I once paid a visit to an older church member who had a garage full of Confederate memorabilia. As he walked me through his collection, he shared his political views. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, he remained a proud Confederate, but he was also a quiet eugenicist, speaking with relish about the purity of the German people. I was unnerved, but I did my best to listen; I was there in a pastoral role after all. As we sat there in his garage, my eyes drifted across the signs and posters and replicas until they settled on one particular bumper sticker.
After the Civil War, adamant Southerners had an expression about their relationship with the Union: “Forget, Hell!” Although they had reunited with the United States, diehard Confederates would forever hold a grudge. They would never forgive Northerners for the burning of towns, the seizing of land, the released of enslaved people, and the attempted dismantling of Southern aristocracy. It was a “Forget, Hell!” bumper sticker that drew my attention, but with a nearby flag hanging over one edge, the slogan looked more like
Forge Hell.
Jesus commanded forgiveness— often painful, counter-intuitive forgiveness—, and when we defy this instruction, it’s like we forge a little piece of Hell here on earth.
Seeing the bumper sticker made me think back to one of the most famous depictions of Hell and unrepentant hatred: Dante’s Inferno, which follows an Italian poet’s decent through Hell before he goes on to the rest of the afterlife. As Dante and his guide, Virgil, pass through the lowest levels of Hell (reserved for traitors), they encounter Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, who was famously betrayed and imprisoned by Archbishop Ruggieri. As both men committed acts of treachery in life, they are now imprisoned up to their waists in ice with an added brutal twist: Ugolino gets to torment Ruggieri by beating and gnawing on him for all eternity. Revenge has imprisoned both men, and they erode together eternally. This is the end result of revenge: it freezes the hearts of all involved, trapping you and keeping you from moving on. Ugolino may be getting his revenge, but he’s still in Hell.
On a recent episode of the CXMH podcast (which is devoted to Christianity and mental health), author Stephen Mansfield offered a similar illustration. Whenever you develop a grudge against someone, Mansfield explained, it’s like you create a tiny version of that person you can keep in a prison in your mind. In moments of anger, you can retreat into your mental prison, go over to their cell door, and poke and prod the object of your grudge to your heart’s content. Most people who choose this route, Mansfield continued, fail to realize they’re trapped in the mental prison as well. It’s like taking Ugolino’s revenge from Dante but in a manmade mental Hell on this side of eternity. This is how revenge traps us, and the Bible has a lot to say on the subject.
The biblical commands on forgiveness are as much for the forgiver as the forgivee. Jesus instructs his followers that, if we do not forgive those who sin against us, God will not forgive our sins either. That’s a pretty intense threat. The Proverbs instruct us to repay evil with good, and Deuteronomy encourages us to leave vengeance to God and not trouble ourselves with it— wisdom Paul would cite in Romans alongside the simple command: Do not take revenge, my dear friends. And so, we’re commanded not to forge Hell but to be agents of God’s Kingdom, practicing forgiveness and abandoning revenge.
Going back to that garage, as I stared at the bumper sticker and listened to this man’s hateful beliefs, I was filled with more pity for him than outrage. He had forged a little Hell right there in his garage, but was I any better? How many times have I struggled to forgive someone, choosing instead to forge a little Hell in my mind?
How many times have we all?