Third Sunday after Pentecost

Third Sunday after Pentecost (B—Proper 5)

June 10, 2018

Text: Mark 3:20-35

            Two high profile suicides this past week.  I admit, I know virtually nothing about Kate Spade, though my heart grieves for her family, and especially for her in her hopelessness and despair.  Anthony Bourdain I know from television and the little bit I’ve read of his writing, and I always found his work enriching, teaching us about food, not just as fuel, but as an art form and a key to other places and cultures, travel, philosophy, and (he probably never realized) even theology, because he always urged the importance of communing with people, family and friends old and new, around the table.  He had this vision of gathering around the table with representatives from every people, tribe, nation, and language.  Food not only nourishes our bodies, it cultivates our relationships and cements them around the shared feast of sight and smell, taste and texture, conversation and camaraderie.  That’s a very eucharistic way of thinking.

            I can’t help but wonder if it would have made a difference if Spade or Boudain could have heard the words you and I have heard and read and sung this morning.  From the Introit: The LORD “has heard my pleas for mercy.  The LORD is my strength and shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped” (Ps. 28:6-7; ESV).  What is suicide but a seeking to hide yourself from the presence of the LORD God?  Yet in our Old Testament (Gen. 3:8-15), the LORD comes to His children who have fallen, and it is a gracious visitation.  He comes and He seeks and He finds and He calls.  And though He does not ignore our sin or pretend it hasn’t happened… He deals with it, always confronts it… nevertheless there is the Promise.  The serpent has not won.  The Seed of the woman is coming.  He will crush the serpent’s head, by Himself suffering the mortal bite of death, His heal crushed in serpentine jaw as His feet and hands are spiked to the wood.  It’s the way out.  It’s our hope.  Death is not the end.  Not for Jesus, and not for you.  Our Savior is risen, and your momentary afflictions will pass.  They will give way to joy and life eternal.  Don’t hide.  Don’t harm yourself.  Come into the forgiving, healing, and life-giving presence of your Lord.  He loves you.  We know, as St. Paul says in our Epistle, “that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence… So we do not lose heart… this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory… we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen” (2 Cor. 4:14, 16, 17, 18).  And we know from our Lord’s proclamation in the Holy Gospel that the strong man, Satan, Beelzebul, the prince of this world, has been bound and plundered by the Stronger Man, our Lord Jesus Christ, by His life, death, and resurrection (Mark 3:26-27).  He has rescued us from all that enslaves and afflicts us.  So we need not despair.  We need not give up.  Things are not as they appear.  Now we suffer in weakness, but we know our vindication is coming.  So “take they our life, Goods, fame, child, and wife, Though these all be gone, Our vict’ry has been won; The Kingdom ours remaineth” (LSB 656:4).

            When we call God’s Word the Word of Life, we aren’t just speaking figuratively.  These Words could have saved two lives this week.  Because the Holy Spirit is in them.  And that’s why you need them.  Desperately so.  Because the only difference between you and Kate Spade, you and Anthony Bourdain, is God’s gracious working in His Word.  This is not to say that Christians aren’t tempted by suicide, nor is it to say Christians never commit suicide.  And it certainly is not to suggest that Christians don’t suffer depression.  Believe me, they do.  But it is to say, you have the only real effective medicine against hopelessness, despair, and death.  You have the Word.  You have Jesus.  And so, you have life. 

            We should here dispel the soul-mudering myth that all suicides go to hell.  That’s just not true.  It’s not in the Bible.  It is a teaching that grew out of the otherwise noble concern that we ought to discourage suicide.  Look, suicide is never the answer.  It is certainly an act of unfaith.  It is not the unforgiveable sin.  We’ll get to that in a minute.  But it is a statement that the state of your life is so bleak and hopeless that not even Jesus could save you from it.  Well, that’s a tremendous lie of the evil one.  And, by the way, it leaves everyone around you devastated.  It’s a very loveless act.  It’s tantamount to abandoning your family and your friends.  DO NOT DO IT!  If you are tempted by this, you must come and see me.  It’s not noble.  It is selfish.  It is a last ditch effort to hide from God under the cover of fig leaves.  So yes, it does put your soul in mortal peril.  But it is not automatic damnation.  Luther said, “I am not inclined to think that those who take their own lives are surely damned.  My reason is that they do not do this of their own accord but are overcome by the power of the devil, like a man who is murdered by a robber in the woods.”  He wrote to a widow named Margaret, “That your husband inflicted injury upon himself may be explained by the devil’s power over our members.  He may have directed your husband’s hand, even against his will… How often the devil breaks arms, legs, backs, and all members!  He can be master of the body and its members against our will.”[1]  This is one of those questions people ask all the time.  Do suicides automatically go to hell?  And before answering, it’s important to inquire, “Why do you ask?”  Because if you’re looking for a pass to do yourself harm, no.  No false comfort for you.  Suicide puts your soul in peril of damnation.  But if you’re looking for comfort because a loved one has harmed him or herself, you should know that our God is a God of mercy.  Just look at what it cost Him to redeem us for Himself.  We are not saved by our work of not doing ourselves in.  Nor are we saved only because we have opportunity to repent before we die.  We are saved by grace, because of Christ.  And no sin is beyond the pale of our Lord’s suffering and death for the forgiveness of our sins. 

