The sin against the Holy Spirit

All Saints’, Dorval

Proper 10, Year B

June 6, 2021

Solar lights and children’s shoes form a memorial in front of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for 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.

This is one of those sentences that brings a preacher up short and demands that it be dealt with before any of the other possible subjects that arise from the week’s readings. What is going on here? What does Jesus mean by “blasphemes against the Holy Spirit,” and why is such blasphemy uniquely unforgivable?

Jesus says this in response to accusations from a number of different directions. His family is worried that he is out of his mind. The Jerusalem scribes claim that he can only cast out demons because he himself is possessed by a stronger demon. In other words, the actions of God – Jesus’ healing and cleansing ministry – is being attributed to demonic powers instead.

As Wendy Farley writes: “The inability to tell the difference between the power of the Holy Spirit and the demonic is an unforgivable sin.” Though I would perhaps nuance it a little bit: saying, rather than “inability”, the refusal to tell the difference between the power of the Holy Spirit and the demonic. God does not blame us for our genuine ignorance, but for our wilful turning away from the truth.

This fundamental confusion – being unable to distinguish between the power of God and that of the Evil One – so distorts one’s perspective on everything that it becomes practically inevitable that one will commit atrocities.

This passage is all too pertinent right now, as Canada wrestles with the revelation of the mass grave of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Some non-Indigenous people had managed not to let the reality of the multi-generational crime committed against the first peoples of this land penetrate their consciousness until this moment, and are now, belatedly, asking how this could have happened.

The fundamental goal of the residential school project was, in the words of its own proponents, to “kill the Indian to save the child.” It was a deliberate breaking down of an existing cultural identity in order to replace it with another one that was considered superior. To the white settlers of the nineteenth century – and well into the twentieth – Indian-ness was a problem. It was savagery, something to be eradicated. To them, the only way to make Native children “acceptable” members of society was to turn them into white people. And the churches were willing accomplices in this project.

In other words, those who perpetuated the residential school system saw the identities and cultures of Indigenous people as demonic and in need of eradication. Identities and cultures that were then, and are now, and always have been, gifts of God, full of the Holy Spirit, beautiful and whole and worthy just as they are.

Those who hated those identities and cultures, and sought to destroy them, were committing the same sin as those who accused Jesus of being possessed by Beelzebul: they were consciously deciding to attribute the work of God to the Devil.

So is this sin really “unforgivable”? I hope Jesus was exaggerating here, and I trust God not to leave anyone behind who genuinely repents and comes to see rightly. But I also don’t want to explain this away: this is probably the single most uncompromising thing Jesus says in all of Scripture, and we are right to take it with the utmost seriousness, and treat the sin it describes as the worst thing that one human being can do to another.

I would say that as a church, we have made a good beginning. The 1993 apology for residential schools, and the 2019 formation of the autonomous Indigenous Church, have laid a firm foundation for reconciliation. But we have so, so far to go.

Nevertheless, I find it encouraging that as an Anglican Church of Canada clergyperson who is only three years post-transfer from the US, there is absolutely no way I could possibly have avoided knowing about the horrors committed in the residential schools, and that we are intentionally centring Native concerns in everything we do.

It is thanks to the grace of God and the power of the Gospel that there is an Indigenous church at all; we could hardly have blamed the first peoples of this land if they had decided to reject the settler religion lock, stock and barrel. But much like the enslaved Africans in the American South, they heard the message that was given to them to try to keep them subservient and eliminate their culture, and heard instead the call to liberation that cannot be separated from the message of Jesus, no matter how hard the hierarchy tries.

And I think that word “hierarchy” is key here. In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus is rebuking the scribes who have come down from Jerusalem: the religious authorities from the centres of power. They are the ones who, thanks to their comfortable certainties, have forgotten how to tell the difference between the works of God and the works of demons. It is precisely the same dynamic at work when prime ministers and bishops conspire together to abuse and kill human beings for their own good.  And it is this dynamic that Samuel warns the people of Israel against in the Old Testament reading, when he tries to get through their heads what will happen if they choose a king to set in authority over them.

I’m not in favour of eliminating all hierarchy in the church; there is definitely a role for clear lines of authority, as long as the policies they are enforcing are healthy and in accordance with the Gospel. But the key is discernment. We must never get so comfortable in our certainties that we forget to pay attention to where the Spirit is moving, and that we forget that God’s habit is to show up in the strangest of places and among the unlikeliest of people. Those in authority, those in the centre, must always consciously and intentionally listen to those at the margins – really listen, and be prepared to change their (our) behaviour as a result.  In the Gospel reading, Jesus claims the motley, hardscrabble crowd around him as his “family” – “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Another point that chimes with the outlook of our Indigenous siblings, who see all the living creatures of the world as their relatives.

To quote Wendy Farley again: “It is an odd feature of Jesus’ ministry that he is open to everybody: Gentiles, Jews, the poor, the demented, the sick, working class, women, tax collectors, sexual outcasts. The only people who provoke Jesus’ intolerance are his family and the normal, law-abiding scribes. … They are least able to make the leap from dedication to religion to openhearted love of God’s beloved, disfigured humanity.”

For many decades, our church committed the sin of looking at people made in the image of God and seeing instead the action of the devil. We have only begun to set things right. If we are to continue to do so, it will be by sitting among the crowd around Jesus, among the traumatized and the forgotten; choosing to see all of Jesus’ beloveds as our family; opening our ears and hearts, seeking healing, and learning to recognize the Holy Spirit at work.

Amen.