As Christians, we can love our neighbors by helping them see that their inclination to get even, while understandable, is a destructive dead end. Jesus shows us a better, more effective, more satisfying way. Perhaps the recurrent theme of revenge is a just that: a black backdrop against which we see, for the actual wonder it is, the light of a gospel that makes it possible to forgive.
A particular theme percolates through pop culture these days, so commonplace we’ve almost called it normal: the desire for revenge.
It’s the underlying plotline of popular shows like Yellowstone or The Terminal List. It’s the fact that after Taylor Swift suffered a bad breakup, fans claimed she wore a revenge dress that paid homage to Princess Diana’s. The Iowa women’s basketball team’s recent win against LSU was widely described as “revenge.”
Cancel culture is built on the notion that if someone’s convictions don’t line up with the prevailing narrative, his livelihood and reputation can be ruined as retribution. This form of “revenge” is widely accepted and practiced—especially on social media.
The media argues daily about just proportion in the deaths accrued in the Israel-Hamas war—as though “an eye for an eye” represents a sustainable path forward. And political power increasingly seems dominated less by collaboration to solve problems as by wrenching power from “the other side” and punishing dissenters or the disloyal.
It’s clear our contemporary culture is wrestling, individually and corporately, with how to right a wrong. Yet when we normalize or even make light of revenge, we sink to our basest human level and then celebrate it.
Snapshot of the Human Heart
The cultural theme of revenge abounds because the desire to exact an eye for an eye gives a snapshot of the human heart. Who is unfamiliar with the sick, sweet longing to even the score? If I hurt the person who hurt me, maybe that’ll serve as protection against being wounded again. A potentially endless cycle is set in motion, one slight followed by another until there’s no way back. I can’t shake the mental image of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner falling from the chandelier to their deaths at the end of the classic love-hate movie War of the Roses.
As ubiquitous as it is as a cultural motif, few would claim getting revenge is ideal behavior, though. Even in a post-Christian culture, the firm command of Scripture rings in many ears: Don’t pay back evil for evil (Rom. 12:17). Let God right the scales (Rom. 12:19). Sometimes God partially rights the scales by using his instruments of justice in this world—civil and other authorities with the power to exact repayment—