Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time-B
The season of Lent, Easter, and solemnities has ended, and we return to Ordinary Time and the Gospel of Mark. The scene portrayed by St. Mark is a confrontation between the Pharisees trying to assert that Jesus’ ministry is the work of Satan instead of from God. The religious leader’s response to Jesus’ exorcizing demons can’t be from God’s because the religious leaders of the time had no part in it. Therefore, they had to accuse Jesus to keep their control over the religious message.
The Pharisee’s attack on Jesus is akin to the verbal attacks seen today when you hear the words racism and fascism hurled against a person to smear him. Those words are meant to discredit the person; nothing can be more devastating than alleging someone is the devil’s agent.
Jesus answers the accusers by using the simple logic of reminding them Satan would not work against himself. Jesus tells them, “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he can’t stand; that is the end of him.”
The irony of this exchange is that Jesus proves he is not from the devil, but we are not so sure about the Pharisees. When they accuse Jesus, they are the ones who might be in allegiance with Satan. One of the descriptions of Satan is not only that he tempts individuals to rebel against God but is also known as the “accuser” himself. “Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: ‘Now have salvation and power come, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Anointed. For the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who accuses them before our God day and night.”
The encounter continues with the crescendo of today’s message, mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. You can always tell what is essential when all synoptic Gospels include the same teaching. Another clue that what comes next is important is when Jesus’s words are preceded by “Amen, I say to you.” He then adds, “All sins and all blasphemies that people will utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemies against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.”
There are a lot of people today who find it difficult to accept Jesus’ definition of unforgivable sin. The reason how could an all-merciful God condemn anyone to the pains of everlasting hell? They would further conclude that if God is capable of doing this to his creatures, he is not the God they want to have faith in.
The “all who are saved crowd” fails to realize what constitutes an unforgivable sin. To help us understand, St. Thomas Aquinas reflects on the topic by borrowing thoughts of early Church Fathers and his own. Thomas explains the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit in three different ways. The first way he describes it is in a literal sense by those who curse the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. In this case, the Pharisees blasphemed the Holy Spirit because they attributed to the devil what belongs to the Creator, namely by claiming Jesus exorcized demons because he was from Satan.
St. Athanasius clarifies this distinction by pointing out that when the Israelites were in the desert and, through human weakness, grumbled to Moses and Aaron that God was not providing enough food for them, this was motivated by their human weakness and not blasphemy. Soon after, the Israelites did blaspheme the Holy Spirit when they worshiped the golden calf, attributing divine characteristics to it. The blasphemy is crediting goodness to someone or thing which is not God.
St. Thomas describes the second-way sin against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. He postulates that a person can persist in their sins until death. Through the Holy Spirit, the bond of love between the Father and the Son is how the remission of sins occurs. By rejecting divine forgiveness, the sinner rejects God, who offers it to him.
The final way one can sin against the Holy Spirit is to hate God. Thomas surmises that power belongs to the Father, wisdom to the Son, and goodness to the Holy Spirit. A sin against the Father can be a human weakness in opposition to his power. A sin against the wisdom of the Son is ignorance, but the sin against goodness is malice. The sin against the Holy Spirit is freely choosing evil without any excuse or mitigation of the weakness of the flesh or the ignorance of the mind. The hatred of God is an unforgivable sin because there is no room for mercy or forgiveness.
The Church has never preached a certainty of people in hell, but it never confirmed that hell is empty, either. All we are left with as Christians is to pray for those who persist in their blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.