Ah poor Nicodemus. Skulking about in the dark, not wanting people to see him talking to Jesus. And then, after all that, not even getting the answers he wanted.
This conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus
happens after the table turning incident in the Temple. The Jewish leaders are
not happy with Jesus. At least, most of them aren’t.
Nicodemus is a self-confident and successful Jewish
leader, a Pharisee. He is spiritually open and curious, but also rational. He is
convinced by Jesus’ actions that he is “a teacher who has come from God” and implies
that there are others who have this same belief.
He is curious to find out more about Jesus and his
social networks and requests a face to face meeting with him. But Nicodemus is
not ready for everyone else to see him talking with Jesus so he makes the
appointment for the middle of the night where he can keep his faith a secret
from his public life.
Nicodemus’ imagination is caught by Jesus, but he
is not ready to declare his faith in the light of day. Jesus’ response to this
is that just saying you believe isn’t enough. You must be “born anew” to see
God’s kingdom. But Nicodemus doesn’t understand, even when Jesus tries again
with “born of the spirit.”
There is an impatience that is read into Jesus’ words,
a command that you must be born again, an urgency of people making a decision
to accept Christ as their lord and Saviour to be paramount. This leads to a
frustration of questioning why Nicodemus doesn’t understand, or why he continues
to question, or why he just doesn’t accept Jesus’ words at face value.
But there is another way to interpret this
interaction between Jesus and Nicodemus, and that is one of invitation, of being
comfortable in misunderstanding, and accepting the invitation to go further
into dialogue with one another despite the misunderstanding. Being part of
respectful conversation and dialogue is part of that feeling of belonging.
Particularly in this dialogue between Jesus and
Nicodemus, Jesus is saying that a piece of belonging is being born anew. He is telling
Nicodemus that he needs to be born again by water and spirit in order to re-engage
his relationship with God, to let God work in his life.
However, Jesus doesn’t make much progress here.
Nicodemus interprets Jesus’ words on a literal level, and he questions how a
person is physically born again. But Jesus’ words are ambiguous. The Greek word
anothen has multiple translations – anew, again, and from above. Nicodemus
hears only the second one and is not able to recognize what Jesus is offering,
and who Jesus is.
Let’s explore these three notions – born again,
born anew, born from above.
I’m sure you have heard the phrase “born again
Christian”. It is a common phrase that is often misinterpreted. We fully well know
that we can’t be physically born again. Being born again means to have accepted
faith in Jesus, to accept the teachings of Jesus as real, and declare a
belonging to the Christian community.
Along those lines, to be born anew is to have a
spiritual renewal. Perhaps some doubt has crept in, some uncertainty about the path
that should be followed, about your relationship with God. To be born anew is to
renew your relationship with God and to rediscover that sense of belonging to
God.
One of the ways we can think of being born from above
is to look at John’s pneumatology. To belong to God, to belong to Jesus’
community, is being born from above because of the very promise of the Holy
Spirit, the gift from Jesus to the disciples when he reveals himself to them
after the resurrection.
This spirit is breathed into us by God, the same
breath that gave Adam life in Genesis and that brought the bones back to life
in Ezekiel. God’s spirit is inside of us and with us. To be breathed on by God
is to belong to God, and to belong to God is to belong to the Spirit, the
advocate, the comforter, the protector. It is this promise of belonging that Jesus’
is trying to give to Nicodemus.
With this promise of the Spirit comes a promise of
eternal life, not only in the future or after death, but here and now. Being
born from above, accepting the Spirit into you is accepting the presence of God,
a relationship with God, a belonging with God today and forever.
Part of that belonging is feel God’s companionship
walking alongside you, sometimes helping, sometimes teaching, sometimes comforting,
sometimes advocating. This is the belonging to which Nicodemus is invited.
All of these terms – to be born again, to be born
anew, to be born from above – all of this is a promise to be a child of God. Belonging
to God is recapturing that sense of what a child feels to belong to a parent. A
parent provides food, water, and protection to their child. So does God provide
food, water, and protection to us.
The questions that Nicodemus must consider are the
same questions that we must consider:
To
whom will I belong?
With
whom will I belong?
To
what will I belong?
With
what community do I belong?
What does it mean for us to consider being born again,
born anew, born from above? Being born again is not about a new mystical experience
but it is about a way of living out the life of God in the world. When you see it
like this, you see God, through Jesus, seeking to establish a relationship of
love and community with us. It means we need to make some decisions about how
we orient ourselves to God, how we belong to God, and how we are to live our
lives in that awareness of belonging to God.
So, my friends, how will you be born again this week?
Amen.
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