Main news for 29 January 2022

The human mind is resourceful; this has been known long and well. So has the fact that it is the greatest flatterer in the world: if a person very much wants to convince himself of something, prove something to himself, or justify something for himself, his mind is glad to try and please him. It will find the needed arguments and offer such interpretations of perfectly obvious facts that, if the person wants, they will allow him to see those facts as completely different from what they really are. This activity of the human mind turns out to be especially "useful" when certain facts simply refuse to fit within the framework of a scheme, concept, or theory devised by the same human mind.

Something like this happened when certain "scribes" (apparently learned rabbis or teachers of Torah from the Jerusalem academy) began to claim that Jesus supposedly cast out dark spirits by using the power of their own head, the ruler of the world of shadows and the kingdom of death, one of whose names was Beelzebul. The absurdity of such a claim was obvious, and Jesus immediately pointed it out to the scribes: if everything were as they claimed, that would be a tremendous stroke of good fortune, because it would mean that a split had occurred in the kingdom of darkness, so that fighting it would now be quite easy. It was obvious to everyone that nothing of the sort was to be expected.

The scribes simply proposed a theory that could explain what was happening without destroying their own concepts, above all their messianic concepts, and some others as well. This Man, they said, violates the Law given by God (in reality, the prescriptions invented by people and proposed as an interpretation of that very Law given by God); therefore He cannot be a man of God; therefore He cannot heal; and since He nevertheless heals, then... at this point the new theory came in handy: therefore, He heals by the wrong power, not by God's power. The logic is preserved, but it has no relation to reality.

Yet a person who wants to deceive himself tries not to notice this, and truly does not notice it, while the mind helps him remain in ignorance. A person's life is determined not by mind and not by logic, but by will, which compels a person to choose and decide. This includes choosing what he wants to see and what he does not want to see. And seeing what one wants or failing to notice what one does not want is not so hard; when needed, both mind and feelings will help with this. They cannot resist the will, which determines who and what a person will be before God and people.

It is worth paying attention to these words of Christ: "will be forgiven all sins and blasphemies." We know what our sins are. What, this too will be forgiven? Yes, it will, because Jesus says so, and His word is faithful.

And what, just like that, without any conditions? Almost. Because we still have to accept this forgiveness, since all our relations with God have two sides: His and ours. His side is accomplished according to His promise, thanks to Christ's atoning sacrifice, but ours... Jesus says that in order for us to be forgiven, we too need to forgive. That is, we must agree that forgiveness is precisely the most right path in resolving conflicts, in restoring broken relationships. Forgiveness is mercy, the beginning of love. Therefore by our consent we acknowledge the supreme rule of love and accept that God is love. Refusal of this path means rejection of love, and accordingly rejection of God's love. This is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit: refusing God in what He is, love. Then what mercy is there for one who does not accept mercy, what forgiveness for one who does not accept forgiveness? One cannot forgive or save by force.

Unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious sometimes gives rise to the strangest theories and assumptions. So it was with the Pharisees: some of them, unwilling to see the Messiah in the Messiah, tried to explain the miracles Jesus performed by saying that He was resorting to the help of dark powers.

To any unbiased person, such an assumption would have seemed at least strange: Jesus had repeatedly cast demons out of people, freeing them from the power of those very dark forces whose help He was supposedly using, if one followed the logic of the Pharisees who accused Him. Jesus points to this contradiction when He rejects the accusation brought against Him: the devil, He says, will not go to war against himself. At the same time, Jesus warns about the most terrible sin, the sin that is not forgiven: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. At first glance everything is simple and clear: He casts out demons precisely by the Holy Spirit, while the people accusing Him regard and call that Spirit dark and demonic, thereby blaspheming God.

Yet there is also a second meaning here, less obvious, but completely clear on closer examination. This has to do with the lie to which a person often resorts in order to justify his own view of the world, his own attitude toward particular people and events. In fact, when a person acts this way, he deceives himself while also trying to deceive other people, and often even God, for all the absurdity of that attempt. This kind of self-deception ultimately turns out to be blasphemy against the Spirit.

Indeed, if a person can see the truth even to some extent, it is only insofar as God shows it to him. This concerns every truth in general, the very possibility of seeing something that really exists. This is God's world, and only God's will, God's action, and God's determination make it real and true. For a human being, the world is disclosed as something real and true insofar as God shows it to him as such.

Refusing to see the world as God shows it to a person is the beginning and root of lying as a way of perceiving reality. Self-deception like the kind people often resort to, and which Jesus' accusers resorted to in particular, means precisely a conscious refusal to perceive reality as God shows it to a person. This refusal becomes blasphemy against the Spirit and is not forgiven, not because God is merciless, but because, until a person renounces self-deception, he will be able neither truly to see God's world nor to meet the One who created it.