Mark 3:20-30
“Unforgivable”
April 22, 2012 - Third Sunday of Easter

         My aunt has a hard time understanding what my cousin is up to. For years he taught chemistry at a top-ranked engineering school in Indiana. He and his family have a good life there and he is well-regarded. Now he’s leaving that solid, stable position to move his family to California where he will take a job at a little Christian university with a mediocre reputation. He’s supposed to start a whole new chemical department. Reading between the lines, my aunt thinks her son is nuts, though she keeps saying, to convince herself, that the Lord is leading him.

         Jesus’ family wasn’t even that charitable about His mental state. Mark gives us the dark side of Jesus’ relationship to His relatives. Matthew and Luke give us positive glimpses of Mary and Joseph at Jesus’ birth. John lets us see Mary there at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and at the Cross. But Mark only gives us the negative, here and at the beginning of chapter 6. Though Mary’s faith is a model for us all, though Jesus’ brother James later became a leader of the church, early on in Jesus’ ministry they had their doubts.

         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 it’s so large and pushy that 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 that they don’t have any opportunity to eat.

         You can see how a mother would think it nuts. Her son was working himself to death. He wasn’t eating, probably 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 and go, 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 to come to his senses. I think you or I might want to do the same if we felt one of our children had become a wild fanatic. That’s how Mary felt.

         For now, that’s all Mark tells us. Next week in verse 31 we will look at the scene when Mary and Jesus’ brothers arrive and how He responds. But for the moment Mark leads us in a different direction, as another group of people show up. Word about Jesus got around. So there was a delegation of scribes, religious leaders, who came down from Jerusalem to see what the Jesus thing was all about.

         Verse 22 gives us their conclusion. Jesus is not only out of his mind, but the cause of His insanity is demon possession. And He’s not just possessed by an ordinary demon. It’s Beelzebul, “the prince of demons,” who has taken hold of Him. That’s their explanation for why Jesus is able to exorcise demons. He has the power of the ruler of demons.

         There are really two accusations here. First, that Jesus is out of His mind because He is demon possessed, and second, that He is using demonic power in order to do His miracles. In other words, He is a sorcerer. Later Jewish writers who rejected Jesus continued that same charge. They couldn’t deny the miracles, with so many eye-witnesses. So they claimed they weren’t miracles from God, but black magic coming from the devil.

         The name of the prince of demons here is a conundrum. There’s no place outside this incident in the New Testament where any spiritual power is named “Beelzebul.” The NIV changes the name to “Beelzebub,” to identify it with the Philistine God mentioned in II Kings 1, “Baalzebub,” which may mean “lord of the flies.” But it’s really just Beelzeboul, and we don’t know where the name came from.

         In verse 23, though, Jesus clearly understands Beelzebul to be just another name for Satan. The prince of demons is the devil himself. And they are accusing Jesus of being in the possession of Satan, to be working His miracles by the power of Satan.

         Jesus’ reply to the scribes first appeals to their logic. This is a great text for those who might think that faith is illogical. Jesus appealed to what logicians call the “principle of non-contradiction.” A statement and its contradiction can’t both be true. It can’t be that it’s both raining and not raining, in the same place at the same time. Here and now, it’s either raining or it’s not.

         The scribes can’t have it both ways. “How can Satan cast out Satan?” Jesus asks them. 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, verses 24 and 25 are two little parables, first about a kingdom, then about a house. Unity is essential if any force or movement is to succeed. A power that goes to war with itself will collapse. That’s what the Republican primary is all about. If a political party stays divided, some supporting one contender and others another, it has no chance to win an election. Eventually Republicans need to get together behind one candidate, with everyone endorsing and supporting that single person. And Democrats can’t suddenly nominate another candidate instead of Obama. They have to stick together. Anything else is political suicide.

         The same thing is true in the spiritual realm, says Jesus in verse 26. If Satan’s party is divided, if Satan has “risen up against himself” and is casting out his own demons, then “he cannot stand, but his end has come.”

         When Matthew and Luke tell this story, Jesus draws the conclusion that the end of Satan’s kingdom really has arrived. Mark leaves it more subtle, just one more parable in verse 27, “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man…” What Jesus means is that, if in fact as everyone can see, demons are being cast out, then someone has tied up the strong man, tied up Satan. What they ought to be seeing in Jesus is not the power of the kingdom of Satan, but as Jesus says explicitly in Matthew and Luke, the power of the kingdom of God putting down Satan.

         As far as I’m concerned, this text and others like it are a Christian’s answer to any fear we might have of the spiritual forces of evil. Movies like “The Exorcist” or more recently, “The Devil Inside” should not cause those who believe in Jesus Christ even a moment of genuine anxiety. Satan is still plenty strong, as anyone can tell from reading the headlines or by coming to our conference on human trafficking, but his power to take over human bodies and souls is absolutely defeated wherever the name of Jesus is known. Some of our missionary friends will tell you how they’ve seen that defeat happen before their eyes.

