A sermon by Bill Countryman, preached at Good Shepherd Berkeley

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, JUNE 6, 2021

Proper 5B: 1 Samuel 4-11(12-15) 16-20 (11:4-15); Psalm 138; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35

“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.” (NRSV)

I doubt that these two verses from Mark (or their parallels in Matthew and Luke) are on anybody’s list of favorite Bible verses. Mostly, we just want to move on past them. “Oh, yes, well . . . and what was it we were talking about?” 

But they do kind of catch in the memory, don’t they? I remember first encountering them at about ten or twelve. I’d been given a copy of the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible when it first came out and read through the whole thing—yes, even the begats. (I was a kid who would read anything that came into my hands, from the backs of cereal boxes to the encyclopedia. And, you know, some of those names were really weird and wonderful.)

But these verses brought me up short. Wow! What was this sin that was so much worse than anything else? How would you go about committing it? What if you were just experimenting? Would that count for keeps? The church I was brought up in was—happily—not big on eternal damnation. It followed Jesus’ example and concentrated on good news, not bad. But I never forgot the words and, for most of my life, had no clear notion what they might meant. 

But, actually, Mark gives us a helpful hint. He adds the words “for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.'” Great crowds have been flocking around Jesus because they heard that he was healing people and casting out demons. There was so much need! So many people who had fallen prey to sicknesses of the body and of the soul, and here was someone who could actually help them! He was also, by the way, teaching about God and (would you believe it?) God’s love for us. 

It’s not surprising that the scribes—prominent religious experts who came all the way from Jerusalem to investigate what this popular teacher was talking about in Galilee—the scribes were skeptical. They didn’t trust him. “Who was his teacher? Who knows what kind of nonsense the man is teaching?” And their first thought was to warn people off. After all, the scribes were the people who knew their religion inside and out; it was their job to keep things on the right track. But how could they break this man’s spell? Ah! tell them that this is all really the devil’s work. Jesus, they said, was cleverly casting out demons to disguise his own pact with Satan. 

And it’s with reference to this that Jesus gives us his warning about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The unforgivable sin is the one that they’ve been committing: they’ve taken something self-evidently good and loving and generous—talk about generous! Jesus and this disciples can hardly find time to eat!—and they’re saying, “No, no, that’s actually evil.” They are turning the moral universe upside down. And probably they’re quite sincere about it. After all, they’re the experts on religion and Jesus is not one of them and therefore not to be trusted. But Jesus says, “No, to call good evil—to call all this healing evil—is the ultimate betrayal.” This, he declares, lies beyond God’s forgiveness.

But this seems so unlike God! All through the Bible, we get stories about the lengths God will go to just to stay in relationship with the people God loves. Our first reading this morning was a great example. The people of Israel, you see, were a tribal confederation. They had no centralized organization. They relied on temporary leaders (the heroes and heroines of the Book of Judges) to guide them through times of peril or oppression. And the great Samuel—prophet, priest, elder statesman—was the go to person of the day. 

So the people go to him—but just to say that they want to be more modern and have a king instead. Samuel is offended. They have a king! God. And they have a perfectly good leader, Samuel. “You don’t need a king,” he says. But, in what is, for us at least, a wonderfully comic moment, they respond, “But everybodyhas one.” 

Samuel flings up his hands in despair and complains to God, who replies, “There, there, Samuel. Don’t take it personally. It’s the way people are. They’re human beings. Let’s give them what they want. Youshould tell them all the reasons why they won’t like it once they get it. But we’ll work with them anyway. We’ll forgive and go on.”

Yes, God was even willing to forgive his own dethronement. In fact, as we know from later stories, God even become rather good friends with some of the interlopers over the centuries that followed: David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Josiah. God doesn’t just cut people off because they make a god out kingship or natoinalism or any other form of government, out of capitalism or communism or any other economic orthodoxy, out of classicism or modernism or post-modernism or what have you. God just likes people and sticks with us through our various experiments, wise or foolish. 

But here’s Jesus, who always insists on God’s love for us, saying, Well, there is one kind of sinner that “can never have forgiveness.” Hmm, here’s something interesting that I hadn’t really noticed until I started preparing this sermon. Mark’s Jesus actually tweaks the language here a bit. In vs. 28, he says (in my own translation this time to try to capture where the emphases really fall in the Greek), “Amen I tell you that all things will be forgiven the children of humanity—their sins and their blasphemies, however many they commit.” But then he goes on, “But anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, doesn’t haveforgiveness ever.”

You might reasonably expect the two statements to be completely parallel: “these people will be forgiven everything; those people will not be forgiven at all.” And that is how the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke read. But Mark’s Jesus says, “doesn’t have forgiveness for ever.” And I think Mark’s phrasing here is quite deliberate. One who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit has reversed the poles of holy and unholy, of good and evil. How would God go about forgiving that? How does someone come back from a state of total distortion? how recognize it as evil? how come to repentance? how accept God’s forgiveness of the blasphemy? how reach out for it? how take hold of it? how have it? To have forgiveness of this, to accept the love of a God whom you have caricatured as the devil, how can anyone go about such a thing? You would have to be turned inside out. You would have to become a different person. 

The bad news is that there is probably a bit of this sin in everyone—yes, even us. We can’t always tell good from evil clearly in our own lives. And sometimes it’s, well, just too easy to dismiss something as evil when in fact it’s merely unfamiliar or even just inconvenient for us. And it’s far easier just to keep things the way we’re used to than to rejoice in God’s lavish and undeserved goodness—especially when all that goodness seems to be falling on people less deserving than ourselves. We’re challenged by this right now as a nation as we struggle to grasp how our white-dominated history has inflicted great suffering on the other peoples of this country, from its original inhabitants onward, including African-Americans, people of Hispanic origin, people of Asian origins, immigrants in general. For those of us in the white majority, it’s proving to be a great struggle to repent and let God’s goodness run amok. But it isn’t impossible. 

And that means that God’s forgiveness isn’t impossible, either. The problem is just that it can be such a wrenching experience to accept that forgiveness, to take it to ourselves, to have it, as Mark’s Jesus puts it. Still, it can happen. Think of the example of St. Paul, from whose writings we read this morning. His blasphemy was way worse than that of the scribes from Jerusalem. He was violent in his rejection of the good news. Even if didn’t kill anyone himself, he paved the way for their deaths. And yet here he is, this morning, declaring that “we have received the Spirit of faith.” “Everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.” 

There you have it. God can forgive even the unforgivable sin, even the sin of Paul. The trick is that to havethat forgiveness, we have to give up something dear to us—identifying everything we don’t like as evil. We have to accept God as the kind of lavish God who will forgive anything and anyone out of love. And then we can, however gingerly, reach out the hand and take hold of the forgiveness proffered to us and have it, and find ourselves being pulled back by God’s love from the dreadful blasphemy of refusing God’s goodness just because it falls on other people as well as us.