A man who is blind and mute because of a demon is brought to Jesus, and Jesus heals him so that he speaks and sees. Nothing in the popular picture of the coming Son of David had prepared anyone for a scene like this. The expected king was a warrior who would break Israel's enemies, and this healer breaking chains no one else could touch was something else. The crowd's question comes out tentative and half-formed. 23"Can this be the Son of David?" They are watching something they have no categories for.
The Pharisees supply a category at once. 24"It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons." Jesus answers with logic his opponents cannot escape. 26"if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself." And there is a sharper problem. If Jesus cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do their own sons cast them out? 27"they will be your judges." If Jesus is guilty by their standard, so are their own people.
Then Jesus names the true alternative. 28"if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you." Someone has already entered the strong man's house and bound him, because nothing is plundered from a strong man's house until he is tied up first. Satan's grip on that blind, mute man had just been broken in front of everyone, and it was broken by the Spirit of God himself. 30"Whoever is not with me is against me," Jesus says, closing the middle ground the crowd was standing on with its half-formed question. Watching and staying undecided is itself a kind of answer.
This is the setting for the hardest words in the passage. Every sin and blasphemy can be forgiven, and Jesus adds that even 32"a word against the Son of Man" can be forgiven. During his ministry Jesus stood before people in a form still partly hidden, and a person could speak against him in confusion about who he was. Peter could deny him three times in a courtyard and be restored. What separates the two kinds of speech is what each one rejects. Standing before an unmistakable work of God's own Spirit, seeing it plainly, and calling it Satan's work is a decision to call light darkness while looking straight at it.
If that description unsettles anyone, the unease itself is worth noticing. The sin Jesus describes belongs to a heart that has stopped caring whether it offends God, and a heart still troubled about whether it has gone too far is showing that it has not hardened to that point. This is a pastoral observation more than a promise in the text, but it fits the passage. The Pharisees were certain.
Jesus then explains why their accusation reveals more than a stray remark. 33"the tree is known by its fruit." 34"out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." Their charge exposed their unbelief the way any fruit exposes its root. Whatever fills a heart eventually comes out the mouth, and 36"people will give account for every careless word they speak" on the day of judgment, because words are the most honest report anyone gives of what is stored inside them.
The healed man walked away seeing and speaking for the first time in years. The Pharisees walked away having shown, in the words they chose, what had taken up residence in their own hearts.
Ask what your mouth has been saying lately that reveals what your heart is full of.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a kingdom that came and is still coming, plundering what the enemy thought was secure. Guard our hearts from ever calling your good work by another name. If our fear of this sin is a sign that we have not committed it, let that fear turn us toward you, and let our words tell the truth about what you have done in us. In Jesus' name, amen.