So Jesus has moved out of the public eye, but that doesn’t seem to have defused the situation.
Right! The devout Pharisees have decided that he is an enemy of all that is good and true and are looking for ways to persuade the broader public of this. His success in healing and freeing people from their demons makes this more difficult—and makes them all the more determined to expose him for the evil influence they believe he is. One effort was to draw his audience away by criticizing him for laxness in keeping the Sabbath, and that hasn’t accomplished much.
But they’ve already suggested a more damning critique: “By the ruler of the demons he casts out the demons” (9:34), they say, implying that he was practicing a kind of witchcraft—or even operating as an agent of Satan (or Beelzebul, an alternative name by which Satan is called here). When the Pharisees hear that he’s cured a man of blindness and deafness by casting out his demons, they decide to make their opinion public. After all, the people are now beginning to think that Jesus might be “the Son of David,” the promised heir, the anointed one who would restore Israel. So far from thinking him demonic, the public see him as the person who can bring about a new beginning for Israel.
But how does Jesus know what the Pharisees are saying? Matthew just says that “Jesus knew what they were thinking.”
Matthew’s language makes the point that the Pharisees were talking openly to others, but not confronting Jesus directly with their accusation. The phrasing could mean that Jesus is reading their minds; or, it could well mean that he’s hearing reports from others of what they’re saying. Either way, he takes them by surprise when he challenges them on what they’ve said out of his earshot—taking the offensive, you might say.
But his argument seems rather jumbled to me.
Yes, it does at first, because it’s actually three distinct arguments presented without a break, which can make for confusion if you’re not used to this kind of discourse. But his hearers would have recognized a kind of abbreviated argumentation that you can also find in later documents of rabbinic discussions such as the Mishnah.
His first argument (12:25-26) points out the absurdity of the idea that Satan is allowing one of his agents to cast out others. The Pharisees have characterized Beelzebul as the “ruler” of the demons. In other words, he is a king and the demons form his kingdom. He is a kind of evil parody of God, whose kingdom is that of the heavens.
Jesus says, in effect, “You’re talking as if there were civil war in Satan’s kingdom.” Now, civil wars were all too familiar in the ancient Mediterranean world. Many a Greek city state had been torn to pieces by them, some never to recover their former prosperity and power. The Roman Empire had also been through repeated episodes of civil war as recently as the generation before Jesus; and for all the resentment of Roman power among their subject nations, there was also a widespread and apparently quite genuine gratitude to the Emperor Augustus for having brought these horrible conflicts to an end.
In civil wars, ancient or modern, no one is safe. Security is lost, lives are lost. Famine and disease kill multitudes. Homes, farms, and businesses are destroyed. Anyone who has followed the news about modern Syria will have some sense of how devastating and embittering such wars are. And Jesus here is laughing at the idea that Satan would be so incompetent and weak that his kingdom was falling to bits around him.
What’s more, if Satan’s kingdom really is falling apart, fine! That should just leave the field open for the Kingdom of the Heavens. But Jesus doesn’t pursue this implication because he doesn’t think there’s any civil war at all in Satan’s realm.
Okay. Then what’s the second argument?
Jesus argues (12:27-28) that the Pharisees’ accusations are dishonest. They, too, have people belonging to their party (“your sons”) who perform exorcisms. Jesus’ activity in this field wasn’t unusual in his time. We might appropriately think of it as one basic strand of healthcare in a period when medicine lacked many of our modern resources.
And Jesus isn’t really doing anything radically different from the exorcists who were Pharisees— except that he’s extraordinarily successful. How can they say it’s right for their people to exorcise, but wrong for Jesus to? The question makes their dishonesty obvious. They’re really attacking him for quite different reasons and suggesting a connection to Beelzebul purely as a way of “spinning” the news (to use the modern term). They want to make what is in itself good seem like something bad.
They come across as evil themselves, then.
Yes. But notice that this isn’t an exceptional kind of evil. It’s something that most of us have probably done at one time or another—grabbed hold of an argument that we think will win our point for us, even though we know that it is either meaningless or devious. But Jesus pushes their mistake toward a different conclusion—his third argument. “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons,” he says, “then the kingdom of God has come to you.” (12:28) It’s the very thing Jesus has been declaring from the start of his ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (4:17) And there’s an implicit threat that they will find themselves on the wrong side of God’s kingdom. Jesus even twists the knife a bit by saying that his critics’ own exorcists will judge them guilty in this regard.
