In scripture, Satan is called “the prince of lies”, not the prince of sex or the prince of greed. More than anything else, it’s lying that corrupts the soul, destroys relationships, and sets itself against light. Lying is darkness, the worst form of it. Jesus tells us that all sins can be forgiven, except one: If someone should blaspheme the Holy Spirit, he says, that would constitute an “unforgivable sin”. How does one blaspheme against the Holy Spirit? Why is this unforgivable?
The unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit begins with lying, with rationalization, with the refusal to acknowledge the truth. But we don’t commit this sin easily, overnight, the first time we tell a lie. We commit it down the line, through a sustained series of lies, long after we first told a lie to our loved ones and began to hide important parts of our lives from them. The soul warps slowly, like an old board soaked too often in the rain. It’s not the first time it gets wet that makes the warp.
We commit the sin against the Holy Spirit when we lie for so long that we believe our own lies. If we lie long enough, eventually light begins to look like darkness and darkness begins to look like light. That’s especially true of the lie of a double life, when we are no longer honest with our loved ones. If we do that long enough, eventually our betrayals begin to look like virtue, our lies like the truth, and what our families, faith, and churches stand for begins to look like falsehood, death, darkness.
Our sin then becomes unforgivable because we no longer want to be forgiven or deem any need to be forgiven. When a sin is unforgivable it’s because we don’t want to be forgiven, not because we’ve crossed some moral line in the sand beyond which God will no longer tolerate our behavior. The blockage is rather that what we once saw as truth (honesty, faith, family, fidelity, health through transparency) now looks like falsehood and the behavior we once had to hide from others and lie about now seems as virtue.
In the film, Sex, Lies, and Videotapes, which is rather simplistic and crass at times, is a lesson that could be taken from John’s gospel: The hero of the story, a young man with a bad history in the area of sexuality, resolves to make himself better by making a vow to never again tell a lie, even a very small one. Like the man who’s born blind in John’s gospel, that vow brings him to health. He gets better, much better. He then sets up a video camera and invites people to come and tell their stories. Those who tell the truth also get better, healthier, and those who lie and hide their infidelities continue to deteriorate in both health and happiness. The truth does set us free.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Truth Sets Us Free” July 2005]