NOTES for Mar 3:20-30
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.