The One Unforgivable Sin
Midrashing the gospels, part 2.
Sequel to A House Divided.
Recap: The Christian Gospels are criminally under-midrashed. We last left Jesus still arguing with the Pharisees about whether his miracles came from God or the Devil. In Mark, he doesn't stop at the house divided argument. He goes on to say something that sounds kind of important.
Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme:
But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.
Because they [the Pharisees] said, “He [Jesus] hath an unclean spirit.”
That first verse is core to Christianity. All sins you commit against people can be forgiven, and all blasphemies against God.
The second verse, the exception? Less core. Generally ignored, or interpreted away. But it’s vital, surely, if your goal involves not going to Hell for all eternity, to understand what exactly is the one irreversible mistake you can make in life.
There’s a secular concept I want to discuss first, because it’s core to my interpretation. Apologies if the delay leads to your eternal damnation.
Ratios help you make better mistakes
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
That value, from William Blackstone, is built into the modern Western system of justice. We want to acquit the innocent and to convict the guilty. Those are two different goals we’re trying to meet using a single mechanism. You can tell they’re different goals, because optimizing for each of the two individually looks very different. If our goal were only to acquit the innocent, we could just acquit everyone who gets indicted. If our goal were only to convict the guilty, we could just convict everyone who gets indicted instead. We have two goals, so now we need a whole second and equally important part of the criminal justice system. Gavel gavel.
When you’re presented with two different goals, and not being given a rough ratio of their relative importance to each other, you’re being set up for failure. I’ve worked as a software engineer for most of my adult life, which means that at least once a year for the past 15 years, a boss or project manager has come to me and said “Your team needs to improve your estimates for how long a project is going to take.” (The only thing that changes is what jargon they use when they mean “estimates for how long a project is going to take.” There’s a trend a minute.) I’ve usually said back to them— “Okay! About how often would you like us to come in under time versus over time?” I encourage anyone in this position to do the same. Their response is a great test for the health of your management culture. Some good responses I’ve gotten have looked like
“Oh, your current ratio of X/Y is fine, I just want you to allocate more time toward refining and updating the estimates to improve the precision.”
“I’d like you to be under time a little more often.”
“Over time more often.” Yes, sometimes that one really is what they want—unfounded pessimism can distort other people’s plans.
In less healthy environments, the person talking to you, or their superiors, are just going through the ritual words they need to say so that blame keeps flowing downwards for all problems. In that case, they typically say “Ideally, you’d never go over the estimated time.” At which point, I cheerfully start multiplying all my time estimates 100x, say from a week to a couple years. (I wish I had enough chutzpah to just start saying “the heat death of the universe”. It’s the only way to be sure.) When you give someone two goals without giving any instruction as to their relative importance, all you’re accomplishing is ensuring that you can blame them for any outcome other than absolute perfection.
Our justice system works the way it does because we’ve decided that freeing the innocent is more important, but not all-important. We treat someone as “innocent until proven guilty.” We consider whole swaths of useful evidence to be “inadmissible,” because it’d be too easy to frame someone if they were admissible. The state can choose not to prosecute, but can’t deny the accused a defense lawyer. Most importantly, a guilty verdict requires that someone be proven guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” There can still be some doubt, which means we accept that we will sometimes convict the innocent. But ties go to the defendant, and “probably guilty” counts as a tie.
Returning To The Fate of Your Immortal Soul
Okay. Now let’s port that style of logic back 2000 years. The Pharisees say he’s probably using devil magic. Jesus says he’s using god magic. You don’t know who’s right. Do you let Jesus heal your leprosy or not?
As with the criminal justice system, there are two different possible mistakes you could make here. You could mistake miracles for witchcraft, or vice versa. Which mistake would be worse? Which side should you err on?
The Pharisees would probably say something like this:
“If you mistake miracles for witchcraft, your skin keeps falling off. If you mistake witchcraft for miracles, your soul is cast unto Gehenna for all eternity with the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. That mistake would be worse, so err on the side of assuming everything is witchcraft.”
Counterpoint:
All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme
Jesus is promising that this isn’t how it works. If you accidentally do a witchcraft, you will be forgiven. Assuming you believe that, it makes sense to err on the side of accepting the healing. Cool.
But what if the miracle in question is less impactful? Jesus also turns water into wine at a party. Admittedly, it is very good wine—somebody is overheard saying “whoa, why break out the best wine now when everybody’s already sloshed?” Still, if you’re at all suspicious that this might be devil wine, it hardly seems worth risking corruption in exchange for one night of drinking. It might not send you irrevocably to Hell, but it’s still possibly a sin.
Counterpoint:
But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.
Jesus doesn’t want people to think this way. That kind of logic closes you off from God and His works (as C.S. Lewis put it, you’re being so afraid of being taken in that you can’t be taken out of your cage.) So he skews the ratio the other way. The Holy Ghost is all the work of God in the world. If you suspect a miracle of being witchcraft, you are accidentally implying the Holy Ghost might be evil. That, he says, is a sin that outweighs every other sin, including mistaking evil for good.
Mistaking evil for good? -1 point. Mistaking good for evil? -∞ points.
So the commandment here is to love the whole world recklessly. Never call something “of the devil” unless the devil has literally appeared to you in the desert while you were fasting and offered it to you. Everything is holy until proven otherwise, and the say-so of a religious authority doesn’t count as proof.
“Love the whole world recklessly” is, to me, the core teaching of the New Testament. Everything else is commentary. Strange ideas, strange people, strange observations…they can lead you astray, but they aren’t traps. They can be wrong, but the rate of actual evil is so small that we can round it down to zero. They can be dangerous, but they’re still worth helping. If you keep a lively mind, and a healthy sense of skepticism, everybody and everything has something good to teach you.
“Love the whole world recklessly.” It’s even easier to say while standing on one foot than Hillel’s version. Stand on one foot at a time while you take your sandals off, because you always walk on holy ground.
