A Scene the World Could Not Understand
On the morning of October 2, 2006, a man walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, sent the boys and adults outside, opened fire on ten little girls, and then killed himself. Five of them died. It was the kind of atrocity that hardens a community for a generation, the kind that ordinarily begins a long winter of bitterness.
What happened next is why anyone outside that valley still remembers it. That same day, before some of the children were even buried, Amish families went to the killer’s home. They sat with his widow and parents, grieved with them, and told them they held no animosity toward them or his children. When the gunman was buried, Amish mourners outnumbered the non-Amish at his grave. They had decided, almost immediately, to forgive the man who had murdered their daughters.
The watching world did not know how to respond to this. Commentators called it beautiful and disturbing in nearly the same breath. Some suspected it could not be real, that it must be denial or repression dressed up as virtue. The reaction revealed something about us: we have categories for revenge and for grief, but we scarcely have one for this. We do not, as a civilization, know what to make of people who refuse to hate those who have hurt them most.
And yet I want to argue that those grieving families, in the worst hour of their lives, were doing the one thing that has ever actually ended a cycle of human violence: the one thing every empire, treaty, and peace conference in history has failed to do. They were obeying a command spoken on a Galilean hillside two thousand years ago: “Love your enemies and forgive those who have wronged you” (Matthew 5:44; Mark 11:25). My claim in what follows is large, and I intend to defend it without flinching. There is one road to peace, and only one. It runs straight through that command. Every other road we have tried leads, sooner or later, back to the grave.
What We Mean by Peace
We should be clear from the outset about what we are looking for, because the word “peace” conceals two very different realities.
There is peace that is merely the absence of active fighting: a ceasefire, an armistice, or a cold standoff between enemies who would gladly destroy each other if the cost were not so high. Call this “negative peace.” It is real and valuable; a held breath is better than a scream. But it is not what the human heart longs for when it longs for peace, because beneath it the war has not ended. It has only paused. The hatred remains. The weapons are merely holstered.
Then there is the peace that entails the actual dismantling of hostility: a condition in which former enemies no longer wish each other harm, and the will to mutual destruction has itself been dissolved. Call this “positive peace”. This is the thing we have never been able to manufacture by force or treaty, because force and treaty work only on behavior, and positive peace lives deeper than behavior. It lives in what people want. You cannot impose it from the outside any more than you can order someone to love.
When I say there is only one road to peace, I mean positive peace, the genuine article, not the armed truce we keep mistaking for it. We can sometimes build negative peace with power. Positive peace has exactly one source, and we are about to see why.
The Engine That Powers Every War
To understand why, look closely at how human conflict reproduces itself, because the mechanism is almost embarrassingly simple.
Conflict rarely begins with an explosion. It begins with an injury. Someone is wronged: robbed, struck, betrayed, humiliated, dispossessed. The wronged party feels the hot, clarifying certainty of injustice and does what feels not merely natural but “righteous”: he answers the wrong with a wrong of his own. He calls it justice, honor, self-defense, or setting things right. But the person who receives that answering blow does not experience it as justice. He experiences it as a fresh wound and strikes back in turn, and he, too, is certain he is only balancing the scales.
This is the engine behind nearly every feud, vendetta, and war in human history, and it runs on the one fuel that never runs out: the universal conviction that we are more sinned against than sinning. Each side feels the last blow more vividly than the one it delivered. Each generation inherits the wounds of the last and passes them forward. The Hatfields and McCoys eventually could not even remember what started it. Nations carry grievances across centuries, sharpening the memory of an old defeat until it becomes the warrant for new blood. The cycle does not wind down on its own. Left untended, it accelerates.
There is an old line, usually credited to Gandhi: An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. It endures because we all know it is true, yet we almost never act as if it were. Retaliation feels like it will close the account. It never does. It only shifts the debt to the other party, who now feels owed in turn, and the arithmetic of revenge has no final sum. There is no measure of suffering you can inflict on an enemy that will make him agree the books are now balanced. He will always feel the last blow was unjust. So the ledger stays open forever, and the killing continues.
This is the wall that every purely external peace effort eventually hits. You can disarm two enemies, but if their hearts still hunger for the other’s ruin, they will rearm the moment they can. You can impose a treaty, but a treaty is paper laid over fire; it does not put the fire out. You can balance their power so finely that neither dares move, but you have not made them friends; you have only frozen them in a posture of mutual threat, waiting for the balance to shift. None of it touches the appetite for retaliation. It only restrains it, and a restrained appetite is still an appetite. It waits.
