Photograph by Mohammed Ibrahim via Unsplash

For me, there is no greater enjoyment to be had in entertainment than a great revenge movie. Something where the main character has been wronged so wholly, that anything becomes permissible. Who doesn’t love to hear “my name is Maximus Decimus Meridius” in the Colosseum? Who doesn’t want to feel disgusted with themselves for cheering for Michael Corleone when Fredo takes a little trip on a fishing boat? It’s incredible. It’s cathartic. It’s exhilarating to see a character’s once-powerful enemies stripped of their power.

Revenge is one of the most formidable impulses in the human imagination. Which one of us has not yearned for it when we are subjected to a difficult boss, an impossible neighbor, a traitorous friend? It is a basic yearning. The problem is that these days it has become part of our national pathos with our politics. Donald Trump is vocal about the fact that he is on a revenge tour, and that nothing will stop him from enacting his revenge.

I think that revenge has become completely normalized in our present discourse, but it goes back further than that. There are plenty of revenge fantasies in Scripture. Take the story of Esther; for sure, Haman deserves what he gets, and the justice is 100% poetic. He erected a scaffold on which he planned to execute Mordecai and instead, he winds up getting executed on it. It literally does not get better than that. The reversal is juicy sweet, and the underdogs come out on top. The Jews get permission to exact revenge on their would-be genocidaires and that’s that.

The problem comes from reading that story in our present time. Purim, the holiday in which Jews tell this story and celebrate their deliverance from true peril, has become a time in which horrible violence against Palestinians is enacted with horrifying regularity. You see, the story has it there. Turn the tables on your enemies, annihilate them. God blesses it and ordains it.

It reached its horrifying zenith when in 1994, on Purim, which overlapped with Ramadan that year, an assassin dressed in Israeli army uniform opened fire with an assault rifle on a large gathering of Palestinian Muslims praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. In that murderer’s mind he was just playing out an age-old story about the enemies of the Jewish people being slaughtered.

It’s still playing out today. What more can you say about the current conflict in Gaza and now, Lebanon? Hamas sought revenge and brutally murdered over a thousand Israelis. Hezbollah sought revenge and bombed a soccer field that killed mainly Druze minority citizens in Israel, most of them kids. Israel has enacted revenge on Gaza, killing over 41,000 residents of the brutally occupied territory, and it is after revenge now in Lebanon.

The thing about revenge is that once it starts, it rarely ever stops. It takes outstanding commitment to peace, willingness to find new solutions, and for someone to decide that now is the time to stop revenge. There seems to be a stunning paucity of that kind of courage today, and even less courage from our leaders in Washington who use our tax dollars to enact this revenge fantasy and fund it.

Probably my favorite reading of the atonement story, that is a story about what Jesus’ death did and how it achieves salvation, is that it offered a different way of sorting out conflict. Rene Girard is probably the most persuasive proponent of this view. Jesus does not enact revenge. Surely, in the Christian imagination, he is powerful enough to do so. Surely, he could have, as Satan tempted him in the desert, commanded angels to enact his revenge for him. But he doesn’t. He shows another way of being in the world that circumvents the very human desire of blood for blood.

In today’s world, revenge is killing us. It is killing some much more quickly than others. It kills us, thousands of miles away from a conflict spiritually, making us unwilling collaborators in a genocidal scheme that robs children of their parents, their lives, and a future. Revenge is not the balm that it at first appears it will be. It is a trap, in our personal and political lives, and we must see beyond it to a different kind of reasoning that comes from the heart. That is the only way that there will be peace on earth, and as Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God.

My favorite essay about revenge comes from George Orwell. In “Revenge is Sour,” he argues that revenge is “an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.” He goes on to tell a story about a woman who fired five shots into Mussolini’s corpse and ends with this line: “I wonder how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a corpse.”

Revenge may be sour, but it is the pervading ethic of our day. Only bold acts of peace that glorify the name of God can get us out of this mess. If we are to believe Girard, then the tools to make peace are already in our hands.