Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 12th March 2017, the 2nd Sunday of Lent, year A
Today I want to reflect on Jesus’s conversation
with Nicodemus as recorded by John in the Gospel reading (John 3:1-17)
Jesus uses that
conversation to teach Nicodemus – and through him ourselves – some great
truths, which are crucial for the later development of our Christian faith and
Trinitarian theology.
Nicodemus finds it
hard to understand what Jesus is saying – and we may too – because Jesus is
speaking in the language of metaphor. It is as if Jesus is speaking in riddles!
‘Being born from above’; ‘entering the kingdom of God’; ‘the Son of Man’; ‘serpents
being lifted up’; ‘having eternal
life’: What in heaven’s name is Jesus talking about? Let me try
my best to tease out what his words mean to me.
We should start with the kingdom of God, I
think – what did Jesus understand by it?
The key I think is in
the prayer he taught us: ‘Our Father, who
art in heaven, hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in
earth as it is in heaven.’ I feel sure we enter the kingdom of
God when we do God’s will here on earth, as it is done in heaven. But that
ain’t easy – we have to resist our human impulses to do what we want, not what
God wants. We can’t do so unless something changes us to be immune to human
wilfulness. That change is like being ‘born anew’.
Jesus tells Nicodemus
that ‘No one can see the kingdom of God without being born
from above’. Now the Greek
phrase translated as ‘born from above’ can just as well be translated as ‘born
anew’ – and that is the sense in which Nicodemus correctly understands it. He
understands the need for it, but he does not understand how to achieve it. ‘How can anyone
be born after having grown old?’ he asks. ‘Can one enter a second time into the
mother’s womb and be born?’
So Jesus explains, ‘No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born
of water and Spirit’. We need to be washed clean of our sinful
natures – that is what baptism symbolises. But we cannot by ourselves surrender
our will to God’s will. For that we need God to take the initiative through the
power of his Spirit. Only then can we entrust ourselves to God completely,
without reservation.
In Greek the same word
‘pneuma’ is used for both wind and spirit. Jesus says, ‘The
wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know
where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the
Spirit.’ He is telling Nicodemus that he doesn’t need to understand
how the Spirit works, he just needs to know that it does work.
There’s nothing very
difficult about any of this from Jesus’ point of view, I think. This is just
how human beings are made psychologically – it is a plain observable fact, an
earthly thing - not a deep truth, a heavenly thing. But Nicodemus just doesn’t
get it. ‘How
can these things be?’ he says in exasperation. And Jesus chides him,
‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not
understand these things? … If I have told you about earthly things and you do
not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?’
But I think Jesus likes Nicodemus, and is
enjoying their conversation.
Because Jesus does
indeed go on to tell Nicodemus – and through him us too - about deep heavenly
truths, theological truths.
‘No one has
ascended into heaven’,
says Jesus, except the one who descended from heaven, the
Son of Man’.
‘The Son of Man’ is a
typically Jewish way of saying ‘a representative man’. Jesus is saying that for
a representative man to go up to God, he must have come down from God in the
first place. And he clearly understands himself to be the Son of Man, the
representative man, who has come from God.
‘And just as Moses
lifted up the serpent in the wilderness’, says Jesus, ‘so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that
whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’
Moses lifting up the
serpent refers to a strange story in the Book of Numbers (21:8-9). On their
journey through the wilderness, the people of Israel complained about their
hardships since they left Egypt. God sent a plague of deadly serpents to punish
them. When the people repented and cried for mercy, God instructed Moses to
raise an image of a serpent on a pole in the centre of the camp, which healed
those with snakebite when they looked at it.
Jesus is saying that
he, the representative man, is destined to be lifted up – on the cross and to
God in heaven - to bring eternal life to those who believe in him, just as the
image of the serpent healed those who came to it.
But what does Jesus mean
by ‘eternal life’? We must distinguish it from ‘everlasting life’, I’m sure,
which might just as well be hell as heaven. Duration doesn’t matter - eternal
life is surely to participate in God’s life, full of the joy and peace and love
that can only be found in God’s presence.
‘For God so loved
the world’, says Jesus, ‘that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who
believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’
In these comfortable
words, Jesus reveals to Nicodemus – and to us – that Jesus the Son of Man, the
representative human being, is also the only Son of God. The breadth and depth
of God’s love for the world – for you and for me and for all creation - is
shown by the gift of his only Son.
‘Indeed’, Jesus continues, ‘God
did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the
world might be saved through him’.
Our loving God seeks
to save us through the gift of his Son, not condemn us. He makes it possible
for us to reconcile ourselves with God by aligning our will with God’s will, in
imitation of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
John does not tell us what Nicodemus makes of
all this.
You might expect
Nicodemus to have taken umbrage when Jesus chided him. But he didn’t. John goes
on to tell us (John 7:50-53) that Nicodemus defended Jesus in the Jewish
Council when there was a move to arrest him. And after the crucifixion
Nicodemus helped Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus, contributing the expensive
embalming spices (John 19:39 -40).
Nicodemus may even have become a disciple of Jesus, and he is considered a
saint in both the Orthodox and RC churches.
So to finish
Let us give thanks for
the insights – the heavenly truths - that Nicodemus prompted Jesus to reveal
about the relationships between God, his Son, his Spirit and human beings like
you and me. They are at the heart of our Trinitarian faith.
And let us pray that
the Holy Spirit may instil in us trust in God’s promises made through Jesus:
‘For God so loved
the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may
not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the
world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through
him.’
No comments:
Post a Comment