Sins against the Holy Spirit
Category: Sundays after Pentecost
Speaker: The Rev. Dr. Robert W. Prichard
Year B Sins against the Holy Spirit St. George’s
Proper 5 Mark 3:20-35 June 7, 2015
“Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness.”
1. One of the things that contemporary mainline Christians worry about is the charge that we are judgmental or exclusivist; we want to present ourselves to the world as welcoming and inclusive. This is true of many American denominations, and particularly true of the Episcopal Church at this point in our history. We shy away from Biblical passages that hint of judgment and favor chapters like Isaiah 56 that speak of openness and welcome. The passage provides the sometimes slogan of the Washington National Cathedral—the temple in Jerusalem is to become a “house of prayer for all people”—but is not typical of the history of Israel in which the temple serves more often as an emblem of a national and religious identity that separates Israel from its neighbors. Every once and while, however, we run up against a Biblical text in which it seems impossible to avoid the theme of judgment. Sometimes such words are found in the mouth of Jesus himself. Our Gospel lesson today about the impossibility of forgiveness for those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is one such text. And Jesus said. “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness.”
2. The Old Testament lesson and the Psalm that we have heard today are part of what the Revised Common Lectionary calls “Tract 2” an arrangement of Old Testament lessons and Psalms chosen to complement the Gospel lesson. [1] In this case the organizers of the lectionary chose well; an Old Testament Genesis and Psalm 130 provide a good background for understanding Jesus’ words in Mark. The Genesis passage is part 2 of the story of the sin of Adam and Eve. Christians in the past 200 years have about what the story of Adam and Eve tells us about the history of creation, but the story is better understood as a story about human morality rather than about biological origins. The story is wonderfully crafted in order to make a basic statement about the nature of human beings. Adam and Eve are presented in the account are a couple who have been utterly stripped of all excuses for misconduct. The list of excuses may be 3,000 years old but it is amazingly up-to-date: They cannot blame their parents and their upbringing, because they had no parents. They cannot blame their neighbors and friends for setting a bad examples because they did not have any. They can justify their behavior as a defense against their enemies, because they have no enemies. They can’t complain that they were compelled to act in the way they did by physical need, because the Garden of Eden provided for all their needs. They can’t complain that the commandments that they are too complicated to follow, because they were given only one commandment—not to eat of the fruit of one specific tree in the garden. And they can complain that no one told them—who knew that you have to move away from the shoulder when a police car is parked beside the road?—because God told them. And yet they still did wrong. The author is telling us something about ourselves; we may have some good reasons to explain our misconduct but even when those are stripped away, we still do things that are wrong.
3. The second half of the account of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, which we have heard today, is the story of the wider consequence of the cussedness that lies within us. The author of Genesis portrayed those consequences with what we would recognize as an ecological sensitivity: human beings lie about their conduct to one another, they blame one another, they despoil the earth, and they are at odds with animal creation. The cussedness within us infects the world around us. All in all, the story of the fall of Adam and Eve paint a picture of a world with serious problems.
4. But that cussedness of human nature is not the last word, and the remainder of the Bible is an attempt to find some relief from the effects of the fallen-ness described in the Genesis account. The author of Psalm 130, which we have heard today, expresses the hope that God will be the source of that relief. The psalm begins with a statement of the problem: “Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD; LORD, hear my voice; * let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication. If you, LORD, were to note what is done amiss, * O Lord, who could stand?” The psalmist then expresses hope: “There is forgiveness with you,” and the willingness to wait upon the Lord for that forgiveness: “My soul waits for the LORD, more than watchmen for the morning, * more than watchmen for the morning.” We know in the depths of our hearts that we need forgiveness and there is one from whom forgiveness is found.
5. Which brings us to the Gospel lesson. Jesus comes among us to set things right. He goes into the wilderness and resists temptation in a way that Adam and Eve did not. And he begins to heal, to forgive, and to set things right, and to announce the Kingdom of God. But some begin to deny what is going on and began to say: "He has gone out of his mind" and "He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons." Those are the lines that bring Jesus’ angry response: "Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin."
6. Notice what Jesus is not saying here. This is not a diatribe against those who have never heard about Jesus or an attack on Judaism. Those are things about which New Testament authors worry. The author of Hebrews develops the idea of those who have not known Jesus can believe in him as the one is to come. Paul worries about Jews who have not believed in Jesus and paints a picture of the end times in Romans 11 in which Israel will be saved once “the full number of the Gentiles has come in.” Jesus is not even denouncing those who blaspheme against him personally. Rather he has hard words for those deny the power of the Holy Spirit to bring forgiveness.
7. I suspect that I am not the only person in this room who has had problems with cable television and the occasional disappearance of channels or reception altogether. One day last year I became irate about the total disappearance of the internet and television services for which I was paying and began to collected materials to support the irate phone call I was preparing to make—until I remembered that I had used the weed whip to clean up around the foundation in the corner of the house. I had cut the cable. It is funny about that: if you cut the connection from the source, you lose the potential to watch the programming. I think that Jesus makes a logical point much like that in the Gospel lesson. It is hard to be forgiven if you deny the source of forgiveness.
8. You may have noticed a piece of medical news this past spring. Medical researchers thought that measles had been eliminated as a childhood disease in this country, because of the existence of an effective vaccination. But the vaccination does not work, if parents prevent their children from receiving it. This past spring a number of children contracted measles in Disneyland and in other places precisely because of that problem. There was help available, but they refused to make use of it.
9. If you deny the possibility of God’s power of forgiveness, you cut your off from being forgiven. Jesus’ words are hard, but they point to a judgment that we make for ourselves. John’s Gospel makes a parallel point in 3:18: He who believes in me is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already. There is judgment, but it is a self-imposed judgment.
10. Mark knows that Jesus’ words are hard ones. I that is the reason that Mark wraps another story around the account of Jesus’ clash with his critics. That other story offers hope and community. Jesus says, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." To deny the Spirit’s power of forgiveness cuts us off from God’s pardon, but obedience to God brings us into a great family in which we find brothers and sisters and mothers and our heavenly Father.
Jesus warned, “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness,” but he also said, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."
© Robert W. Prichard
[1] The original Sunday and Holy Day Lectionary in the Book of Common Prayer 1979 was an edited version of the Ordo Lectionum Missae (1969), the three-year lectionary prepared by the Roman Catholic Church following Vatican II (1961-65). It provided a single set of Old Testament and Psalter lessons, which were chosen for their relationship to the Gospel lesson—i.e. what is now called Tract 2. The Episcopal Church, however, adopted the Revised Common Lectionary (1994) in 2006, which provided a new set of sequential Tract I readings for Pentecost season. St. George’s used the Tract I Old Testament readings in Pentecost season of 2014, and will be using Tract 2 in 2015.