Sermon Tone Analysis

Blasphemy

I wonder if when you were younger you were told off for blaspheming and what that actually meant?

What were you saying?

I can remember times as a child when I said something that I thought was pretty innocent only to be dressed down by my mother in a ferocious terms!

It surprised me on more than one occasions.

Now with my own children and having a teenage daughter my own notion of ‘blaspheming’ is challenged.

I don’t even understand half the words she says now a days, let alone work out if they are insultng.

Apparently if something is ‘ sick’ these days its a good thing?! Who Knew?!

But it was not the teenager recently -  Louis recently started saying ‘O My God’ in a very loud voice in the garden.

I let it go first time, but he kept on shouting it.

I looked but he wasn’t in trouble.

Just walking round the garden.

Shouting.

Now, it might of sounded to everybody else that he was deeply calling on God for help!

But of course he wasn’t.

It a tough call - I decided in the end it  would be better to say O My Gosh !

Of course I am trivialising blasphemy, but it is actually a very serious subject.

One that makes my own parental experiences fade into insignificance.

Us Europeans have mostly forgotten what blasphemy means.

This becomes clear when we become shocked and surprised at the outrage caused by a book or cartoon written in a newspaper that depicts Mohammed in a negative light.

At the most extreme version we are rightly sickened as we did in recent times when people, staff of a magazine,  actually paid for this with their own lives.

You may be surprised to lean that the UK laws against blasphemy were only repealed as recently as 2008 , and appeared hopelessly archaic.

Until then it was illegal to speak against Christianity under common law.

It was only 1977 that he publisher of the Gay news was actually imprisoned for describing Jesus as ‘Well Hung’!

So we can see that society has changed.

We can see that from our own lives and our struggle with the concept of blasphemy now with our own children.

In Jesus day, blasphemy was the worst offence anyone could be accuse of.

Even the Romans considered offending the Gods as an offence against the whole of society.

The Jews were horrified of blasphemy and we read this time and time again throughout the new testament.

And Jesus was constantly under threat of being charged with it.

In fact Jesus was almost stoned on a couple of occasions ; ‘my father and I are one’ and ‘before Abraham was born, I am ‘ as examples of Jesus not just flirting with the rules but shocking his contemporaries into stoning him, such was the outrage.

This is useful to remember when we think of the trinity as we did last week on Trinity Sunday , of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

When we read Jesus words we can be of no doubt that he equated himself with the divinity of God.

God the father and God the son were the same.

No wonder he was accused of blasphemy.

The aggressive stance against blasphemy was treated as the most serious of the 10 commandments because it is the only only one followed by the statement that ‘the lord will not leave this unpunished’ .

They concluded from this that blasphemy must therefore be unforgivable , that no amount of repentance would enable people to escape punishment.

Of course, we expect Jesus to repeal this law, to show Gods loving side , right?

Wrong! 

Enter our gospel passage today.

Jesus is under pressure and being accused of all sorts of things.

His family say he has gone crazy, thats the only explanation for the things he is saying.

They want to come and sort him out.

The teachers of the law claim something else all together - they say he is possessed, that he is evil to be speaking these things.

They even accuse him of using the power of evil to drive out evil!

So Jesus answers them by accusing them in turn of blasphemy.

‘how can Satan cast our Satan’ he answers?! 

How can Satan oppose himself and remain standing?

He uses a story of a strong man to illustrate this.

The fact that if you were going to plunder his house you would need to tie him up first.

The strong man cannot tie himself up and plunder his own house!

Then he delivers the line ‘whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness’ 

Jesus doesn’t repeal the law of blasphemy , he extends it.

Now, thats shocking perhaps to us.

And it was to the Jews.

But - they were not shocked that blasphemy is unforgivable , they already thought that.

What they were shocked with is that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was unforgivable

The law stated that blasphemy against God was - but here Jesus was putting the Holy Spirit on the same level as God and Jesus.

And then of course Jesus mother and brothers turn up to drag him away , believing him a madman for saying such things.

But Jesus does not let them in, looking at his disciples saying ‘these are the ones that get me’ , they get where I am coming from’.

But what about blasphemy?

Are we not taught to believe that God forgives us for anything, if we repent and believe in him?

Doesn’t Jesus, but extending this commandment in this way contradicts this?

The real tragedy of the ‘unforgivable sin’ is that it has been abused by Christian leaders as a threat to people with genuine faith.

To bully them into conforming.

Just as the blasphemy rules here in the uk were , before they were abolished used to belittle and threaten people.

Also, some people laden with guilt, feeling like they are not good enough to be forgiven have latched onto these verses.

They feel so overwhelmingly guilty that they think they cannot possibly be forgiven - they feel unforgivable.

And they compound this when they read these gospel verses.

They also point to he The letter to the Hebrews

This suggests that forgiveness is impossible for those that deliberantly choose to reject Jesus.

That we cannot be forgiven if we reject the forgiver.

But I think we need to look at the context and see what is really going on here.

Jesus is saying in our passage from Mark that real blasphemy is looking at the work of God and calling it evil, these teachers of the Law are actually acknowledging Gods power , rejecting it and then calling it evil!

As I said the letter to Hebrews says that if we reject Jesus then that is an unforgivable Sin.

So if you know Jesus/God already and reject him then we get just that - the separation from God we have asked for.

And that sounds serious them I am afraid it is!

There are consequences for our choices and the biggest one we can make is to accept God or not.

I know its not popular, but it is at heart of the Christian faith.

But it is also clear that - if a person wants to repent and be reconciled with God it is clear that they have not rejected him.

Many people reject Jesus earlier in life and go on to repent and believe.

I am one of those people.

We are told time and time again, that God is always ready to receive us.

That he has a party every time one person turns to him.

That the heavens rejoice.

That God’s arms, like the prodigal father remain open to welcome you.

This is the promise of God the father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.