Beth and I have been watching Shtisel, an Israeli television series (with subtitles). The title is the family name of an ultra-Orthodox clan and the show follows their relationships and interactions with the people around them, both inside and outside their religious community.
At the center of the Shtisel story is the patriarch rabbi Shulem and his 27-year-old son, Akiva. Shulem is convinced that his son is wildly misguided in life, particularly in his desire to be an artist. The old man, prompted by the matchmaker who set up more than one failed match for Akiva, calls his son something in Hebrew or Yiddish (I can’t tell which) which gets translated in the subtitles as “screw-up.” Even just as it seems the father might be showing his son some compassion and understanding, Shulem goes further in order, in some way, to sabotage his son’s aspirations as an artist, his actual career as a teacher of Torah, or a promising relationship with a woman. He wants to keep Akiva entirely within his own control.
We see something like that happening in the beginning and end of our text from Mark 3:20-35. Jesus’ family, perhaps goaded by the Jewish authorities who also appear here using strong language about Jesus, seem to completely misunderstand what He is about. They, the family, even attempt to bring Him home and/or interfere in His mission.
In the middle of the family action (presumably while the family travels to where Jesus is) comes an encounter with the authorities in which the scribes raise the specter of diabolic activity and attribute it to Jesus. Jesus’ response is a subtle argument for His own divine authority over demonic forces, together with a rebuke for attributing what is clearly holy and divine work of freeing people from spiritual evil to that same spiritual evil. To do so, says Jesus in verse verse 29, is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, by whose power demons are cast out and people are set free. And those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit “can never have forgiveness.”
Down through the ages those words of Jesus about “an eternal sin” have engendered for sensitive souls a great worry about salvation. We ask ourselves, “have I committed the unforgivable sin? Am I lost forever?”
Reading the warning in context makes it clear that the unforgivable sin is the attitude of ascribing God’s good work of salvation in Christ to spiritual forces of evil. Mark very clearly explains in verse 30 that the scribes had committed or were on the verge of committing “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” by attributing the work of God’s Spirit to demonic forces (Beelzebul in verse 22).
The standard answer to worries about committing this unforgivable sin is correct. If you are worried about it, you haven’t done it. That is, if there is enough fear of God in you to be concerned about how He would judge your sin, then your spiritual state is not and never was in the bleak condition which identifies something good as something evil.
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit–in the form of seeing the work of Christ as evil–is unforgivable because it removes one from the possibility of salvation. The very thing which saves, the work of God in Christ, is denied and falsely judged and salvation becomes impossible.
The family drama surrounding this teaching about Jesus’ power over Satan and the danger of attributing God’s work to Satan actually fits well here. Insofar as Jesus’ own mother and siblings misunderstand who He is and His relationship to God the Father, they place themselves outside the circle of Jesus’ followers, just as they are literally, physically outside that circle as the text comes to a close. They cannot receive His forgiveness and grace as long as they imagine that He is insane or worse.
Fortunately we know both by Scripture and church tradition that at least some of Jesus’ family, His mother and His brother James, came to know the true nature of their family member. Mary is there at the Cross and James the brother of Jesus is a leader of the church in the book of Acts. Whatever their attitude toward Jesus at the time of this story, it was forgivable.
Actually, in the process of delivering the warning about the unforgivable sin, Jesus offered the utmost reassurance about forgiveness in verse 28, “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter…” That is, everything is forgivable except denying the possibility of forgiveness by seeing Jesus who brings forgiveness as possessed by an evil spirit.
So all the sins Christians have sometimes treated as though they were unforgivable–murder, adultery, homosexual behavior, divorce, etc.–are within the scope of grace. The true wideness of God’s mercy and forgiveness is revealed as we contemplate the very narrow field of what is unforgivable. The redemption of members of Jesus’ own family after this unfortunate episode is proof. So maybe there’s hope for messed up characters and families like the Shtisels, and you and me, as we turn our eyes toward Jesus and seek to do what He teaches us about God’s will.