In fact, as he says in the brief parable that follows (12:29), his exorcisms are part of the arrival of God’s kingdom. Jesus’ ability to plunder Satan’s household—to turn it upside down—is a manifestation of the kingdom of heaven.
And then we get to some verses that seem quite scary—particularly the business about the sin against the Holy Spirit. What are we to make of that? And what’s it doing in this context anyway?
We’ve seen before that, even when Matthew seems to switch gears rather suddenly, there’s always some reason for it. Sometimes it harks back to related materials from an earlier context; sometimes it’s an extension of the current subject. Here we probably have a continuation of what we’ve just read, and we should understand the sin against the Holy Spirit in relation to the argument over exorcisms.
They’ve misinterpreted the work of the Holy Spirit as the work of demons?
Yes. But, as we’ve seen, this isn’t a casual misjudgment; it’s a deliberate misrepresentation. The opponents are looking at good, gracious, generous actions that confer great benefits on their recipients and calling them evil purely as a way of calling Jesus’ teaching into question. To put it in broader terms, they’re reversing the moral poles and calling good evil.
And that’s the one thing that can’t be forgiven?
This statement really seems strange in the context of Matthew’s Gospel, doesn’t it? Matthew’s emphasis is on God’s readiness to forgive, not God’s eagerness to punish. But I think we’ll get further illumination on the matter when we come to the famous parable of Sheep and Goats in chapter 25. Even though there’s no actual reference to the sin against the Holy Spirit there, a great judgement and division is being made between those who have done loving acts for others and those who have not. And those who have not are stunned! Why? Perhaps because they couldn’t tell good from evil in their own lives.
I get the connection. The goats are all hustled off to the bad place. But why is it unforgivable?
Matthew doesn’t tell us, but my understanding of this dynamic is that if we get our moral values so completely reversed that we can no longer tell good from evil, then we can’t even recognize, much less repent, our own evil actions. It’s the same process that allowed Medieval inquisitors to inflict such horrors in the name of Jesus. And it still flourishes among modern Christians and, for that matter, people of all religions and none.
What I think, then, is that this sin is unforgivable not because God refuses to forgive, but because we can become so warped that we cannot understand our behavior as sinful. We don’t know how to repent. And if we don’t know that we’ve sinned, we can’t accept the forgiveness God is ready to offer.
But “Whoever is not with me is against me” (vs. 30) sounds more specific than that. Is Jesus saying that only Christians can be saved? I think that’s how it’s usually read.
Yes, many Christians do read it that way. And I think that’s a serious misunderstanding. The context here has to do not with doctrine or belief but with a willingness to tell good frm evil. Notice the phrasing of the second half of vs. 30: “whoever does not gather with me scatters.” What Jesus condemns in the Pharisees here is not their disagreements with him about Torah. It is their lack of concern for the people he is healing and exorcising. They want to scatter his following even at the cost of depriving people of these blessings.
Ah, that helps with vs. 32. It’s all right to speak against Jesus—but not to call good evil.
Yes, exactly! Say what you like about Jesus and Christianity, but don’t confuse good and evil in the process. And if we read these verses as we just have, they lead quite naturally to what follows, where Jesus returns to the theme of good fruits that he introduced as a test of true prophets in the Sermon on the Mount (7:15-20). As he said there, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.” (7:18)
Jesus even reverses the argument used against him. His attackers have said that his miracles can’t really be good because what he teaches is wrong. He replies that his attackers are incapable of speaking what is good because they themselves are corrupt. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” Calling them a “brood of vipers” is a way of saying that their speech is poisonous. Or, in the words of the old Tennessee proverb that I heard long ago from a beloved elderly friend, “Nothing spoils a snake but its mouth”
In fact, so related is the mouth to the heart that Jesus can wind up sounding almost as if he’s reversing himself. Instead of “by your fruits,” he now says, “By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” He’s not talking about doctrinal correctness here. He’s talking about words as moral (or immoral) actions—as the equivalent of “fruits,” by which we can tell good from evil.

Next up: SOME CONCLUDING WORDS AGAINST RELIGION-AS-USUAL (12:38-50)