June 6, 2021 “Unforgivable” – Mark 3:20-35

Mark 3:20-35
“Unforgivable”
June 6, 2021 – Second Sunday after Pentecost

Beth and I have been watching Shtisel, an Israeli television series (with subtitles). Shtisel is the family name of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish clan in Jerusalem. The show follows their relationships and interactions with people around them, both inside and outside their religious community.

At the center of the Shtisel story is the patriarch rabbi Shulem and his 27-year-old son, Akiva. Shulem is convinced his son is wildly misguided in life, particularly in his desire to be an artist. The old man, prompted by a matchmaker who sets up more than one failed match for Akiva, calls his son something in Hebrew or Yiddish (I can’t tell which) which gets translated in the subtitles as “screw-up.” Just as it seems the father might show his son some compassion or understanding, Shulem regularly sabotages his son’s aspirations as an artist, his actual career as a teacher of Torah, or a promising relationship with a woman. He wants to keep Akiva entirely within his own control.

Something like that happened with Jesus and His family in the beginning and end of our text today. Perhaps goaded by the Jewish authorities, who also appear here using strong language about Jesus, His family misunderstands who He is and what He is about.

Like for Akiva, Jesus’ family wasn’t charitable about His mental state. Matthew and Luke give us positive glimpses of Mary and Joseph at Jesus’ birth. John lets us see Mary trusting Jesus at the beginning of His ministry and at the Cross. But Mark gives us the dark side of Jesus’ relationship to His relatives, both here and at the beginning of chapter 6.

The scene in verse 20 takes us back to chapter two. Jesus is once again at home in Capernaum, probably back at Peter’s house. There’s another crowd around the place. This time so large and pushy it’s not only keeping people from getting in, it’s keeping Jesus and His followers from getting out to find food. The demand for Jesus’ teaching and healing is so great they don’t have any opportunity to eat.

You can see how a mother would be upset. Her son was working himself to death. He wasn’t eating, maybe not sleeping. People were saying all kinds of things about Him, especially as Mark tells us, that He was “out of His mind.” Why wouldn’t she take His brothers along, as we’re told in verse 21, to “restrain” or “take hold” of Him and bring Him home to rest and restore His senses?

When I was in college, one of my mother’s friends was frantic because her son’s Christian faith connected him with a fanatical cult. All she wanted to do was go get him and bring him home. You or I might want to do the same if we felt one of our children had lost her senses. That’s how Mary and Jesus’ brothers felt.

With a literary technique Mark likes, the focus shifts in verse 22 to scribes from Jerusalem. Jesus’ interaction with His family goes on the back burner until verse 31. According to that delegation from the Jewish capital, Jesus was not only out of his mind, but demon possessed. Not by any ordinary demon, but by Beelzebul, “the ruler of demons.” That’s their explanation for how Jesus cast out demons. He had the authority of their ruler. They claimed Jesus’ exorcisms weren’t miracles from God, but black magic.

The demon ruler’s name is a conundrum. Nowhere outside this incident in the New Testament is a spiritual power named “Beelzebul.” Another translation changes it to “Beelzebub,” to match the Philistine god in II Kings 1, “Baalzebub,” “lord of the flies.” But in Greek it’s Beelzeboul. We don’t know exactly why. But in verse 23 Jesus clearly sees Beelzebul as another name for Satan. The ruler of demons is the devil himself. The scribes accused Jesus of working His miracles by the power of Satan.

Jesus’ reply appeals to logic. If you think faith is supposed to be illogical, here’s a counter-example. Jesus used what logicians call the “principle of non-contradiction.” A statement and its opposite can’t both be true. It can’t be both raining and not raining, in the same place, at the same time. Right now, just outside, it’s either raining or it’s not.

The scribes can’t have it both ways. “How can Satan drive out Satan?” asked Jesus. Either Satan is in charge, or he’s not. If he is in charge, then he would leave his demons alone. If he’s not, then something else is going on, something more powerful than Satan.

As Mark says in verse 23, verses 24 and 25 are little parables, first about a kingdom, then about a house. Any force or movement needs unity to succeed. Power that goes to war with itself will collapse. If a political party divides, some going one direction and some another, the whole thing may fall apart, or at least not win many elections. The same thing is true in the spiritual realm, says Jesus in verse 26. If Satan’s party is divided, if Satan “opposes himself” and casts out demons, then “he cannot stand; his end has come.”

