Why we are punished by our sins, not for them

Today’s gospel begins with a sobering reminder that whereas the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was bad, his own family thought he was mad. The text says that they thought he was “beside himself” or “out of his mind” and so they tried to seize him. Some textual traditions found this reaction of his own kith and kin so embarrassing that on the basis that the same word used here for ‘to seize’ is used later to convey what the Scribes and Pharisees tried to do to him, the text was changed to read as if it was they, rather than his relatives, who thought he was mad. His anxious family reappear at the end of the passage, this time his “mother and brothers”, with the same intention.

But in between these two references to his family, Mark sandwiches two perplexing passages that have always caused difficulty for readers of the gospel. Some of that difficulty has doubtless been caused by forgetting that Mark says at this point that Jesus was speaking in parables. Parables did not always take the form of extended stories: the word also refers to similes, comparisons and allusions and the corresponding word in Hebrew even means proverbs and riddles. Nevertheless, there is a part of this pericope which one commentator rightly says has been “the occasion of untold anguish for many souls”: namely, Jesus’ reference to the “unforgiveable sin”.

On any reading, the very idea is difficult to reconcile with his own compassionate and forgiving attitude to so-called sinners. While some contemporary Jewish thinkers had drawn up an extensive list of sins that put the sinner beyond the range of God’s forgiveness and the Jewish legal code, derived from the scriptures, certainly specified some sins as punishable by death or permanent exclusion, Jesus, crucially, rejects all such draconian strictures. Unsurprisingly, this reference in Mark and the other synoptic gospels to an unforgivable sin has led many Christian readers of the gospel to wonder what it might be.

St Augustine thought it was resistance to God’s grace, manifest in final impenitence. Some medievals, Peter Lombard (1100-60), for instance, thought it was despair and presumption (along with obstinacy, resisting known divine truth, and envy of another’s spiritual good). For English Puritans, fear of falling into the unforgiveable sin was an overriding concern since it was a sure sign of belonging to the ‘damned’ rather than the ‘elect’, a predestined state that was utterly unalterable by anything we might do or not do, a depressing doctrine that was frequently weaponised in seventeenth century religious controversies.

So, how are we to understand the notion of an ‘unforgivable sin’? Is it the case that God might choose to withhold forgiveness, even from the repentant? The answer is surely ‘no’. The clue lies in, first, how we understand the word ‘God’; and, secondly, in whether we see forgiveness and repentance as the same thing or, at least, obverse sides of the same coin, or whether we understand them as related conditionally and consequentially. First, of all anthropomorphic ideas about God, the one that has done most damage to believers and put off most would-be believers, is the notion that God rewards us for doing good and punishes us for doing bad.

This particular projection of human ways onto God has generated crippling scruples and fear-fuelled, false guilt in countless Christian souls over the generations. The truth is that we are punished by our sins, not for them. God’s reaction to sin is not anger or offence but sorrow, sorrow, that is, for us and the harm we do to ourselves by our sins. To think otherwise is to forget that nothing we could ever do or not do can change God’s mind about us or diminish his love for us. Jesus’ whole life, death, and resurrection make this utterly clear. “God proved his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6)

Secondly, it is precisely the sometimes painful experience of coming to see ourselves for what we are, namely, sinners, and being sorry for our sinfulness, that enables us to receive the forgiveness that is an integral 3 and abiding aspect of God’s love for us, rather than our sorrow being the ‘trigger’ that induces God to forgive us. In this sense, contrition and forgiveness are the same thing. God, in other words, doesn’t forgive (or withhold forgiveness) in response to our sorrow (or impenitence): rather we accept (or reject) his forgiveness in the act of acknowledging (or denying) our sin. We are not forgiven (loved) because we are sorry but sorry because we are forgiven (loved).

So, the notion of God withholding forgiveness from either repentant or the unrepentant cannot make sense. For God to withhold forgiveness would be for him to stop loving us. But God can no more stop loving us, even in our sinfulness, than he can create square circles. It is accusing rather than excusing ourselves that enables us to accept forgiveness, even if we (and, sadly, others – think here of the effects of ‘original’ sin) may live with the external consequences of our sins for the rest of our lives. With repentance and forgiveness, the essential consequence of sin, the consequence, that is, that matters ultimately, namely, our alienation from God – notice, our alienation from him, not his from us – is nullified. As opposed to the way it works among ourselves, God’s ‘forgiveness’ is the graced realisation that we are still loved by God even when we stupidly choose our own futile rather than his genuine way to goodness and happiness – when we sin, in other words.

That’s why we feel, rather than just acknowledge, sorrow, and why sorrow is sometimes painful. But the essential point is that we recognise our sins for what they are precisely because we recognise that we are, loved, even when we turn our back on that love. The ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ that is said to be ‘everlasting’, then, might be better understood not as the unforgivable sin – as in the fate of Marlowe’s Faustus – but rather as the unforgiving hardness of heart, engendered over years of self-preoccupation and delusory self-praise, that has blinded us to the truth of both our sins and God’s unchanging and unchangeable love for us all. Herbert McCabe (1926-2001) catches it.

The great characteristic of sinners is that they do not know that they are sinners, that they refuse to accept and believe that they are sinners. On the contrary, they have found all the ways of justifying and excusing themselves. The whole conversation in Hell consists of the damned telling each other how it is all a terrible mistake, and they should not be there at all because they are righteous and virtuous. The boredom of this must be the pain of Hell, but the thing that constitutes Hell is the fact that God can’t be seen. Instead of seeing God, they see only a projection of their own judgmental mindset; instead of their sins, they see only their own selfrighteous indignation at the ‘injustice’ of the judgment they attribute to God, but which in reality they have handed down on themselves. George Herbert (1593-1633) also catches it in the last stanza of I smell the dew These are thy wonders, Lord of love, To make us see we are but flowers that glide: Which when we once can find and prove, Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide. Who would be more, Swelling through store, Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.