Thoughts about John chapter 3 (inspired by this morning's sermon)

In chapter 3 of the gospel of John, Jesus is approached by Nicodemus, a man who is described as a Pharisee (the strictest group of Jews in Jesus' day), a member of the Jewish ruling council (the highest governing body in Jewish society) and "the teacher of Israel" (an esteemed authority on religious matters).  He starts the conversation by saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs that you do unless God is with him.”  From his standpoint, he was honoring Jesus by calling him Rabbi (even though Jesus had no official credentials within Jewish academic circles that would entitle him to such a title) while displaying his own credentials as one who represents the top academic circles in Israel, people qualified to make such a judgment about Jesus.

But Jesus knows the hearts of the Pharisees, how they will go toe-to-toe with him over his healing on the Sabbath, how they'll attribute his work to the devil, how they'll excommunicate people who believe in him, and how they'll finally join the chorus of people who demand that he be crucified.  So when Nicodemus, says "We know that you are from God," Jesus pushes back hard by replying, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born from above [or "born again"], he cannot see the kingdom of God.”  In effect, he's saying, "You guys who think you are qualified to evaluate me as a spiritual teacher can't even see what I'm doing unless you're spiritually reborn."

This knocks Nicodemus back on his heels.  Far from getting appreciation from Jesus for his generous acknowledgement of Jesus' teaching ability, he has been told that he and his peers are utterly unqualified to evaluate Jesus, and have to become spiritual infants in a second birth before they can even begin to understand who Jesus is.  So he reacts with incredulity by parodying what Jesus says; "What do you mean - crawl back into my mother's womb and be born once more?"  Of course he knows that Jesus doesn't mean this, but he wants to deflect the accusation that he's incompetent to evaluate Jesus by making Jesus look silly and this is the best way he can find to do it.

But Jesus won't be deflected.  He drives his message home harder, by saying: “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit."  Evaluating Jesus is a spiritual matter and must be done by people who have spiritual life in them.  For a person who is only born of water (that is to say, through normal human conception and birth) to judge Jesus would be as hopeless as for a dead person to evaluate a living person.  We are born spiritually dead and, just as we received biological life from our parents, we must receive spiritual life from God before we can evaluate spiritual people like Jesus.  Otherwise their behavior is as mysterious to us as the movement of the wind, for, as Jesus goes on to tell Nicodemus, "The wind blows wherever it will, and you hear the sound it makes, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Nicodemus is now entirely out of his depth, only being able to reply with the weak question, "how can this be?"  He is now where Jesus wants him to be, admitting his inability to understand what Jesus is doing, and Jesus affirms his ignorance with the question, "Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you don’t understand these things?"  But in case Nicodemus think that his ignorance is innocent, Jesus goes on to say that the ignorance of Nicodemus and his peers is is not simply a lack of information, but a rejection of the truth.  "I tell you the solemn truth,", Jesus says, "we speak about what we know and testify about what we have seen, but you people do not accept our testimony."  Nicodemus and his fellow Jewish teachers should have recognized that Jesus was no freelance rabbi needing to be welcomed into the official guild, but that he was far above any official guild and the appointed teachers of Israel needed to sit at Jesus' feet and learn from him.

Jesus then asks Nicodemus, "If I have told you people about earthly things and you don’t believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven – the Son of Man."  The fact that Nicodemus and his peers didn't see how far Jesus was above them was a moral failure on their part and makes it impossible for them to learn from him.  He alone was qualified to teach them about heavenly things, yet they wouldn't even sit at his feet and learn earthly things from him, let alone the things of heaven.

Jesus goes on to say, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”  Jesus must be lifted up in their conception of him before they can truly believe in him in a life-giving way.  This is the thrust of what Jesus goes on to say in his famous statement in John 3:16: "For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life."  Those who believe in Jesus, who see Him as he truly is, lifted up above all things, and are willing to sit humbly at his feet to learn from Him and follow Him, will not perish, but will have eternal life.  But not everyone is willing to do this, for being born again entails becoming small and dependent, losing our prestige and authority, and learning again to humbly receive teaching that we cannot obtain any other way.

 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him. 18 The one who believes in him is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. 19 Now this is the basis for judging: that the light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone who does evil deeds hates the light and does not come to the light, so that their deeds will not be exposed. 21 But the one who practices the truth comes to the light, so that it may be plainly evident that his deeds have been done in God.

These days it's easy to be a spiritual authority.  We tell one another what we think God would say or do and are taken with complete seriousness.  Everyone is qualified to say "my god would never..." or "of course god wants us to ..." without needing to appeal to any higher authority than our own desires and intuitions.  We freely correct Jesus when he gets something wrong, and are perfectly happy to choose from a smorgasbord of available religious teachings the ones that suit our taste and fancy.  But this is the road to death.  Rather than sit in the light of Jesus' judgment of us, we prefer the darkness of our judgment upon him, perhaps following Nicodemus in magnanimously admitting that Jesus is a teacher from God, or perhaps more critically declaring that his teachings are deficient and others are more worthy of our allegiance.  But only by being reborn in the Spirit can we see Jesus for who he is, the Son of Man come down from heaven, and abandon the folly of passing judgment upon him.  Only as our hearts are made alive in Christ will we see Jesus clearly enough to realize that all of our judgments of him are foolishness, and our right position before him is as a humble student and follower of him, seeking to learn true wisdom from the only one qualified to dispense it.