Nicodemus visits Jesus

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 8th March 2020, the 2nd Sunday of Lent

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 – as 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’; ‘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 ‘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 wilful natures which lead us into sin – 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 surrender ourselves to God’s will completely, without reservation.

In NT 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 ‘the ideal man’ – in other words, the perfect model of what God has created a human being to be, whether a man or a woman. Jesus is saying that for the ideal 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 ideal 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 ideal 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. Everlasting life might just as well be an everlasting 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.’ Those of us of a certain age will recognise these as the first of the ‘comfortable words’ in the traditional language of the communion service. In these words, Jesus reveals to Nicodemus – and to us – that Jesus the Son of Man, the ideal 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, the ideal human being, 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 – both the earthly and 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 his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord: ‘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.’

God of mercy,

you are full of tenderness and compassion,

slow to anger, rich in mercy, and always ready to forgive:

grant us grace to renounce all evil and to cling to Christ,

that in every way we may prove to be your loving children;

through Jesus Christ our Lord

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, for ever and ever. Amen

An Epiphany of the Trinity

An address given at Templederry and Killodiernan on 11 Jan 2009 - the Baptism of Christ

Tracks of charged particles in a cloud chamber

Ever since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been fascinated by the pictures taken by particle physicists of the tracks of sub-atomic particles in cloud chambers.

The particles are smashed into each other in accelerators. By studying and measuring the patterns they make as they split and decay, scientists can see traces of the underlying structure of matter. The results confirm or disprove elegant theories – mathematical models - constructed by theorists.

I’m looking forward this Summer to the first results from the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Built in a circular tunnel 17 miles in circumference under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, it will accelerate beams of charged particles to almost the speed of light and smash them together head on. Among the things scientists hope to discover are traces of a weird particle called the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. Some people jokingly call it the God particle, because it gives mass to all other particles!

In much the same way, I think, as particle physicists search their cloud chambers for events that reveal the nature of matter, Christian theologians have searched the Bible for passages which reveal something of the nature of God.

The Greek word ἐπιφάνεια (epiphaneia), from which our word epiphany comes, literally means a showing forth or a manifestation. And it is during Epiphany that we are invited through the chosen readings to reflect on how God reveals himself to us, how he is shown forth, made manifest. In the Church callendar, Epiphany begins on Jan 6th, when the focus is on the story of the Magi, when the Christ-child is first shown to the gentiles. But on this and the next 3 Sundays in the season of Epiphany, until Candlemas on 2 Feb, the set readings present us with many other epiphanies, many other stories that reveal something of the nature of God.

So today I invite you to reflect on how God is revealed to us in today's readings as a Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and what this means for us.

Psalm 29 presents us with an epiphany of God the Creator.

From time immemorial human beings have seen traces of the majesty of God the Creator in the natural world, and in the awesome power of natural forces.

Psalm 29 captures this kind of epiphany in these words:

The voice of the Lord splits the flash of lightning;
the voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord makes the oak trees writhe
and strips the forests bare;

I think we’ve all experienced this sense of awe when confronted by the great forces of nature, and by wild and desolate landscapes. They make us feel small and insignificant.

But this is a rather primitive idea of the nature of God, isn’t it? If this were all we knew of God, no doubt we would still be sacrificing our children to appease such a terrifying presence, as many primitive cultures have done, and as it seems the Hebrew patriarch Abraham planned to do with his son Isaac, before the angel prevented him.

Over the long centuries of OT time, the Hebrews came to see themselves as having a covenant with this powerful God, who promised to protect, strengthen and nurture them, so that Psalm 29 can finish with these words:

The Lord shall give strength to his people;
the Lord shall give his people the blessing of peace.

By the time of Jesus, Jews had begun to think of God the Creator as loving his children - the Children of Israel - as a father does. And of course Jesus built on this in his teaching. He himself clearly experienced God as like a loving Father, and he taught his disciples – and through them us - to pray to Our Father in Heaven.

God the terrible creator is transformed into God the loving Father.

The 1st reading from Acts (19:1-7) is about an epiphany of God’s Holy Spirit

The dozen or so disciples that Paul met in the great pagan city of Ephesus were followers of John the Baptist. They had been baptized into John’s baptism of repentance, but they had not been baptised or initiated as Christians. They knew nothing of the Holy Spirit, which the disciples in Jerusalem had experienced after the Ascension.

Paul explained to them that John himself had taught his disciples ‘to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus’. And they accepted baptism from Paul, not ‘in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’, the Trinitarian words we use now, but ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus’. Perhaps the earliest baptismal words were changed as later theologians began to understand the nature of God as a Trinity.

Only then, when Paul laid his hands on them, did they experience the Holy Spirit. We are told they spoke in tongues and prophesied, just as the disciples in Jerusalem had done. We are not much given in the Church of Ireland to speaking in tongues and prophesying, are we? – in fact we are rather afraid of the idea! I hate to think what the Rector and Bishop Trevor would do if I started to speak in tongues from this pulpit! But if we interpret this phrase as how the early Christians described their sense of being empowered, empowered by Jesus to do the work of God, perhaps we would do well to be more open to the idea.

The 2nd reading from the beginning of Mark’s Gospel (1:4-11) describes an epiphany in which Jesus is revealed as the Son of God at his baptism by John.


‘Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan’, Mark tells us. ‘And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart, and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven,’ – from God – ‘“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”’. What an amazing vision Mark conjures up with so few words! It has inspired so many artists over the centuries to paint beautiful images.

The Baptism of Christ, by Andrea del Verrocchio, 1475, in the Uffizi, Florence

But who saw the dove, and who heard the voice from heaven? I don’t think it can have been the crowd down by Jordan’s banks, because Matthew uses the pronoun ‘he’: this vision is surely a private not a public experience. The pronoun is ambiguous. Is it Jesus who sees the vision? Possibly. Perhaps this is the very moment when Jesus the man realises his own significance as the Son of God. But perhaps more likely it is the Baptist who sees the vision. For the writer of John’s Gospel tells us that John the Baptist testified: “I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptise with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.’”

Whichever it is, this passage is very important for all Christians who see the nature of God as the Trinity. This is the only place in the Gospels where we find all three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit - together at the same time. It is the defining vision of the Trinity.

The Church teaches that God is a Trinity – a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit


After analysing these and other Bible passages for a long time, around 3 centuries, Christian theologians achieved a high degree, though not complete, unanimity on this. And they expressed it in the historic creeds which we still say together.

But do we have to rely entirely on the authority of ancient scriptures and long-dead theologians to reach this understanding?


I wonder if, like the particle physicists probing the nature of matter with their cloud chambers and experiments, we can ourselves come to understand God as Trinity, by probing our own hearts and spiritual lives, and the hearts and spiritual lives of those about us? I rather think we can.

All around I see faint but unmistakeable traces of a God like a loving Father, of a Son that shows people how to relate in love to all about us, and of a Spirit that animates all creation!