Insulting the Spirit

The scriptures referred to are 1 Samuel 8:4-20 and Mark 3:20-35.

I have been reading a book called Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths in which the author does a deep dive into history of “great men” to show that most of them were, for all their achievements, psychopaths: people without fear, without empathy, and without regret. Using recognized historical sources, he cites a depressing list of atrocities committed by Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Ashoka, Atahualpa, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Constantine the Great, Alexander the Great and just about everyone called “the Great.” Yes, he mentions Hitler, but Stalin and Mao killed more people. And often these leaders used, and in some cases enjoyed watching, torture. He thinks the adulation folks heaped on such rulers had to do not so much with them being needed to protect the people from other nations but because slavish devotion was the only way to protect oneself from one's own leader. And adulation is how you appease a malignant narcissist.

Just this week a meta-analysis came out that looked at 437 studies involving more than 100,000 people worldwide and it found that “Narcissism is a significant risk factor for aggressive and violent behavior across the board.” People with an inflated sense of their importance and entitlement were not only more likely lash out with physical and verbal abuse and bullying but also more likely to do it in a cold and deliberate way. And narcissism doesn't even have to rise to the level of pathology to lead to aggression. But give a malignant narcissist great power and only the most craven sycophants are safe.

Most modern democracies have safeguards in place to keep any one person from having unchecked power. And yet some people want to give a strong man power, someone who is tough and ruthless if need be, who fights as dirty as our enemies, fighting fire with fire. Which is exactly what General Curtis LeMay did, dropping napalm on 66 cities in Japan and continuing even after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fire bombings killed as many as a half a million Japanese civilians. As we said, many people cannot imagine a different way of dealing with evil other than by using its own methods against it. And today's gospel has something to say about that.

Even then, people knew that diseases were caused by unseen entities. They called them demons. We call them bacteria and viruses. Communicable diseases are the top two leading causes of death in low income countries today. Lower respiratory infections are still the 4^th leading cause of death worldwide. And that's in a world where antibiotics and vaccines exist. In Jesus' day, a simple cut could get infected and kill you. There were no antibiotics or respirators or anti-psychotics or calcium-channel blockers or surgeries that would remove a cancerous tumor without killing you. But Jesus could and did heal people. That's why they flocked to him.

But Jesus did not abide by the ritual rules of purity. After touching a leper or a bleeding woman or a corpse, he should have gone away from people, washed, changed his clothes and been ritually unclean until sunset. That would have severely limited his ability to heal more than one person a day. But Jesus is healing as many as could get near him. And that's a problem for the scribes and experts in the law of Moses.

Healing is supposed to come from God. But so was the Torah. So how could Jesus accomplish one while ignoring parts of the other? The scribes' solution was that he was casting out the demons that caused disease through the power of the prince of demons.

Jesus immediately points out that this makes no sense. Is Satan at war with himself? Such a civil war would spell the end of God's spiritual adversary. What makes more sense is that God is more powerful than the forces of disease, destruction and death.

And then Jesus says, “Truly, I tell you, people will be forgiven their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” Jesus may have been thinking of the verse in Isaiah where it says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil...” (Isaiah 5:20) Or as the NET translates it, “Those who call evil good and good evil are as good as dead.” Nevertheless this is a disturbing statement and it makes some people worry that they may have committed the “unforgivable sin.”

Let's look at what Jesus is actually talking about. His critics are attributing what he is doing, in this case healing, to the devil. How badly screwed up must your thinking be to say that healing is coming not from the source of all goodness but from the chief agent of evil? Essentially they are confusing the Spirit of God with Satan. It is blasphemy, or in other words, an insult to the Spirit of God. And not only would such a person not go to Jesus for physical healing they would not go to him for spiritual healing either. Thus anyone thinking that Jesus is acting out of an evil spirit would not go to him for forgiveness, thereby rendering himself in effect unforgivable. But that means anyone who does go to Jesus and trusts him to forgive their sins is not blaspheming the Holy Spirit, who empowers Jesus and acts through him. If you are worried about blaspheming the Holy Spirit, you aren't. Those who do blaspheme him by thinking he is evil do not have such doubts about the rightness of their opinions and behavior. Rejecting God's forgiveness, they condemn themselves.

But I want to deal with the fact that they thought Jesus could use the power of evil to fight the power of evil. And since people were being healed, they must have thought that getting down on the devil's level is actually an effective method of dealing with evil. Which is a very human temptation.