The Most Subversive Sentence Ever Spoken
Into this machine, Jesus of Nazareth introduced something the world had never heard stated with such clarity or authority. We have heard his words so often that we have lost the ability to be shocked by them. They were shocking then, and if we hear them honestly, they remain shocking still.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:38-39). And then, even more startling: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44; see also Luke 6:27-28).
Notice how completely this dismantles the engine of vengeance. The old rule, an eye for an eye (Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:20), was, in its time, an advance. It was meant to “limit” revenge, to ensure that a man who lost an eye could not take a life in return and that punishment would stay proportional rather than spiral upward. It was a brake on the engine. But Jesus does not merely improve the brake. He proposes to shut the engine off. He says, in effect: the cycle of injury and retaliation that you have mistaken for the very structure of justice is killing you, and the only escape is for someone, somewhere, to absorb a blow without returning it. Someone has to let the chain stop. Someone has to refuse to pass the wound along.
This is the genius of the teaching and the reason I insist it is not one option among many but the single mechanism that can actually end conflict rather than merely postpone it. Every other approach tries to make retaliation too costly or too dangerous to attempt. This one alone proposes to make retaliation “unnecessary,” dissolving the desire for it from the inside. Jesus is not asking us to lose the war. He is asking us to refuse to fight it, so that there is no war left to win or lose. He is asking us to break the chain at the only point where it can be broken: in the heart of one person who decides that violence will end with him.
The Command That Was Also a Demonstration
If the teaching stopped at words, a skeptic could fairly call it easy advice from someone who never had to follow it. But the most important fact about this particular teacher is that he was eventually required to do the hardest version of what he commanded, in public, at the cost of his life. And he did it.
Jesus was arrested on false charges, abandoned by his friends, beaten, mocked, and nailed to a Roman cross between two criminals. He had every right to the world’s accumulated grievance. By the logic that governs the rest of us, this was the moment for a curse, for the promise of judgment, for the satisfaction of knowing his tormentors would one day pay. Instead, as the nails were still being driven and the soldiers gambled for his clothing, he prayed for the men killing him: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
This is the teaching enacted at the greatest cost and with the least advantage: enemy-love offered not to a manageable annoyance but to an executioner, in the very act of execution. It transforms the Sermon on the Mount from a set of admirable maxims into a demonstrated possibility. It can be done because it was done. And it set a pattern that his followers immediately recognized as the heart of the matter. When Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was being stoned to death, he used his last breath to ask that the sin not be held against his killers (Acts 7:60). He had clearly understood what the command required.
For the Christian, the cross is more than a brave example. It is the claim that at the center of reality itself is a God who responds to human enmity not with annihilation, which He could easily accomplish, but with forgiveness, which costs Him everything. As the Apostle Paul wrote, while we were still enemies, we were reconciled to God (Romans 5:8-10). On this view, the whole moral architecture of the universe is built not on the principle of repayment but on the principle of absorbing wrong, of a love that takes the blow and refuses to return it. If that is true, loving our enemies is not a quixotic exception to how things work. It is alignment with the deepest grain of how things actually are. The peacemaker is not fighting reality. He is finally cooperating with it.
Forgiveness, Precisely Defined, and What It Is Not
Forgiveness is the act that puts the command to love our enemies into practice. Therefore, we must be precise about what forgiveness is, because nearly every objection to the teaching is, in fact, an objection to an inaccurate caricature of it.
Forgiveness is not pretending the wrong never happened. It is not calling evil acceptable. It is not the erasure of memory or the suspension of justice. To forgive is not to declare the offender innocent; it is precisely because he is guilty that there is anything to forgive. We do not forgive the innocent; we have nothing to forgive them for. Forgiveness presupposes a real debt, a genuine wrong, and an injury that actually occurred and mattered.
What forgiveness does is cancel the wrong’s claim on the future. The injury happened and cannot be undone. But the wronged party makes a decision: “I will not demand that this wound be answered with another wound. I release my right to retaliate.” The account that the engine of vengeance would keep open forever is deliberately closed by the one who has standing to keep it open. When Peter asked how many times he was obliged to forgive and proposed the generous-sounding figure of seven, Jesus answered seventy times seven (Matthew 18:21-22), meaning without ceiling or limit, as a settled way of life rather than an occasional concession.
