We’ve all heard it before. In the movies, on TV shows, in the news and in interviews. We’ve probably heard it from friends and relatives, and maybe we have even said it ourselves. Imagine a situation in which you hurt someone else. Not just a slip of the tongue or a simple mistake. But you did something or said something that caused a deep wound. And when you realize what you did, you try to apologize. And that’s when you hear those words: “I can never forgive that.” Maybe it’s someone we know and we here them say, “I’ll never forgive him for what he did to me.” We see this played out in movies, on TV, and in real life. One of the problems with this is that this attitude is actually promoted by our media in today’s culture. And from a worldly and purely human perspective, I can understand the hurt and unwillingness to forgive the other person.
Now imagine that we have sinned against God. And not just a little fib or some random illicit thought, but something major, like one of the Ten Commandments. Can you imagine God saying, “I could never forgive that!”? Of course not! That’s why Jesus says to the scribes in this Gospel passage, “Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them.” And he lives up to his own statement when on the cross, after being humiliated, beaten, scourged, and crucified, he can say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). And that’s the challenge for us, because Jesus doesn’t just ask that we do the same, he expects us to. That’s why he taught us in the “Lord’s Prayer” to say “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But then immediately after saying all sins and all blasphemies will be forgiven he says, “But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.” So what is going on here? What kind of blasphemy is unforgivable? Is there a particular kind of sin that is everlasting?
We can get a better understanding of this if we look a little closer at the first reading from the Book of Genesis. The man and the woman had just sinned against God. God gave them two commandments. The first: “Be fruitful and multiply.” And the second: “Don’t eat from that tree. Everything else is yours, just not that tree.” They don’t even obey the first command before they disobey the second! When God approaches them and confronted them, what did they do? The first thing the did was hide from God. Then the man blames the woman and God: “The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.” And the woman blamed the serpent: “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.” So not only did they do what God had forbidden them to do, they wouldn’t take any responsibility for their wrongdoing—they tried to hide from God, and then blame others for that they did. Aren’t you glad we’ve gotten away from that?
But what is important is God’s response to that. God does indeed bring punishment: to both the woman and the man, which isn’t included in this passage, but also to the serpent, whom the Book of Revelation interprets as the devil. So God does punish for sin, but he also redeems. In fact, the last verse of this passage in today’s reading is known as the “Protoevangelium” or the “First Gospel.” God says to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.” This points to the ongoing battle and spiritual warfare that we see in the public ministry of Jesus, especially in his exorcisms, and of the ultimate victory of good over evil.
This is what Jesus was doing right before this episode in today’s Gospel: healing the sick and driving out demons. And it’s what prompted the scribes to say “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “By the prince of demons he drives out demons.” In other words, they were attributing Jesus’ miracles to the work of Satan instead of God. So Jesus responds in two ways. First, he basically disproves their claim by showing that it’s absurd and illogical that Satan would fight against his own demons. Then he speaks of what we would call the “unforgivable sin,” or blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. Saint John Paul II explains what this means from an encyclical he wrote in 1986 on the Holy Spirit:
“[B]lasphemy against the Holy Spirit does not properly consist in offending against the Holy Spirit in words; it consists rather in the refusal to accept the salvation which God offers to man through the Holy Spirit, working through the power of the Cross.” (Dominum et vivificantem, 46)
The Catechism of the Catholic Church adds to this:
“There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss.” (CCC 1864).
Now Jesus is not declaring that the scribes have committed the everlasting sin, but rather he is warning them of the grave peril the are in, unless they open their hearts and repent. That’s why this message is so important for us.
A lot of people ask: “Could I be guilty of the unforgivable sin?” The good news about that questions is that if you’re concerned about it, you’re most likely not guilty of it. To fear this kind of sin and spiritual blindness is a signal that a person is not dead to God and is fairly conscious of the need for God’s grace, mercy, and help. That being said, however, I don’t think anyone can argue that there is in our culture today a loss of the knowledge of what sin is and what it can do. And it’s not just with those who are un-catechized. We have allowed a lot of what is acceptable in the eyes of the world to permeate into our own thoughts so that in many cases we can become spiritually blind, and see what is evil as good and what is good as evil (cf. Isaiah 5:20). The most obvious example of this is the issue of abortion, where polls say that the majority of people today see it as something that is good rather than the killing of the most vulnerable and innocent unborn in the womb.
Jesus’ answer to this is, of course, the gift of the Sacrament of Reconciliation that he gave to the Church. When we approach the sacrament with true contrition and repentance, we receive the grace and mercy that God is so eager to give us. But when we avoid Reconciliation, we are in essence saying that we don’t need or don’t want the grace God has to offer. Remember what Saint John Paul II said: blasphemies against the Holy Spirit consist in the refusal to accept the salvation which God offers. When we do this, we risk hardening our hearts like these scribes in the Gospel passage and refuse to accept his merciful gift of forgiveness. And the more often we do this, we risk falling into despair and losing hope in God.
But we can say with confidence, as we proclaimed in our Psalm Response, “With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.” So let us turn to the Lord in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and ask for his mercy and forgiveness and resist becoming hardened of heart to the point of refusing God’s grace. And we can be assured that because of his great love for us and his desire for us to be united to him, he will graciously grant it to us.