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(OPINION) In the preeminent criminal trial of the ages, Pontius Pilate asked Jesus of Nazareth whether he considered himself some sort of king.

This was a life-and-death question. The Roman Empire held Caesar to be the one true king, the lord of the known earth and a god to whom religious allegiance was owed. To set yourself up as a rival ruler was treason and blasphemy.

Jesus answered indirectly. “My kingdom isn’t of this world,” he said. “If it were, my followers would be fighting.”

Yet right there, in the first century, at the dawn of the Christian faith, we see Jesus defining for us what the spiritual struggle of the coming millennia would be about. It would be a contest between two opposed kingdoms, one violent and the other peaceable.

One side would, as the Roman Empire did, reflect this world’s oldest systems, tactics and assumptions. The other would exist alongside the first, but its origin was from another realm entirely. It would make different assumptions, promote different principles, act in different ways. The two kingdoms would not understand each other. They would speak different languages.

It’s not difficult to recognize the first kingdom, which I’ve heard at least one preacher refer to as the kingdom of empire. It’s made up of practically everything we know, and a lot of things we love and most every supposed truth we take for granted.

It’s a kingdom that fights, literally and figuratively, century after century. The Roman Empire had beaten all comers to win dominance of the civilized world. Fighting was what it did best. Rome’s worldview was all about conquering, prospering, grabbing, enslaving, bragging, slashing, burning, intimidating and, as we might say today, “owning” the opposition.

By the time he stood before Pilate, Jesus had spent several years preaching what his disciples would call the “good news” of an entirely different kingdom, one not of this world — indeed a kingdom Jesus and his followers believed was sent to Earth directly from heaven. It was the antithesis of Rome.

When Rome said dominate your enemies, Jesus said love them. Whereas Rome honored the athletic, the victorious and the proud, Jesus said blessed are the sick, the humble and the poor. When Rome and legalistic religious leaders made a great show of brutally punishing wrongdoers, Jesus taught mercy and pardon. When Rome rewarded its citizens while cruelly taxing and abusing outsiders, Jesus proclaimed the outsiders of Rome to be insiders to God.

In short, Jesus took all the prevailing wisdom by which society ran and dumped it upside down onto the floor, then swept it into the gutter. What you call good is actually bad, he said. What you think is weakness is in fact profound strength.

When Rome and local religious elites took Jesus as a prisoner, he ordered his disciples to sheathe their swords and keep the peace. He prayed his murderers would be forgiven. Instead of self-exaltation, he practiced self-sacrifice — up to and including his own death.

When he told Pilate, “My kingdom isn’t of this world. If it were, my followers would be fighting,” he was saying, in effect, there’s no kingdom on this planet — including yours, Pilate — that operates according to the rules of the kingdom I proclaim. My kingdom is unique. And mine is the one created by God.

Today we fail to see how cosmically revolutionary Jesus, his kingdom and his early followers were.

As a prisoner, St. Paul stood in court and testified of this kingdom before Herod Agrippa and a powerful Roman procurator named Festus. He sounded so ridiculous Festus interrupted him.

“You are out of your mind, Paul!” Festus shouted. “Your great learning is driving you insane.”

That’s how any undiluted proclamation of the kingdom of peace has sounded ever since, not just to Roman officials but to officials of every kindred and tribe, including ours. Jesus’ way is just as crazy to 21st century Americans, including to a great many Christians, as it was to Festus.

Tragically, that same old wrong-headed Roman Empire decided a few centuries after Jesus and Paul to make Christianity its official faith. Thus the kingdom of heaven got alloyed with its polar opposite, the kingdom of empire.

Ultimately, the kingdom of this world won out, and the church became another extension of empire, with its own hubris and gold and armies, instead of an assembly of ragamuffins and losers who went about picking up lepers off the streets and bandaging their sores.

So we continue until today. Too often, the kingdom of empire and what passes now for the kingdom of heaven are indistinguishable. Sometimes professed Christians want to unite even more tightly the church and the U.S. government. Seems we never learn.

I think it might be possible to proclaim, and perhaps even live, Jesus’ original kind of kingdom today. But likely the same thing would happen to you as happened to him. You’d get crucified.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.