"Father, forgive them..."

In 2003, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the then-Dixie Chicks’ lead singer, Natalie Maines, told a sold-out London audience that she was ashamed that President George W. Bush was from her home state of Texas. The uproar that followed, including death threats, drove the group off the stage for three full years. When they returned, it was with a song called “I’m Not Ready To Make Nice” that began like this.

Forgive, sounds good/ Forget, I'm not sure I could/ They say time heals everything/ But I'm still waiting... I’m not ready to make nice, I’m not ready to back down/I’m still mad as hell and I don’t have time to go ‘round and ‘round and ‘round…

…and I confess that I’ve quietly hummed that tune to myself more than once.

Because, you see, this white plastic collar I wear to work on Sundays is no halo. It does not magically confer saintliness on the wearer. When I am attacked, when I am lied about, when I am disrespected, ejected, rejected, trolled, sold, put on hold, or thrown out in the cold, my first thought is light-years from “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Can I get an Amen, people? ‘Cause I know you know.

And when I see Jesus nailed up there on that cross, whipped within an inch of his life, sweating, crying, bleeding and dying, my first thought is, How can you even think “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”? I want to ask Jesus, “How can you not think, ‘Father, damn them! Damn them to Hell! Damn them forever! Make them feel the burning in every raw nerve ending that I’m feeling right now, and make it for all eternity! Make them gasp for every single breath for endless ages upon ages! Let the laughter and scorn of their most cruel enemies roar in their ears, while they scream in agony! Make them pay, because they know what they’ve done!”

But he didn’t. (At least, he never said so.)

Do you think Jesus really thought they didn’t know? Do you? Be honest. Do you think he thought it was an accident that he was up on that cross? Mistaken identity? Bureaucratic bungling? These were the same people who tried to throw him off a cliff in Nazareth after his first sermon. They followed him around for three years trying to trip him into blasphemy or treason. They couldn’t do it—so they lied. They made stuff up.

And they conned Pontius Pilate into condemning him to die for something he didn’t do. I saw where somebody said Jesus died in the Blackest way possible: unarmed, with his hands up, with his mother crying at his feet. Do you think Jesus thought those soldiers and officials didn’t know what they were doing?

I read recently that there are three kinds of errors. There are honest, innocent mistakes, excusable, but not needing forgiveness. There’s willing, intentional wrongdoing, forgivable with repentance. But our legal system recognizes acts that come out of something called culpable ignorance. Culpable ignorance is when you don’t want to know what you should know, when you don’t want to see what you should see, because you’re blinded to the truth—and you like it that way. And you have no intention of letting anyone open your eyes, because it’s a lot more comfortable keeping them closed just as tight as you can.

This is, I think, the reason the word, and the concept, of “woke” is so triggering for some people. They don’t want to be awake, and they don’t want anybody else to wake up, either. They want to be able to doze through life without being bothered by history, or morality, or for that matter, reality. Just livin’ the dream—except their dream is a nightmare for the rest of us.

I think that’s what Jesus knew about human beings. He knew that, sometimes, we would just rather be stupid. Not lacking intelligence, or intellectual ability—there are plenty of really stupid people with advanced degrees—but culpable ignorance. Or louder for the people in the back: Stupidity.

A German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote from a Nazi prison that “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.” He said that “against stupidity we are defenseless,” because something takes possession of the willfully stupid and makes them into a “mindless tool...capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.” He said that “it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

You can’t teach people out of that kind of stupid. You sure can’t preach them out of it. I wish I knew what does work, because if I did, I would move heaven and earth to do it.

Don’t get me wrong. I know what Jesus told me to do, and I try hard to do it. Forgiveness is not necessarily contingent on public repentance; the Roman soldiers and the religious leaders who stood approvingly at his execution, so far as we know, never told him they were sorry if anything they did made him uncomfortable (which is the slippery way most public apologies are made these days).

But let’s not mince words: to forgive is not to condone. And I am with Pastor Bonhoeffer, God rest his soul, on this. You will never, ever, ever get me to condone the actions of someone who insists on their “right” to be stupid, and to keep being stupid and doing stupid right up to the bitter end of stupid.

I just don’t have the time for stupid any more.