When Matthew and Luke tell this story, Jesus draws the conclusion that the end of Satan’s kingdom has arrived. Mark leaves it subtle, with one more parable in verse 27, “No one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man…” Jesus means that, if in fact as everyone can see, demons are being cast out, then someone has tied up the strong man, tied up Satan. They ought to see in Jesus not Satanic power, but as He says explicitly in Matthew and Luke, the power of the kingdom of God, putting down Satan.

Earlier in the year we read in Mark about the first exorcisms Jesus did. I said Christian need not fear spiritual forces of evil. Satan is “strong,” as anyone can tell from reading the headlines, but his power to possess human beings is totally defeated by Jesus. Some of our missionary friends will tell you how they’ve seen it happen before their eyes.

What we might fear more is the spiritual evil that motivated the scribes, the deadly sin of jealousy. It’s a powerful force. It may be part of what eats up old Shulem in relation to his son on that TV show I talked about. And I read a novel about a boy who learned stage magic, card tricks and other illusions. He became the star entertainment for his high school prom, amazing his fellow students with disappearing milk poured into a paper cone and cutting up a teacher’s necktie only to “magically” put it back together.

But one student, a bully, hated the performance. The attention the nerdy magician got drove him crazy. He interrupted the show to try and show how a trick was done, and was laughed off the stage. So after the performance, he beat up and nearly choked to death the performer, all because the magician had skill and popularity the bully could never hope for.

Dark envy ate at the scribes as they witnessed the rising popularity of Jesus. He did what they could not. He cast out demons and healed people. His spiritual power and popularity far exceeded the scribes. Eventually they physically beat up on Jesus, but for now, in our text, they expressed their jealousy and frustration in verbal abuse, saying, as we’ve seen, that Jesus was a magician, a dark sorcerer possessed by satanic power.

In verses 28 to 30 Jesus points to the real spiritual darkness at issue, the evil which possessed those scribes. They have either fallen to or on the brink of what we’ve come to call “the unforgivable sin.” Their attitude toward Jesus was dangerously close to putting them outside the possibility of salvation.

Jesus says that one who “blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” Unfortunately, this verse gets lifted out of its context. It led to all sorts of speculation about what is “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”

I heard about this unforgivable sin as a young boy. In Ephesians 4, Paul warns against “grieving” the Holy Spirit. Is that the same thing? Is some idle thought or curse that names the Holy Spirit in an irreverent way blasphemy? Is a joke about the Holy Spirit blasphemy? What if I’ve done it and don’t know it? Thinking about this can really mess with your head.

Worrying about the unforgivable sin can be part of a truly messed up head. Sadly, I’ve talked with a mentally ill person or two who feared he or she had committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Part of the torment of their illness was spiritual anxiety that salvation was forever lost.

We need to look at the context and especially at Mark’s explanation in verse 30. The reason Jesus warned the scribes about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was because, “they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’” The blasphemy was just this: they were calling the Spirit inside Jesus, the Spirit by which He was healing and casting out demons, the Holy Spirit of God—they called that Spirit Beelzebul, the ruler of demons, Satan.

The scribes witnessed the very best thing about Jesus, the fact He was filled with the Holy Spirit, and they called it the worst. They saw the good power which was bringing people salvation from illness and sin, and called it an evil power. They were in the presence of the highest good, but out of jealousy and spite they pretended it was the highest evil.

It could have been an honest mistaken. Some may have changed their minds about Jesus later. I’ll come back to that. As I said, maybe they were only on the brink of unforgivable sin. But if they kept on thinking this way, if they held onto the conviction that it was evil instead of good inside Jesus, look where it lands them. Jesus is the way to salvation. The Holy Spirit led Him to the Cross to die for our sins so we could be forgiven. The Holy Spirit in Jesus raised Him from the dead and made Him the Savior. If a person denies that power, how can that person be forgiven, how can that person be saved?

