If you had been there...:
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey IF YOU HAD BEEN THERE... WOULD YOU HAVE RECOGNIZED JESUS? The sin against the Holy Spirit is the one that Jesus said was beyond forgiveness. It is plainly the one to...
...but if anyone speaks against the Holy Spirit, there is no forgiveness, either in this age or in the age to come" (Matthew 12:31...
...I am far from sure that I would have been among them...
...But I do have a feeling that we are much too comfortable with belief, most of us, wherever we are with it...
...or we want what lies beneath this sense of "knowing for sure"-we want to feel that we are on the right track in some way we can check out by referring to an external referent, some certain way, a pole-star...
...The religiously correct people who fail to help the beaten man are not loving, and therefore are not servants of God, whereas the religiously uncorrect Samaritan is...
...The failure to recognize the Spirit in Jesus strikes us (protected as we are from any real encounter with the reality that faced first-century Palestinians) as obvious...
...Nothing is less likely than what we celebrate at Christmas...
...Ordinary religious understanding can dwindle into convention: it isn't at all likely that salvation of the human race and the meaning of the universe would all come down to events in the life of a Jew from an unimportant town in an unimpressive province of the Roman Empire...
...That makes sense, but to try to find one particular sin and identify it here is a mistake...
...It is important to see that the text does not say that it is a sin not to recognize the Spirit, to fail in that perception, to be blind...
...we are at pains to show that we are not conservatives, or not liberals...
...This may be a call to a silence and reverence, a recognition that ordinarily we do not know, maybe cannot know, where the Spirit is at work...
...I don't know...
...One traditional-and much too narrow-interpretation has been that despair is the unforgivable sin, presumably because it is impermeable-you refuse to allow mercy to touch you...
...To see the Spirit where the Spirit is, or at least not to deny the presence of the Spirit, requires a discernment that can only be learned through the alertness Jesus calls us to practice constantly...
...We want to know for sure, and to say what we know...
...out of your own mouth you will be condemned" (Matt...
...We are told that no one can set aside any part of the law, and also told that "the Sabbath was made for man...
...No one deliberately speaks against the Holy Spirit...
...What is condemned is not failure to recognize the Son of Man, Jesus...
...or we search for a positive criterion, like the Bible, or a church which cannot make mistakes, either because the church's "long haul" or tradition is a reliable guide (as Orthodox believe), or because the church has a guaranteed source of infallibility in a magisterium protected from error (as Catholics believe...
...man was not made for the Sabbath...
...but when he, or his followers, claimed more after his death, when the claim was made that he was Messiah (despite the fact that the Messiah was to have been an earthly and triumphant ruler who really would redeem the whole nation and be obvious in his triumphs), I might very well have looked around an obviously unredeemed world and denied that assertion...
...Or we look for political and social correctness as a criterion for what really matters, religiously-whatever the vehicle is, is unimportant: nearly anything will do, as long as it persuades us that we are on the right track...
...It is precisely religious correctness, seen rightly, that is involved in not speaking where one may not, and in not denying the action of the Holy Spirit...
...We settle into it, which is precisely what we are not meant to do...
...His opponents-acting, no doubt, in good faith, convinced that Jesus was behaving in inappropriate and even blasphemous ways- were guilty of this denial, guilty even though their intentions may very well have been pure, or may have felt pure to them (there is an important difference...
...Would that be the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit...
...These words are, at least, a call to radical humility...
...Let's move the question to more nervous-making grounds: given my temperament, I am not sure that, if I had lived at that time, I would have regarded the claims of Jesus as any more impressive than those of the Maharishi or Jim Jones...
...But what is it...
...Jesus' words about the sin against the Holy Spirit seem to me to fit into the same category as his words about being constantly prepared for his coming: we are always to be like sentries, always on the alert...
...The implication is that, even more important than this, there is a failure to see the work of the Spirit, the least known-one might say the most elusive, even tricky-person of the Trinity...
...Some were able to see it, and become obedient to what God revealed there...
...That alertness is itself a gift of the Holy Spirit, and can come only with prayer and struggle...
...There is more to it than that, though: "Any man who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven...
...When Charles Williams wrote that God commanded altars to be set up so that he could send down fire somewhere else, he could have been writing about the sin Jesus said could not be forgiven...
...12:36-37...
...Taking this seriously could mean, for example, that we must at the very least not deny the work of the holy in the compassion recommended by Buddhism or the desire for radical obedience to God's word represented by fundamentalism, however awkwardly...
...To deny the Holy Spirit may be to deny holiness in places where we are not accustomed to finding it...
...There are places in the New Testament where Jesus condemns the failure to act, where "not doing" is as sinful as doing something wrong...
...The radical humility called for here does not come easily to religious people...
...If this warning is here for a reason, what is it...
...Again, what is condemned here is not a failure to act-it is not failing to say the right thing-but an insistence on speaking where one should not, that leads to trouble...
...For out of your own mouth you will be acquitted...
...Far be it from me to say that it wouldn't...
...I might have liked a lot of his ideas, his emphasis on what really mattered in Judaism...
...It is plainly the one to avoid...
...The text does not say that religious correctness is beside the point...
...but it should at least make us alert...
...Faith is not meant to make us uncomfortable...
...This, very often, will separate us from others and is even intended to do so: we are not like Muslims in this, not like Jews in that, not like fundamentalist Christians in another way...
...The sin is in a more willful thing: a denial, a refusal...
...The domestication of the holy is the worst thing religion does, and that is what is involved in all of these moves...
...At one level it could be seen as the refusal to recognize the Spirit at work in Jesus...
...A few verses later, Matthew has Jesus say, "I tell you this: there is not a thoughtless word that comes from men's lips but they will have to account for it on the day of judgment...
Vol. 117 • December 1990 • No. 22