Here is a distinction that resolves most of the confusion and fear surrounding this teaching: forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Forgiveness is unilateral. The victim can grant it alone, on his own initiative, without the offender’s cooperation or even his knowledge; it is a movement of the wronged heart, releasing its claim. Reconciliation is bilateral. It requires two parties: the offender’s genuine repentance, changed conduct, and the slow rebuilding of trust. And it is right that it does. Forgiveness opens the door. Reconciliation is the two parties walking through it together, and it cannot and should not happen until the one who did the harm has turned from it.
This distinction matters enormously because it answers the objection that forgiveness asks victims to expose themselves again to those who hurt them. It asks no such thing. A woman can forgive an abuser, releasing her heart from the corrosion of hatred and the demand for his ruin, without ever placing herself back within his reach. Forgiveness frees the victim. Reconciliation protects her by waiting for the abuser’s repentance. The teaching commands the first without limit; it never commands the second in the absence of real change. To collapse the two is to slander the teaching as a charter for the strong to keep preying on the weak, when in fact it is the only thing that frees the weak from being possessed, inwardly, by the strong who wronged them.
And forgiveness costs the forgiver. It is not free. The one who forgives absorbs the loss rather than passing it on; he repays no one evil for evil but overcomes evil with good (Romans 12:17-21). To the natural mind, this looks like weakness, even a betrayal of justice. In fact, it is the strongest thing a human being can do, and the only thing strong enough to break a cycle that has resisted every other remedy in the history of the world. The forgiver pays a price so that violence does not continue. He does, in his small corner of the world, exactly what would have to be done everywhere to bring peace to the whole world.
The Witnesses, and an Honest Accounting of Why It Worked
It would be easy to dismiss all this as lovely but unworkable, a counsel for monks rather than for the real world of power and danger. The trouble for the skeptic is that wherever human beings have tried it on a serious scale, it has produced what force alone never could. We should look at the cases honestly, including what “else” was at work, because the strongest version of this argument does not pretend that forgiveness acted alone.
Consider the American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. confronted one of the most entrenched systems of injustice in the modern world, defended by law, custom, and the constant threat of murder. Many forces converged to dismantle it: federal legislation, court rulings, economic pressure from boycotts, the Cold War embarrassment of American racism on the world stage, and the sheer organized persistence of ordinary people. I do not pretend that forgiveness alone did the work. But forgiveness, the disciplined refusal to answer hatred with hatred, was the “indispensable” element, the one without which all the others would have produced a very different outcome. A violent uprising would have invited overwhelming repression and handed the oppressor the moral high ground he desperately needed. By absorbing blows without returning them, by loving people who turned dogs and fire hoses on them, the movement broke the system’s moral logic and forced a watching nation to see clearly what was being done in its name. King knew exactly what he was doing. He insisted that returning hatred for hatred only multiplies hatred, that darkness cannot drive out darkness and only light can do that. Strip forgiveness from that movement, and you do not get a faster victory; you get a race war.
Consider South Africa. After generations of apartheid, the country stood at the edge of the bloodbath nearly everyone predicted. The grievances were vast and entirely justified; by the logic of vengeance, an ocean of retribution was owed. Many factors steered the country off that cliff: shrewd political negotiation, international sanctions, economic exhaustion, and leaders willing to compromise. But at the center stood a choice that was unmistakably the teaching in action. Through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, victims faced those who had wronged them. The truth was spoken aloud, and a path was opened for confession and amnesty rather than wholesale punishment. It was imperfect, as every human thing is. But it averted the slaughter that pure retribution would almost certainly have produced. Its architects, many of them Christians, said plainly that they were acting on the conviction that there is no future without forgiveness. Take forgiveness out, and the other factors remain. The most likely result is the very massacre that was so narrowly avoided.
Consider the smaller, quieter witnesses, who, in some ways, are the most convincing because no political strategy stood behind them. The Amish families at Nickel Mines, with whom we began, had nothing to gain and no movement to advance. Corrie ten Boom, who survived a concentration camp where her sister died, found herself years later face-to-face with one of the guards who had tormented them, now asking for her forgiveness. When she chose to take his hand, she discovered that the act released “her” as much as it released him, and that the hatred she had every right to carry would have been a cell she built for herself.