We know how to stop the pandemic, how to be saved from it. Social distance, wear masks, get vaccinated. But if someone refuses to do those things, how can they keep from getting the disease? Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is a failure to accept spiritual medicine, healing of the soul that the Holy Spirit brings through Jesus Christ. If you won’t accept it, if you call it evil, then you leave yourself without the very thing that can save you.

If you’re drowning and someone throws you a life ring, but you keep saying and believing that it’s some kind of evil trick, then you will be lost. If you’ve got treatable cancer, but you believe doctors are all frauds and only out for your money, then you will suffer and die. And if you are a sinner lost in your sins, but you keep believing that the Spirit of Jesus is some evil demon, then you will be lost forever in eternal sin.

Unforgivable sin is not an isolated, one-time failure. It’s a persistent attitude of rejecting the very source of salvation. The tense of the verb “to say” in verse 30 is not the perfect “they had said,” but the imperfect “they were saying.” The scribes persisted in identifying Jesus’ Spirit as a demon. They kept on saying it. If they kept it up, and kept believing it, how could they be forgiven? They rejected the very means of forgiveness.

The good news is that it’s pretty hard to commit the unforgivable sin. The old saying that if you are worried about it you haven’t done it, is absolutely true. The only way to fall truly blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to stubbornly, constantly, over the whole course of life, treat Jesus as an agent of evil rather than accepting Him as God’s good gift of salvation.

This unforgivable sin is not the same as having doubts. It’s not the same as sins like failing to love others, which grieve the Holy Spirit. It’s not about a person who struggles to find faith. It’s about deliberately, intentionally, constantly regarding as evil the Spirit who lives in Jesus and in every believer. It’s only that person who puts himself or herself outside God’s grace. Everyone and everything else can be forgiven.

That’s why incredible good news is hidden in the midst of Jesus’ dire warning. Yes, there’s an unforgivable sin, an unforgivable blasphemy, but by the grace of God, Jesus in verse 28 says, “people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter.” It’s the same message we heard in Psalm 130 and I told the children about. God does not mark our sins against us, “but there is forgiveness” with God.

Satan would love for you to focus on the power he has in this world. He will try to convince you that he’s even the source of good things, that his evil is good, and God’s good is evil. That’s how he tempted Adam and Eve in the garden, to believe that what God said would be bad for them was actually good, that God’s good will for them was really evil.

The devil still tempts us like that, trying to get people to believe that God’s gift of medical knowledge is bad, or that a good attitude like being against racism and for justice is somehow wrong. Satan wants us to believe that lying or adultery or abusive language is acceptable if it’s a means to a good end, some righteous political goal. But evil remains evil no matter why it’s done or how it’s justified.

Yet there is forgiveness for sin and whatever foolish and blasphemous things might come out of our mouths. The only way to prevent that forgiveness is to refuse it, to imagine that the very medicine which can heal us is somehow bad, that God’s holy vaccine for sin by the blood of Jesus is really an evil conspiracy to plant a chip to control us in our souls.

At the end of this text, we see Jesus’ mother and brothers standing outside the house and sending a message in to Him. They refused to come in, to hear what He was teaching to everyone else. Right then, they didn’t feel the need for the medicine, for the grace and healing He offered all the others for free. When He got the message that His mothers and brothers were there, Jesus’ reply sounds a little harsh, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Then He looked at the crowd and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

Jesus’ point was that anyone could be in His family. The grace He offers is for everyone. It’s for you today. The only unforgivable sin is refusing His forgiveness, standing outside of Jesus’ love and pretending that the Spirit who brings it is somehow a bad thing. But come in the house, sit with Jesus, and all will be well with you.

In the most recent episode of Shtisel we watched, Shulem and his brother were estranged from each other after a bitter argument. But when their mother dies, that’s all forgotten. The brother comes and knocks on the door. Shulem opens it and they look at each other. Then they embrace. All, for now, is forgiven.

As we remember this morning at this Table, Jesus died and rose again so that all, not just for now, but forever, can be forgiven. By the holy medicine of His body and blood, He welcomes you into His family. As we know, He welcomed those of His own family who came to trust Him later. His mother was with Him at the Cross; His brother James became a leader of the Church. Yes, at one point they thought Jesus was out of His mind, but all can be forgiven, “whatever blasphemies they utter.” Just come and receive what Jesus has to offer. I hope you will today.

Amen.