutional priorities, recognizing that behind every number and every policy are people whose flourishing matters to God.
Holy love ought to shape how we engage in public life. Why? Because politics matter. Politics matter because policy matters. Policy matters because people matter. And people matter because they are made in the image of God, and we are called to love them.
Elections matter, too, and Christians should take their political responsibilities seriously. But winning an election is not the same as loving our neighbors, and losing one does not release us from the obligation to seek their good. Whatever the outcome, our calling remains the same: to seek the shalom of our neighbors, including those whose political convictions we oppose.
The Christian calling to seek the welfare of our neighbors cannot end with our personal relationships. It must extend into the public life of our communities.
This is what I mean by holy love in public. Not simply talking about Christian love or defending Christian convictions, but living in such a way that our neighbors encounter something of the love of Jesus Christ through us.
The world does not simply need Christians who can explain holy love. It needs Christians whose lives make holy love visible.
Becoming People Who Love Like Jesus
All of this raises a question that goes deeper than our strategies for cultural engagement or public witness.
What kind of people must we become to love like this?
What kind of people can genuinely seek the good of those who have wronged them? What kind of people can hold deep convictions without allowing those convictions to become excuses for contempt? What kind of people can participate in public life without being consumed by fear, resentment, or the desire to win?
And perhaps most importantly, how do we become those kinds of people?
The answer, of course, begins with Jesus Christ.
In Jesus, we encounter the one who loved us while we were still sinners (Rom. 5:8), who humbled himself by taking the form of a servant (Phil. 2:5–11), and who prayed for those responsible for his unjust crucifixion (Luke 23:34).
Jesus does not simply command us to love our enemies. He demonstrates what such love looks like. And through the Holy Spirit, he makes that same holy love possible in and through us.
This is where the Wesleyan theological tradition has something especially important to offer the contemporary church.
John Wesley understood holiness not simply as avoiding sin or becoming increasingly religious, but as being perfected in love (Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, §19). Through God's sanctifying grace, love for God and neighbor increasingly comes to govern our hearts, desires, and lives.
Such love cannot be manufactured through willpower, moral determination, or more effective ministry strategies. It is the work of God's sanctifying grace.
Through the Holy Spirit, God transforms our hearts, reorders our desires, and conforms us increasingly to the likeness of Jesus Christ. The Spirit teaches us not merely to behave lovingly toward our neighbors, but he empowers us to genuinely desire their good and then to pursue it.
This distinction matters enormously. Christians can learn to act charitably while harboring resentment, to speak politely while nurturing contempt, or to serve others while quietly pursuing their own interests. Yet sanctification reaches beyond outward behavior to the desires and affections of the heart.
God is not merely teaching us how to perform acts of love. He is making us into loving people.
And this transformation ordinarily takes place through the means of grace: prayer, Scripture, the Lord's Supper, Christian fellowship, and works of mercy. As we encounter the love of Christ, we are transformed by that love. As we extend that love to others, God continues his transforming work within us.
And by grace through faith, we can even now experience the Spirit's work of perfecting us in love for God and for our neighbors. Come, Holy Spirit!
This is why Christian engagement with the world must ultimately be understood as a matter of Christian formation. The church's challenge is not merely to develop better strategies for cultural influence, public communication, or political engagement. It is to become a people whose hearts have been so transformed by God's grace that they genuinely seek the flourishing of their neighbors.
Our public witness will inevitably reflect the kind of people we are becoming.
If we are being formed by fear, resentment, and the pursuit of power, those dispositions will shape our engagement with the world. But if we are being formed by the holy love of Jesus Christ, our neighbors ought to encounter something of that love through our presence among them.
The world does not simply need Christians who know what to believe about their neighbors. It needs Christians who are becoming more like Jesus in the way they love their neighbors.
Jeremiah's command to the exiles remains a remarkable invitation for God's people today. We are called to inhabit communities we do not control, seek the flourishing of people who may not share our convictions, and make the love of Christ visible through the ordinary practices of our lives.
We are sent to show holy love in public.
And the good news is that the God who sends us is also the God who sanctifies us. The God who calls us to love is the God who makes us capable of love through the power of the Holy Spirit.
J. Matthew Barnes is Vice President of Student Life and Formation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, and an elder in the Global Methodist Church.