NOTES for Mar 3:28-29

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.

The learned scribes constantly argue with Jesus, do not accept Him, and try to catch Him in His words. But now they are already doing something blatantly outrageous: they point to white and say "black." The Lord heals diseases, casts out demons, in short, tramples down Satan's power in this world, and they are ready to attribute His actions to the prince of darkness himself. The Lord has already said that a tree is known by its fruits, but today He speaks even more definitely: a good work is only from God, and if we do not acknowledge this, then we are close to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. If we learn to see what is good in people, in their relationships, in nature, and in ourselves, we will learn to see God's action and presence in this world. If we thank Him for every good thing we meet on our path through life, we will never confuse white with black, good with evil, the action of a demon with the action of the Holy Spirit.

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.

One of the greatest saints of our time, Therese of Lisieux, began writing her autobiographical notes, "Story of a Soul," by opening the Gospel at random and finding her eyes falling on the very words with which our passage begins: "Then He went up on the mountain and called to Himself those whom He Himself wanted." In her thought, the whole mystery of the calling to holiness is contained in them: "He does not call those who are worthy of it, but those whom He Himself wants."

The whole passage is about the "called" and the "summoned," about the Lord's relationships with those closest to Him. Why does He choose the circle of His closest disciples? Do we have grounds to agree with Therese's words, or are we inwardly convinced that among all the listeners those chosen by Jesus were the worthiest?

In verses 28-29 there is a warning, and one of the sternest in the Gospel. Let us note: it is not Jesus who condemns the scribes. Speaking in parables, He gives them the opportunity to look and test for themselves what from what has been said applies to them. Is not this respect of His for the human conscience the key to what it means to "blaspheme the Holy Spirit"? Every other blasphemy is external: a person may "not know what he is doing." But when he blasphemes the Holy Spirit, he knows, and he does it in spite of what his own conscience is crying out. Is this not why the condemnation proves eternal, because nothing remains in a person that could raise him up?

In the last verses of the third chapter one at first sees a bitter testimony to Jesus' rejection of family ties because His relatives did not understand Him, until one realizes: the Lord does not move away from His relatives, otherwise what value would there be for the disciples in being called His "brother, and sister, and mother"? He shares with those who do the will of God His most personal, most tender, and most caring love.

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.