In each case, the same pattern appears, and the honest version of the claim is this: forgiveness was rarely the sole force at work, but it was the one force without which the outcome would have been more bloodshed. The other factors could stop the fighting. Only forgiveness could make a peace that held.
Why Every Other Road Is a Dead End
I have claimed this is the “only” road to peace, and exclusivity is a strong claim that warrants a direct defense. Why not the other roads?
Every alternative, examined closely, turns out to depend on the very thing it seeks to overcome. Take deterrence, peace through the threat of overwhelming retaliation. It does not abolish the desire for violence; it holds violence at bay by threatening more violence. It is vengeance dressed as a stable system, and it is stable only so long as the threat remains credible and no one miscalculates. It has spared us certain wars, and we should be grateful. But it has not given us peace. It has given us a held breath: two enemies, weapons aimed at each other, forever. That is not the end of hostility. It is hostility, armed and frozen.
Take the balance of power. Same defect. A balance restrains the strong from devouring the weak but does nothing to stop them from wanting to. It is peace as a temporary equilibrium of opposing hatreds, and equilibria shift. When the balance tips, the war resumes because the appetite that drives it never left.
Take international law and institutions, which are genuine goods I have no wish to dismiss. But law can only restrain conduct it has the power to punish, and law among nations carries no sword of its own beyond what the nations lend it. When a powerful party decides that its grievance outweighs the penalty, the law is revealed as the paper it always was. Law manages conflict. It cannot dissolve the will to conflict, and the will is the real disease.
Take even the noblest secular vision: peace through perfect justice, the righting of every wrong. This comes closest to an essential truth: no lasting peace can simply ignore injustice. The Scriptures that command forgiveness also command us to do justice and to love mercy (Micah 6:8), and the two are not enemies. But pursued “alone,” without forgiveness, the demand for total justice becomes its own engine of war. Every party in a conflict believes itself the wronged one, and a strict insistence that all wrongs be repaid is merely vengeance under a respectable name. The debts of human history are infinite and mutual; a world that insists on collecting them all is a world that will never stop fighting. Justice tells us what is owed. Only forgiveness can release us from the obligation to collect it in blood.
There is the heart of it. Every other road leaves the appetite for retaliation intact and tries to manage it from the outside. The teaching of Jesus is the only one that reaches inside and changes the appetite itself. Everything else is crowd control. This alone is a cure.
The Hardest Objection: What About Hitler?
Any honest case must confront the objection that haunts this one, and to dodge it would forfeit the reader’s trust. It is usually put in a single name: Hitler. Are we really to “love” a regime that was industrially murdering millions? Was the world wrong to take up arms against the Third Reich? The objection sharpens to a fine point in the figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who wrote one of the great modern books on the Sermon on the Mount, insisted on the costly grace of discipleship, and nonetheless joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and was hanged for it. If even the twentieth century’s foremost teacher of enemy-love concluded that sometimes you must take up the sword, has the whole argument not collapsed?
I will not pretend this resolves cleanly, because it does not, and the pretense would be worse than the problem. But several points can be made that leave the central thesis not merely standing but strengthened.
First, Bonhoeffer himself did not regard his action as a clean vindication of violence. He did not claim to have found a righteous loophole. He acted out of what he understood as guilt, taking responsibility for a terrible deed and throwing himself entirely upon grace, refusing to call evil good even when he judged it necessary. That is the opposite of the self-righteous certainty that fuels the engine of vengeance. It is a man choosing, in extremity, to bear the weight of a wrong rather than pretend it was not one. The teaching is not mocked by a disciple who breaks it in anguish and calls it sin; it is mocked by the man who breaks it in triumph and calls it justice.
Second, we must hold on to the distinction made earlier between protecting the innocent and avenging the self. Physically restraining a murderer in the act of murder, standing between him and the child he is about to kill, is not an act of vengeance. It can be, and at its best is, an act of love toward the victim. There is a real and defensible difference between the soldier who stops a genocide while wishing he did not have to, and the man who burns a village because his grandfather’s village was burned. The first protects; the second retaliates. The teaching absolutely forbids the second. The first it treats as a tragic last resort, to be undertaken in grief rather than hatred, with no illusion that violence has become good, only that, in a fallen world, the failure to protect can be a greater evil than the reluctant use of force.