         What we might be more afraid of is the spiritual evil that motivated the scribes, the deadly sin of jealousy. It’s a powerful force. I’ve been reading a story about a boy who taught himself performance 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 of the students, a bully, hates the performance. He can’t stand the attention that the nerdy magician is getting. He interrupts the show to try and show how a trick was done, only to be laughed off the stage. So after the performance, he beats up and nearly chokes to death the performer, all because the magician had a skill and popularity which the bully could never hope for.

         Something like that dark envy ate at the scribes as they witnessed the rising popularity of Jesus and His success in doing what they could not. He cast out demons that drove people insane and healed them of their diseases. His spiritual power and popularity far exceeded theirs. Eventually they will get their chance to 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 real magician, a dark sorcerer possessed by satanic power.

         What Jesus says in verses 28 to 30 points to the real spiritual darkness that is at issue here, the darkness which is possessing those scribes. They have either fallen to or on the brink of what we’ve come to call “the unforgivable sin.” That is, their attitude toward Jesus was dangerously close to putting them outside the possibility of salvation.

         In verse 29, Jesus tells us 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 here and leads to all sorts of speculation about what is “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”

         I can remember hearing about this unforgivable sin for the first time as 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.

         And worrying about the unforgivable sin can be part of a truly messed up head. Sadly I’ve had the experience of talking a time or two with a mentally ill person 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.

         So 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 prince of demons, Satan.

         In other words, the scribes witnessed the very best thing about Jesus, the fact that 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 the grip of Satan, and called it an evil power. They were in the presence of the highest good and out of jealousy and spite they pretended it was the highest evil.

         Now they could have been honestly mistaken. Perhaps some of them changed their minds about Jesus later. That’s why I said earlier that maybe they were only on the brink of the unforgivable sin. But if they kept thinking this way, if they came to seriously believe and maintain and hold onto the conviction that it was evil instead of good inside Jesus, look where their thinking lands them. Jesus is the way to salvation. It’s the Holy Spirit who led Him to the Cross to die for our sins so we could be forgiven. It’s the power of the Holy Spirit in Jesus who raised Him from the dead and made Him the way to salvation. If a person denies that power, how can that person be forgiven, how can that person be saved?

         You’ve heard the news stories about parents convicted for manslaughter here in Oregon when they’ve let their children die without medical care for infections or other treatable conditions because they trusted in faith healing. They believed that somehow the good blessings of medical care and antibiotics were wrong, evil. So their child or infant was left without the very things which could have saved them.

         Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is a failure to accept spiritual medicine, the 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 that all doctors are 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 believe that the Spirit of Jesus is some evil demon, then you will be lost forever in eternal sin.

         The unforgivable sin is not just 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 problem for the scribes is that they persisted in this identification of Jesus’ Spirit as a demon. They kept on saying it. And if they kept it up, and kept believing it, there would never be any possibility of forgiving them. They were rejecting the very means of forgiveness.

         Which means some good news for us 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 into the pit of blaspheming the Holy Spirit is to stubbornly, constantly, over the whole course of life reject 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 about Jesus. It’s not the same as sins like failing to love others, which grieve the Holy Spirit. It’s not about a person who is struggling to find faith. It’s about the person who deliberately, intentionally, constantly regards 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 who is unforgivable. Everyone else who trusts in Jesus can and will be forgiven.

         That’s why we ought not miss the incredible good news hidden in the midst of Jesus’ dire warning to the scribes. Yes, there’s an unforgivable sin, an unforgivable blasphemy, but by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, verse 28 tells that every other sin or blasphemy can be forgiven. The operative Greek word here means “all,” “all their sins and all the blasphemies they utter,” will be forgiven.

         Let’s end our worship today with a celebration of that incredibly wide forgiveness. I invite you first to do the hard thing of remembering your sins. Lay them out across the table of your mind. Maybe pick them up and examine them. Feel how slimy they are. Imagine how truly disgusting they smell. Try to recall the worst, the darkest, the sins you’ve never told anyone, the things which bring you shame years later, the failures which make you feel like you are a failure. Bring to mind the horrible things you’ve said, maybe to someone you love, maybe to God. Remember all that, then remember what Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven all their sins and all the blasphemies they utter.”

         Then let the grace of Jesus Christ sweep across that ugly table and wipe it clean. Accept and rejoice in the wideness of His mercy, in the height and depth and width of His complete forgiveness. And go out today at peace, a child of God, forgivable and forgiven.

         Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj