They don't know

Spoken from the cross, while it was happening, not afterward in reflection once the pain had faded and the story could be told with perspective. And spoken not as a heroic act of will but as a diagnosis: they don't know.

This is the deepest thing Jesus ever said about the people who hurt us. They are not, mostly, evil. They are asleep. They act from fear and habit and a self they have never examined, and they hurt us the way a sleepwalker knocks over a lamp. Seeing this does not excuse the harm. It removes the poison from it. You can set a boundary against a sleepwalker without hating him.