Forgive Them. They're Stupid.

On maintaining compassion in times of dehumanization.

Holy Week is just about here. Christians around the world will be commemorating the final days of the life of Jesus of Nazareth before his public, state-sanctioned, barbaric execution leading up until the day his disciples found his grave empty and his body raised.

In some Christian traditions, we’ll see people hold “Seven Last Words” services, where ministers present sermons & messages built around the seven last sayings of Jesus during his torture on the cross.

It’s the first of these sayings that has taken on new meaning for me in this season.

In the Gospel according to Luke, we find these words recorded for our consideration:

Πάτερ, ἄφες αὐτοῖς, οὐ γὰρ οἴδασιν τί ποιοῦσιν in the Greek.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” says the King James Version.

“Father, forgive them. They’re moving in ignorance” a contemporary rendering might say.

“God, forgive them. They’re stupid” the Treyslation would say.

As he hung on a cross, dealing with the agonizing pain of nails being driven through his flesh, bone, and cartilage, Jesus found it in his heart to pray for the forgiveness of those who meant him harm.

But there are two things I noticed about this prayer that mostly escaped my prior reflections on these words:

1. Jesus’s prayer was that the Father would forgive them. Trinitarian understandings not withstanding, he doesn’t speak in the first person. Jesus does not say “I forgive them.” The prayer is Father, forgive them.

2. Jesus’s prayer for forgiveness is grounded in the ignorance of the transgressors. While their worth and identity as children of God made in the image of God may very well serve as the subtext of such a request, what was essential in this instance was that they were moving in ignorance. They did not understand what was happening. The didn’t grasp what they were participating in. In the moment, they were being stupid.

I was not initially comfortable with either of those observations.

For starters, Jesus’s stance on forgiveness seem pretty clear. The idea that God will only forgive us to the extent that we forgive those indebted to us is communicated in the very prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples to pray. Jesus implores us to forgive our brothers/neighbors countless times. Forgiveness is one of the primary ethics of the reign of God.

But forgiveness is hard.

And the idea that Jesus offers this prayer in these words seems to underscore that.

What if, in the moments before it seemed that the death dealing ways of Roman torture would have the final word and he had breathed his last, Jesus struggled to forgive the people who appeared to be responsible for the injustice he was facing?

I think about that as I try to be an ambassador of light in the middle of a society that has descended into fascism. In the middle of a society that uses the shifting definition of “illegal immigrant” to deprive people of civil rights. In the middle of a society that is looking for satellite concentration camps, as its current concentration camps cannot fit anymore abductees. In the middle of a society where the very ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion have been presented as the ethics of the unjust—and that is to say nothing of any effort to strive toward the realization of these ideals. In the middle of a society where we are no longer wrestling with the prospect of genocide around the world, but actively dreaming of what we will do with the lands once the genocides have been completed.

And this is just a few of the things that explicitly lead to death. That’s to say nothing of creating new geopolitical enemies or gambling with the livelihoods of millions of people around the world by recklessly pressing buttons on the economic controls and haphazardly terminating people under federal employ.

It is tough to think of forgiveness when people are actively supporting an administration and policies that stand in the way of the wholeness of everyone except for a handful of ultra-wealthy people.

But then, I think about this prayer of Jesus. And I’m reminded that sometimes, we cannot begin to think of forgiving people until we entertain a possibility:

They are stupid.

Hanlon’s razor says to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

And Jesus, once said “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

The last three quotations were from men who were literally killed by people held captive by ignorance.

Ignorance is part of the matrix of sin that we cannot be saved from on an individual basis. An individual becoming enlightened will not become safer if they are still surrounded and ensnared by a web of ignorance.

Stupidity is sin that sinks us all.

And one of the more dangerous aspects of stupidity is that people who are enslaved to stupidity do not know it. They cannot see the chains that restrain them from living in the wholeness that God has called them to. They believe themselves to be free, and that malformed image of freedom is the source of the death dealing systems they propagate.

Anger is a natural response to dealing with stupid people.

But sitting with that anger until it makes room for compassion can remind us that we’ve all been susceptible to the embrace of stupidity at some point.

And then we can work to love around stupid people, instead of arguing with stupid people.

The danger of arguing with stupid people is that it will drive you crazy.

A society full of nothing but crazy and stupid people is a society devoid of hope.

I don’t think Jesus sat on that cross with the sort of cheery optimism that would lead him to believe that these agents of empire were ignorant of the fact that they were killing him. I do believe that he is of the mind that they were ignorant of what such a course of action said about themselves. About their concept of justice. About the gods they’d constructed in their imagination. Jesus saw them as gravely stupid in this fashion.

And his prayer was that they’d be forgiven for such stupidity.

It is worth noting that some of these people may not be stupid. They may not be moving in ignorance. The alternative is that they are willing agents of the worst evil imaginable. And it is much tougher to contend with that.

But the only way to overcome darkness is with light. The only way to overcome evil is with good. The only way to overcome hate is with love.

And sometimes, the most loving thing we can do for someone who has become an agent of harm… is pray that God would forgive them for their stupidity.

I like playing with words. So that’s what I do. Whether it be with tweets, videos, essays, sermonic presentations, Bible studies, podcasts, or speaking engagements of other sorts, I’m always trying to figure out how to provoke an image in a seeker with some combination of words.

If you’ve enjoyed any of the words I have to offer, check out my book Theologizin’ Bigger: Homilies on Living Freely and Loving Wholly wherever books are sold!