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What are the unforgivable sins?
This is a thoughtful question, and it’s one the church has wrestled with for a long, long time. In the New Testament, Jesus says (Mark 3:29) “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” What should we make of this? Does Jesus draw a line in the sand when it comes to God’s forgiveness and love? I thought God’s forgiveness and love were boundless?
Let’s start with context for the passage. In chapter 3, Jesus is just beginning his public ministry. Crowds begin to follow him. They marvel at his teachings and healings. He calls his disciples. Word of his healing and love spreads. Other religious leaders take notice of him (along with Jesus’s family). Feeling afraid, they wonder about the source of his otherworldly power. His family and some of the religious leaders conclude that Jesus must be possessed by an unclean or evil spirit. They confront him. Jesus’s response takes the form of a logical argument: Really people? Would an evil spirit do holy things like heal and restore life? “Can Satan drive out Satan? A house divided against itself cannot stand!” In other words, he says, if evil were to do good things like giving and restoring life and sharing God’s forgiveness and acceptance and home with folks who long for it most, then evil would be contradicting itself. Therefore, the power at work here (to heal and give life) is divine power.
Given the context for this strange teaching–“whoever speaks ill against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin”–what might Jesus mean?
Jesus might be saying this: “Listen up people. If anything is unredemptive, it is the refusal to accept God’s Spirit of acceptance, or the refusal to accept that God accepts the world (especially the marginalized) in love. We “quench” or “douse” this Spirit when we refuse to accept God’s radical acceptance and love for the world. When we call evil good, and good evil, our soul hungers-on for liberating grace and wholeness, and we contribute to others’ hunger too. The eternal judgment of God is that healing and wholeness have the final say, not fear and exclusion.”
Still, is Jesus saying there are sins so terrible God will not forgive them? For example, if I say bad things about God, or if I speak badly of the Holy Spirit who heals and restores life, or if I struggle to get with the program of God’s radical acceptance, then am I out of luck if I later wish I hadn’t said or done those things? Does God’s forgiveness and acceptance end when I’m mad or angry and then through my fear I say angry or mad or hurtful things about God or God’s life-giving Spirit? If this were the point Jesus was making in the text then the apostle Paul would have certainly been out of luck. If anybody did unforgivable things that doused the Spirit of life, it was Paul. But that’s not how his story goes. Paul needed to encounter the living Christ for the scales to fall from his eyes. Maybe the only unforgivable (“eternal”) sin is a world without the possibility of forgiveness and acceptance, but that’s not the world God made. Like Paul, when we try to fashion a world like this for ourselves, God saves us.
When I was young, I remember being taught to think that Mark 3:29 was Jesus drawing a line in the sand of God’s forgiveness. Don’t step out of line, or God will eternally punish you. But God in Jesus is not a God of fear and enmity. In Jesus, the eternal judgment of God is that healing and wholeness have the final say, and the Spirit of healing and wholeness never stops seeking to nourish every possibility of life within the soul.
