The Unforgiveable Sin?

​If it were up to me, I would not have chosen a Gospel reading about the unforgivable sin on my first week back from vacation! But that’s what we get. Here it is, one more time: “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.” Wow…..
 
Sin is any failure to love perfectly, any failure to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, or any failure to love our neighbor as ourselves. By that measure, we all sin many times every day.
 
But we repent, and we confess, and we try to do better, trusting that God forgives us, and strengthens us, and helps us to grow towards perfect love, even if we never get all the way there in this life. That’s how it mostly works. Even today’s troubling line confirms that we “will be forgiven for our sins.”
 
Except, apparently, for the unforgiveable one.
 
So, what is the unforgiveable sin? What does it mean to blaspheme the Holy Spirit?
 
According to the dictionary, blasphemy means “the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things.” That’s a good definition for how we normally use the word, “blasphemy.”
 
But that definition doesn’t really make sense of our passage. Why would it be OK, or at least forgivable, to speak sacrilegiously about God the Father and about God the Son, but NOT forgivable to speak sacrilegiously about God the Holy Spirit? We don’t separate Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in that way.
 
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit has to be something other than sacrilegious speech. It has to be something specific to the Holy Spirit.
 
We get help from Paul here. In our reading from Second Corinthians, Paul says, “even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”
 
We don’t need examples of the wasting away of our outer nature. We know this all too well. Our bodies, our outer nature, get worse over time.
 
I am feeling a little wasted away right now. I’m just back from vacation and adjusting to an thirteen-hour time change. I’m not feeling very perky in my outer nature at the moment!
 
But Paul is not really interested in our outer natures. Paul’s interest is what’s happening inside. And inside is an entirely different story. Even as our outer natures waste away, our inner natures are being renewed, strengthened, sanctified, prepared to be with God in eternity and with “an eternal weight of glory.”
 
The inner renewal that happens inside us day by day helps us to be a little more generous, a little more forgiving, and little braver than we were the day before.
 
Sadly, inner renewal is harder to see than outer wasting away. But I would like to think that all of us, if we reflect back on our lives, can see spiritual growth. I’d like to think that we really are all a little better at loving now than we were even a few years ago.
 
Life is complicated. We suffer setbacks along the way. But hopefully the general trend is clear.
 
I see this happening in my relationship with Carrie. As she can attest, I am still sometimes cranky. I still sometimes act like a jerk, especially when I am my outer nature is particularly wasted. But I am, overall, less cranky, less jerky, than I used to be. Not every day. But growth has happened. 
 
That inner renewal, that growth, is the work of the Holy Spirit in us, in our lives, and in our relationships with each other and with God.
 
That is what the Spirit does.
 
To blaspheme the Spirit, the unforgiveable sin, is to deny or resist that work of the Spirit in us.
 
Sometimes, we refuse to exercise our spiritual gifts. That is denying the work of the Holy Spirit in us, and so blaspheming the Spirit.
 
Sometimes we refuse to love. We hold on to our anger or our hurt or our selfishness rather than responding to others with grace and generosity. That, too, is blaspheming the Spirit.
 
But occasionally denying our gifts or refusing to love is not yet unforgivable. Even the saints fail sometimes. Paul himself says that “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:18-19).
 
I think about my experience of driving.
 
I routinely leave my house later than I should. With luck, I hope to make it to wherever I am going on time. But I need the traffic lights to be with me.
 
When I am in hurry, I look ahead at the lights and, if the light is green, I accelerate. But sometimes I get caught behind a person who is not in a hurry. The green light is up ahead, but the car in front of me keeps easing along.
 
In the worst cases, the light turns yellow as the casual car in front of me reaches the intersection. That car gets through, leaving me stuck at a red light.
 
Suddenly I face a spiritual test.
 
One possibility is that I take the short delay at the light as a moment to say a quick prayer, blessing all the people around me. That is what the Holy Spirit, busily at work renewing my inner nature, invites me to do. In fact, I have said that prayer zero times. In Paul’s words, that is the right that I cannot do, not in that moment.
 
Another option is for me to sit there stuck at the light, fuming, and cursing the driver in the car that is now disappearing in the distance, considerably more likely to get where they are going on time than I am.
 
I exercise that option virtually every time I drive.
 
Now, getting impatient while driving may not seem like a big deal. But it is resisting the work of the Spirit. And if I continue in that resistance for my whole life, it is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
 
The only sin that is unforgiveable is a final resistance to the Spirit, resistance until the day we die, perhaps even resistance after death. It’s not unforgivable in the sense that God refuses to forgive. It’s unforgivable because we have permanently refused God’s forgiveness and grace and renewal.
 
Thankfully, even in moments when we are stuck at traffic lights and behaving in a most unchristian way, the Spirit keeps renewing, keeps nudging, keeps working away on us.
 
Because God’s will for us is “an eternal weight of glory.”
 
That’s something to sit with.
 
God, the creator of the cosmos, with its billions of galaxies and trillions of light years of expanse, has plenty to do to keep the whole thing running. But God cares enough to die for each of us, to live inside us each of us, to work constantly to bring each of us into right relationship with God and each other. And all God asks is that we not fight God on this.
 
And so, on this third Sunday after Pentecost, I pray that God will protect us from committing the unforgivable sin by opening us up, more and more, to the renewing work of the Spirit, that God will continue to prepare us for an eternal weight of glory, and that God will sustain us all the way to the end.
 
In Christ’s name. Amen.