Homily for the Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

We hear today two references to the presence of evil in the world, with a singular indication of how we might overcome it. Evil is “personified” or embodied for us as the serpent in the First Reading and Beelzebul (the prince of demons) in the Gospel.

 The Evil presented for our consideration finds its form in the Original Sin of Pride enacted by both Adam and Eve in the Genesis story, and the Scribes, in the Gospel passage. Adam and Eve reject the place of God the Father in their lives, and the Scribes reject the divine nature of God the Son in their structure of religion. So, as a result, Our Lord warns us against rejecting God the Holy Spirit in our lives.

 Jesus introduces here the notion of an unforgivable, everlasting sin. This sin, as He explains it, is a sin against the Holy Spirit, which raises two questions:
 1) What is this sin?
 2) Why will it not be forgiven?

 In recent years, two great Teachers in the Church have given us some insight into this perplexing situation.

 Saint John Paul the Great wrote:
 “This sin does not properly consist in offending the Holy Spirit in words. It consists, rather, in the refusal to accept the salvation which God offers to Man through the Holy Spirit, working through the power of the Cross. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the sin committed by the person who claims to have a right to persist in evil — in any sin at all — and who thus rejects Redemption.”

 It is in this sense that the sin is said to be unforgivable: the sinner feels no need or desire for forgiveness, because he has re-defined the moral law according to his own worldview, denying any objective sinfulness within his thoughts, words or actions, therefore leaving the Holy Spirit who binds us to God, and restores us to God upon the confession of sin, out of the equation and, therefore, out of his life.

 Pope Benedict XVI defines this sin against the Holy Spirit as closing one’s mind to eternal, universal and revealed Truth. He described this as “the dictatorship of relativism,” naming it further as the greatest heresy of our time.

 Here a person becomes the source of his own “truth” relative to his own worldview. What happens then is similar to what the Scribes did to Jesus: the demonization of people who think or believe differently from the Relativists’ guiding principles.

 Our Lord teaches us that this is not simply a form of benign ignorance; it is a culpable blindness, weighted with the gravity of sin against the Holy Spirit. The absence of forgiveness comes into being not because God cannot forgive every sort of sin, but because the person in question — in self-inflicted, moral blindness — rejects the Grace of the Holy Spirit, and therefore rejects the very gift of divine forgiveness...

 What, then, should we do in order to avoid a similar fate?

 An image of the Blessed Mother is brought forward in the Gospel for our consideration. She is presented here not, for the moment, meriting our veneration as the Mother of Jesus, (witnessed by His question, “Who is my Mother?”) She is presented, instead, as Mother of the Church, as Jesus answers His own question, saying: “Whoever does the Will of God is my brother, my sister, my mother.”

 She is also presented here in contrast to Eve, as seen in the First Reading:
 + where Eve succumbed to the temptation of pride in wanting to become God’s equal…

 + Mary responds to God in pride’s cure, which is humility, in which she proclaims, “Be it done unto me according to thy word.”

 If we remain close to the Blessed Mother, she will lead us away from pride, self-absorption and sin… to her Son, who gives His Holy Spirit, and the Spirit will lead us beyond evil so that we can find holiness deep within ourselves and bring that holiness forward for our ongoing conversion, and for the conversion of the world.

 To encapsulate the answer to the question:  “What is the unforgivable sin of which Our Lord speaks?” Simply stated, it is the refusal to accept forgiveness and the Grace of the Holy Spirit out of sinful pride and self-aggrandizement, thus sending our souls to eternal damnation.

 To close, another statement from one of the greater theologians of the Twentieth Century  — my Mother —  “You should probably go to Confession more often than you do… because you’re probably not as holy as you think you are.”