But here is the decisive point, the one that turns the hardest objection into a confirmation. “Even granting that force was tragically necessary to stop the Nazi war machine, force did not make peace.” It could not. Force stopped a slaughter, a great good, but it left behind a ruined continent of hatred, and the question of whether real peace would follow was answered by something else entirely. Look at what happened. After the First World War, the victors built a peace of vengeance. They humiliated and bankrupted Germany, determined to collect every ounce of the debt. The result was not peace but the very resentment that Hitler rode into power twenty years later. Then, after the Second World War, the victors did something almost unprecedented: rather than crush the defeated, they rebuilt them. They poured resources into the reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the nations whose cities they had just burned. And that peace held. The enemies of one generation became the allies of the next.
The lesson could not be clearer. Force, at best, can stop the violence. It has never, by itself, made peace. Whether peace follows depends on whether the victors choose vengeance or something nearer to forgiveness. A vengeful peace breeds the next war; that is what Versailles bought. A peace that absorbs the wrong and rebuilds the enemy can actually hold; that is what the postwar settlement, for all its flaws, achieved. So the case of Hitler, pressed to its limits, does not refute the thesis. It demonstrates it. Even where the sword is unavoidable, it cannot give us what we are really after. Only the refusal of vengeance can.
The Other Honest Objections
A serious case must answer the remaining obvious objections, too.
“Is this not hopeless naivety; does turning the other cheek not simply invite the brutal to do as they please?” This misreads the teaching. To love an enemy is not to be passive before evil; it is to refuse to “become” what one opposes. King did not submit to injustice; he resisted it with everything he had, but without hatred, and that is exactly what made his resistance unconquerable. The forgiver may still resist the wrong, still protect the innocent, still labor to change the wrongdoer. What he surrenders is not the struggle against evil but the right to answer evil with evil; he leaves vengeance to God rather than seizing it himself (Romans 12:19), and in surrendering that right he gains a power the violent can never hold. The violent man can be beaten by greater violence. The man who has stopped hating cannot be beaten at all.
“Does this require a religious faith much of the world does not share?” Remarkably, the teaching has proven both persuasive and effective far beyond those who share its theology. Gandhi, a Hindu, drew openly on the Sermon on the Mount; King drew on Gandhi in turn. People of every faith and none have recognized, when they have seen it lived out, that it speaks to something real about the human condition. That is what we would expect if the teaching is “true,” if it describes the actual structure of how peace is and is not made. The law that retaliation breeds retaliation operates whether or not one believes in God, and so does the law that forgiveness alone can break the chain. One need not begin as a believer to discover that Jesus was right about how violence ends.
“Can this really scale? It is one thing for a saint to forgive; can a nation?” This is the deepest difficulty, and it deserves more than a slogan.
Owning the Hardest Leap: From One Heart to a Whole World
The hardest move in this entire argument is the leap from the individual heart to the geopolitics of nations. It is genuinely hard, and I do not want to wave it away with the easy line that “nations are made of people.” They are; but a nation is not simply a person enlarged. It has institutions, interests, security dilemmas, and internal factions, and no leader can unilaterally decide that an entire people will now forgive. So how does a teaching aimed at the individual heart ever reach the scale of armies and borders?
It does not reach that scale mechanically, and we should admit it. There is no lever a statesman can pull to convert national policy into corporate forgiveness overnight. What forgiveness does at scale is slower and stranger than that. It works the way every deep cultural change works: by shifting, person by person and community by community, what a people is willing to do and to demand. A society in which forgiveness has taken root in enough individual hearts is one whose politics slowly becomes possible in ways it was not before: where leaders who choose reconciliation over revenge find a constituency rather than a firing squad, and where the demagogue who promises vengeance finds his market shrinking. The change does not begin in the foreign ministry. It begins in churches, homes, and schoolrooms, and it rises.
