June 9, 2024

I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I like being outdoors, but I’m not really a wilderness type. I’ve never been to the Boundary Waters or out to the Alaskan frontier. The closest I get to getting lost is when Christine and I go hiking in a park or a forest. Sometimes those paper trail maps are hard to read. And if the trails are poorly marked, it’s hard to know where you are or where you’re headed. Since the two of us don’t have a lot of outdoor skills, it’s hard for us to orient ourselves in those situations. We’ve ended up hiking the long loop or going the wrong way on the trail more than once.

I wonder if there are times when you’ve found it hard to get your bearings. I invite you to keep those times in the back of your mind this morning, because I think our Gospel reading has a lot to say about being spiritually oriented.

With his teaching and healing, Jesus has drawn quite the crowd. But some of the people who have come aren’t big fans. These are Scribes – people who have been trained to interpret Jewish law – who’ve come from Jerusalem. They’ve heard some disturbing stories about Jesus’ and his disregard for the law, and have come to see things for themselves.

Now, something appears to have set the Scribes off. We don’t know what. Maybe they heard the crowd talking about things they didn’t agree with. Maybe they saw something they didn’t like. But whatever it was, it seems to have confirmed their worst suspicions about Jesus. And so in this morning’s reading the Scribes assert that Jesus’ teaching and his acts of healing aren’t signs of God’s favor. Instead, they insist his ministry shows that he’s in league with the devil.

And this is where Jesus says something disturbing. He assures the crowd that their sins and blasphemies will be forgiven – unless that sin or blasphemy is against the Holy Spirit. In that case, Jesus warns, the sin can’t be forgiven.

It can be scary to think that there’s a sin that can’t be forgiven. It raises a lot of questions in our minds. “What does it mean to blaspheme the Spirit?” “Is this something I’m doing?” It can bring up all our fears and insecurities about life after death and our relationship with God, especially if we were brought up in a tradition where you had to do something to earn God’s favor.

I think it’s vital for us to get clear on what Jesus means by “blaspheming the Spirit”. Because Jesus isn’t warning us here against taking the Holy Spirit’s name in vain, or any of the other garden-variety sins we might commit.

Through his ministry of teaching and healing, Jesus is proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God, with its abundance of forgiveness and mercy. What Jesus means by “blaspheming the Spirit” is to witness God’s power unfolding in and through Jesus’ ministry, and willfully oppose it so firmly that you resort to accusations of sorcery and demonic possession to get around the signs of God’s Spirit confirming Jesus’ identity as the messiah.

This is not about a simple mistake in discernment. It’s about a hardness of heart that leads the Scribes to confuse the presence of God with the presence of Satan. Blaspheming the Spirit is about willfully confusing good and evil.

And this leads to the real problem. When their callous hearts reject even the Spirit’s testimony – expressed through exorcisms – about Jesus’ identity and mission as the messiah, his accusers show themselves dangerously close to being incapable of repentance.

Repentance is essential to participating in God’s kingdom. Without repentance, it’s impossible to orient ourselves towards God. Without repentance, we simply can’t get our spiritual bearings. Without repentance, we can be permanently lost in the wilderness.

What we’re seeing this morning is a lesson in repentance. Jesus has gathered a motley group of people around him. Jews and Gentiles alike. The poor. The demented. The sick. Laborers and peasants. Women and children. Tax collectors. People who know that they’re sinners. People who are desperate to be in the right relationship with God that Jesus offers. People who have discerned that repenting – turning back to God – is the only source of true life.

Jesus doesn’t straight-out say that the scribes are already condemned, but he warns them of their precarious position. The irony here is that the demons who have been driven out of the people they possessed are more open to God’s presence in Jesus than those who most piously follow the Law. Even the demons, it seems, are more likely to repent than those blinded by hearts that are hard.

My friends, I don’t want us to miss the Good News this morning – God’s abundant forgiveness is available to each and every one of us. All we need to do is repent – to reorient our lives toward God. And that takes something the Scribes don’t seem to have – compassion.

This morning, Jesus shows us that compassion is a key to repentance and reorienting. Perhaps if we have compassion for the wounds of others, we might have compassion for our own woundedness and find our own hearts being softened. With compassion we might find ourselves in the crowd around Jesus – oriented toward God’s mission of replacing hate and hostility and resentment with love and peace and human flourishing. Amen.