"'Let anyone blaspheme against the Holy Spirit and he will never have forgiveness: he is guilty of an eternal sin.' This was because they were saying, 'An unclean spirit is in him.'" (Mark 3:29-30)
In Sunday’s Gospel, we might ask ourselves what is the connection between saying Jesus is possessed and blaspheming the Holy Spirit, and why that sin is unforgivable.
If we say that Jesus is possessed by an unclean spirit we are directly blaspheming the Holy Spirit since he is the Spirit who really possesses Jesus. Paradoxically, the more we are possessed by the Holy Spirit the more we become our true selves, whereas every concession to the devil makes us less free and more enslaved. Jesus’s human body and soul were fully possessed by the Holy Spirit and so he had the greatest human freedom conceivable.
If we reject Jesus as a demoniac, then there is no one left who can forgive us: only Jesus can wipe away our sins. This is the reason why blaspheming the Holy Spirit is unforgivable: we are ruling out the only one who can forgive us, by claiming he is satanically possessed. If we change our mind and ask Jesus for mercy then of course he will grant it to us.
Jesus presents himself as the "strong man" who enters the devil’s house, binds him and steals his goods (3:27): our fallen world is the devil’s house and we are his possessions, if we are without God’s grace.
Paradoxically, Jesus broke into our world with utter gentleness when he was conceived in his mother’s womb; he binds the devil by being bound for execution in Gethsemane; he takes us as his stolen goods by losing all of his possessions in his sufferings, even his clothes. He lifts us from the devil’s home to his, which has been "built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens" (2 Cor 5:1).
We will enter Jesus’s heavenly home in our bodies on the last day, if we are saved; but in our souls we can live the life of this home even now. "Anyone who does the will of God, that person is my brother and sister and mother" (3:35) and so by receiving Jesus’s grace we can live as a member of his household today.
Let’s ask to be "his mother", as he says; in other words, to imitate Mary, who was perfectly possessed by the Holy Spirit as her Son was.<br><em><br>Photo: 'The Temptation of Christ by the Devil', by Félix Joseph Barrias. (Wikimedia Commons.)</em>