After all, don't our heroes win basically by using overwhelming violence against the bad guys? Superheroes win not because they are morally better but ultimately because they have stronger superpowers and can damage the bad guys to the extent that they can't fight back. The same goes for ordinary human heroes. Who doesn't remember the line in The Untouchables where the Irish cop tells Eliot Ness how to fight Al Capone? “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” Forget an eye for an eye. For any threat or injury, if you're in the right, you can go directly to taking a life. You're entitled to. The problem is everyone thinks they're in the right.

People forget the reason for the flood in the story of Noah: “The earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was filled with violence.” (Genesis 6:11) God decides to reboot the world because it is filled with violence. People created in the image of God were harming and killing other people created in the image of God. So God's first covenant outlaws murder. It is symbolic deicide. Which is a kind of blasphemy.

King David tells his son Solomon that he wanted to build a temple for God, “But the Lord said to me: 'You have spilled a great deal of blood and fought many battles. You must not build a temple to honor me, for you have spilled a great deal of blood on the ground before me...'” (1 Chronicles 22:8) So Solomon, a man of peace, will build God's temple. For David, a man of blood, to do it would have been a kind of blasphemy.

So under his new covenant Jesus tells us, “I say to you, do not resist the evildoer. But whoever strikes you on one cheek, turn the other to him as well.” (Matthew 5:39) And “I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be like your Father in heaven, since he causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:44-45)

Notice that the reason that we are to love even our enemies is so that we are like God. And not in the egotistical or arrogant way a narcissist would see it; we are to be like the God who is love morally. God sends the rain and sun, vital to the growing of food, on all. God is good and gracious to all. As we read in last week's passage from John's gospel, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” (emphasis mine) If God loves the world enough to send Jesus to die for us sinners, we should love others, even those we class as enemies. Which means not using unloving, harmful actions on them.

Like violence, obviously. The world rightly condemns things like the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades and the witch trials as unchristian. I would call them blasphemies, insults to the Spirit of the God who is love. And so would Jesus. When Peter defended him by cutting off the ear of the high priest's slave, Jesus told Peter, “Put your sword back in its place! For all who take hold of the sword will die by the sword.” (Matthew 26:51-52) And then he healed the man's ear. (Luke 22:50-51) Healing is in line with the Spirit. Later Jesus tells Pilate that one sign that his kingdom is not from this world is that his followers weren't fighting to rescue him. (John 18:36). Both Paul, who violently persecuted the church before encountering the risen Christ, and Peter, the swordsman, learn to be like Jesus. They both write that we are not to repay evil with evil but with good. (Romans 12:17, 21; 1 Peter 3:9). Violently opposing people is not Christlike. And there are other methods that are ungodly.

Like lying. Anyone who tries to defend or promote Christianity with falsehoods is not doing so through the Spirit. At least 3 times in the gospel of John, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit “the Spirit of truth” (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13) and says “he will guide you into all the truth.” Jesus famously calls himself “the way, the truth and the life.” (John 14:6) Jesus said that “true worshipers shall worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23) Psalm 31:5 calls the Lord “God of truth.” God is, of course, the ultimate truth of existence. So we must not succumb to the temptation to use what Plato calls “the noble lie” to push an agenda, however praiseworthy. Just as Jesus says his critics were misrepresenting the Spirit of God, so too are those resorting to lies to defend him. Lying in the name of the Spirit of truth is an insult.

Now I am not saying that these are unforgivable sins. After all, Paul violently persecuted the Jesus movement and so he must have felt that Jesus was, if not in league with the devil, at least blasphemous to claim to be God's Son. But then Jesus chose Paul to become one of his most effective missionaries. And this reinforces the idea that what makes blasphemy against the Holy Spirit unforgivable is that the person persists in seeing good as evil and doesn't seek forgiveness. Paul repented, trusted Jesus, and later humbly referred to himself as the least of the apostles. (1 Corinthians 15:9)

Paul condemns those who say, “Let us do evil so that good may come of it.” (Romans 3:8) Further we are not to avenge evil, lest we be overcome by evil. We are to overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:19-21) There is a real difference between the healing, forgiving, loving ways of following Jesus and the harmful, unforgiving, unloving ways that we, at our most narcissistic, resort to. But we cannot use violence, devilishly clever lies or other infernal methods to promote the kingdom of God. It is an insult to Jesus, our King, who did not shed the blood of others but let his blood be shed for others.

We must be guided by the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8:9). And if we are, the undeniable manifestations of the Spirit in our life will be “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23) Indeed, as Paul says, “For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment, namely, 'You must love your neighbor as yourself.'” (Galatians 5:14) Or as Jesus puts it, “This is my commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you.” (John 15:12) Loving one another, including our enemies, as Jesus does, is never an insult to God. It's how we honor his Holy Spirit.