And here the skeptic must reckon with the fact that it has, in fact, scaled, not perfectly, not everywhere, but unmistakably, at the level of nations. Consider France and Germany. For most of modern history, they were hereditary enemies, fighting three catastrophic wars within a single lifetime (1870, 1914, 1939), each war seeding the next with fresh grievance. By every precedent, a fourth war was only a matter of time. Instead, in the wreckage after 1945, a handful of leaders made a deliberate decision to bind the old enemies together rather than exact revenge. Robert Schuman, a devout Catholic who had been imprisoned by the Nazis, helped lead the way toward reconciliation, which became the foundation of a united Europe. Today, war between France and Germany is not merely unlikely. It is unthinkable. Two peoples who slaughtered each other for centuries have arrived at a positive peace so secure that the young can scarcely imagine it was ever otherwise.
That did not happen through deterrence or the balance of power. It happened because, after the last and worst of the wars, enough people on both sides chose to stop collecting the debt. The leap from the forgiving heart to the peaceful nation is real. It is hard, it is slow, and it has actually been made. The fact that it is difficult is not an argument that it is impossible. It is only an argument that we have not yet taken it seriously enough, often enough, in enough places.
The War Within Comes First
There is a final dimension, and it may be the most important of all. We imagine peace as something that exists “between” people: the absence of war between nations and the settling of disputes between neighbors. But the command to love our enemies points to a deeper truth: the peace between people can only ever be as real as the peace within them. The wars outside us are the overflow of wars within us.
Hatred is not only destructive to its target; it is also destructive to its host. The one who refuses to forgive does not punish his enemy nearly as much as he punishes himself. He carries the wound forward, keeps it fresh, lets it shape him, until the original injury has done far more damage over the long years of his resentment than it ever did at the moment it was inflicted. He becomes the captive of the very person he refuses to release. This is why forgiveness is so often experienced as liberation by the one who grants it: Corrie ten Boom, taking her tormentor’s hand, found herself the freer of the two.
So loving our enemies is not ultimately a technique for managing other people. It is the only way to be free of the slow poison of our own hatred. And a person freed from hatred is, for the first time, truly capable of building peace, because he no longer carries within himself the seed of the next war. We will never have peace among nations made of people at war within themselves. The road to peace runs through the human heart, and only one teaching has ever known how to make that road, because only one teaching ever aimed straight at the heart’s appetite for revenge and proposed to heal it rather than merely restrain it.
The Choice Before Us
So I return to that schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, to the families who walked toward the killer’s widow on the worst day of their lives, and to the claim I have tried to defend without flinching: that there is one road to peace, and only one, opened on a hillside in Galilee, walked all the way to a cross, and proven wherever human beings have been brave enough to take it.
We have tried everything else. We have tried to out-arm, out-maneuver, out-legislate, and out-fight our way to peace, and each of those efforts has left us holding our breath and calling it victory. Not one of them has reached the source of the trouble, which is the human heart’s conviction that wrong must be answered with wrong. While that conviction stands, no treaty will hold, no balance will last, no deterrent will deter forever. The cycle will keep turning, generation after generation, exactly as it always has, until someone at each link in the chain decides to absorb a wrong rather than pass it on.
That decision is the only one that has ever stopped a war and meant it. We have watched it work in the streets of Birmingham and in the courtrooms of South Africa, in a concentration camp and in a country schoolhouse, in the ruins of a continent that chose to rebuild its enemies instead of avenging itself upon them. Wherever a human being has loved an enemy and forgiven a wrong, the violence has ended there, in that place, with that person.
It is not naive. It is the most realistic thing in the world because it is the only thing that addresses the disease’s true cause. And it is not cheap. It asks the hardest thing a person can be asked: to bear an injustice without repaying it, to will the good of someone who has wished us harm, to let a debt go uncollected so that the chain of suffering can finally break. It costs the forgiver dearly; it cost the one who first commanded it his life. But the alternative costs more. It costs us the future, generation after generation, world without end.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” the same teacher said on that same hillside, “for they shall be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). The choice before the human race has always been the one laid out there: to keep answering hatred with hatred until the whole world goes blind, or to take up the single weapon that has ever defeated an enemy for good, namely, to love him until he is no longer an enemy at all. There is no third road. There never has been. The peace we have always longed for and never found is not waiting at the end of some better treaty or some cleverer balance of force. It waits at the end of the hardest and most beautiful command ever given to our race: love your enemies, forgive those who have mistreated you, and so break, at last and from the inside, the ancient chain that has bound us to our wars. That road is open. It has always been open. The only question that has ever mattered is whether we will finally choose to walk it.
