NOTES for Luk 12:2-12
“I tell you: everyone who acknowledges Me before others, the Son of Man will also acknowledge before the angels of God. But whoever denies Me before others will be denied before the angels of God. And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven” (vv. 8, 9, 10). This quotation must not be broken apart; it can only be considered as a whole. We often make this mistake when we try, unsuccessfully, to understand the last two sentences (v. 10). They seem paradoxical and incomprehensible: is this the Lord's humility before the Holy Spirit, who is His hypostasis? Yes, we have witnessed Jesus' humility before the Father, who is also His hypostasis, so this explanation has a right to exist. Yes, it holds for the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, where the verses corresponding to verses 8 and 9, on the one hand, and verse 10, on the other, stand in different parts of the text and have no connection in meaning. Yet this idea of Jesus' humility does not exhaust the full meaning of verse 10 in Luke's Gospel. Its first part is very closely, and apparently deliberately, connected with verse 9—so closely that we apparently cannot separate them and quote verse 10 alone, apart from verses 8 and 9, without eliminating an idea distinctive to Luke. Thus, whoever “denies” Jesus before others will be denied, whereas whoever speaks a “word” against Him will be forgiven. At a glance, these seem mutually exclusive statements. Is there really some essential difference between denying and blaspheming that affects a person's fate so profoundly? In fact, there is. To deny, or “negaverit,” as we read in the Vulgate, means “to deny stubbornly, to reject persistently” (Petruchenko's Latin–Russian dictionary); and it is generally clear that one can reject only what is offered to one. But one can inadvertently blaspheme even against something one does not know. How often we speak skeptically about something we have never really encountered in our lives, something that has not yet come to us, simply on other people's word—the word of people we are used to trusting. But once the Holy Spirit is at issue, there can be no more talk of “not knowing”: the Holy Spirit enlightens everyone who has come into contact with Him. So the second part of verse 10 takes us back to verse 9: you are being enlightened, but you refuse—and that means you do so knowingly. What a wealth of new meaning comes from Luke's joining verses that were separate in the other two Synoptic Gospels! And like a refrain, the apostle Paul's stern warning resounds: “For it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift and shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and who have fallen away, to be renewed again to repentance, if they for their part crucify the Son of God and expose Him to shame” (Heb. 6:4–6).