            Well, what then about the sin against the Holy Spirit?  Jesus explicitly says in our Holy Gospel, “Truly, I say to  you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29).  This bothers us.  And it should.  Just like suicide should bother us, and all other sins should bother us.  It’s a call to self-examination and repentance, confession and forgiveness.  But we wonder, what does Jesus mean by this?  And worse, have I committed the unforgiveable sin?

            First, you must understand, it is not the case that our Lord’s death on the cross doesn’t cover blasphemy against the Spirit.  No sin is too big for the blood of Jesus.  That goes for suicide.  That goes for depression.  That goes for your particular sin.  And that goes for blasphemy.  The reason the person who blasphemes the Holy Spirit is guilty of an eternal sin has nothing to do with the inadequacy of Jesus or the atonement.  It has to do with the hardness of heart of the person and his willful and persistent rejection of the Spirit’s efforts to bring him to faith in Christ.  The person who blasphemes the Spirit knows full well that Jesus is the Savior and died for his sins, but he rejects it anyway.  He calls the Spirit in Jesus an unclean spirit, a demon, and serves the demons as gods.  He sells his soul for the fleeting and empty pleasures of this life.  And this is why Jesus brings this up against the scribes and the Jewish powers that be.  At some point, they know.  They know He is the Messiah.  They know He is the Savior.  But He is a threat to them.  He is a threat to their power and their way of life.  He is a threat to their own self-righteousness by their adherence to the Law.  So they reject Him.  And they kill Him.  And in our text, they call the Spirit at work within Him an “unclean spirit.”

            Many Christians worry whether they have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit.  Maybe they said something irreverent about Him.  Maybe they even cursed Him at one time or another.  Perhaps they weren’t always believers in Christ.  Perhaps they are weak in the faith even now.  Well, take heart, dear Christian.  The classic comfort here is that you wouldn’t be worried you had committed the sin against the Holy Spirit if you had, in fact, committed the sin against the Holy Spirit.  It is the nature of this sin that the perpetrator has so hardened his heart against God that it is impossible for him to repent or return to the faith.  Think here of Pharaoh and his hard heart, or King Saul.  On the other hand, remember that St. Peter denied Jesus with an oath.  It was a terrible, soul-imperiling sin, and Peter had lost the faith in Jesus in those moments.  But Jesus looked upon him.  And the Spirit sent into His heart the Words Jesus had said, and these brought Peter to the bitter tears of repentance.  Remember also St. Paul, the onetime persecutor of the Church.  In his zeal and ignorance, he sought to put Jesus’ precious believers to death.  He did not believe there was a Holy Spirit in Jesus, but then Jesus spoke to him, on the Damascus Road.  And Paul heard the Word, was baptized, and believed.  And he preached Jesus as the Messiah.  Our Lord’s own family thought He was insane and they tried to bring Him home and shut Him up.  Well, St. Mary is pretty much the queen of the saints.  We shouldn’t pray to her, and she wasn’t sinless, but we rightly love her and imitate her.  And James and Jude were among the brothers who became leaders in the very earliest Church.  This is all by grace.  Clearly Peter and Paul and our Lord’s own family danced awfully close to the border of blasphemy.  We do, too.  Our Lord’s Words this morning about this sin are a warning to us all.  Be careful how you walk.  Examine yourself.  Repent.  Confess.  Cling to the forgiveness you have only in Jesus.  Don’t resist the Spirit’s work in you.  He calls you by the Gospel.  He enlightens you with His gifts.  He sanctifies and keeps you in the one true faith of Jesus Christ.  To blaspheme Him would be to call all of that evil, and not only that, but to harden your heart against it, and to keep hardening your heart against it to the very end, so that you die outside of the faith of Jesus.

            Which is often what does drive people to self-harm and suicide, school violence and substance abuse, and certainly to despair.  What I find so grievous about Anthony Bourdain in particular, is that as enriching as it was to enjoy his work, you could always tell, he doesn’t know Jesus.  He was pretty explicit about that.  I’m not saying he committed the sin against the Holy Ghost.  Maybe he did.  Maybe he didn’t.  And I pray that somehow, some way, in his dying moments, he encountered the grace of God in Jesus Christ.  Probably not, but we can hope.  Because we know our God loves Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade.  And we know He loves us.  And His love for every human being is greater than any love we could ever begin to have for any other human being, even our spouse and our children.  And that is a great comfort.  Because God’s love acts for the good of the beloved.  Always.  He can help them, and He does.  He doesn’t force His salvation upon them, but His salvation is there for them, accomplished fact, in the crucified and risen Jesus.  

            And now this.  We know that God so loves us that He gathers us around the family Table.  And He calls us His brother and sister and mother.  And He sets before us a Feast.  If only Anthony Bourdain had known this!  We eat together.  We drink together.  The body of Christ.  The blood of Christ.  And it makes us one.  One with our Host, Jesus Christ.  One with each other, the Body of Christ that is the Church, those of us gathered here and now, and those who join us from other times and places at the one altar of Jesus Christ.  The sights.  The smells.  The tastes.  The textures.  The Word of Life ringing in our ears.  And the joy.  Sins forgiven.  Life eternal.  The Great Feast of the Lamb that has no end.  Do not lose heart, beloved.  This morning you have a foretaste of your eternal reality.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.                

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[1] Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel, Ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Westminster/John Knox, 1955) pp. 58-59.