Nick at Night.

John 3:1-17

March 12, 2017

I.

A Jewish leader and teacher named Nicodemus comes to Jesus.  He comes in secret or at least inconspicuously.  Jesus has just created a disturbance in the Temple which would have made it dangerous for Nicodemus to meet him openly.  And they have what Nicodemus thinks is going to be a rabbi-to-rabbi conversation.  He starts out by recognizing that, based on the signs Jesus has done, Jesus is a teacher sent from God

Jesus responds by stating that “no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.”  Later he says it a little differently.  “No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.”

So this Kingdom of God, which is the theme of Jesus’ ministry, is something that we do not see or enter in our present, normal existence.  It requires some change in us so comprehensive that it is analogous to a second birth.  Our first birth is of the flesh, that is, physically.  It is what we usually think of as being born.  We emerge from our mother’s womb and begin an apparently independent existence in the world.  And for most of us, that is the only kind of life we know, experience, or think is real.  

But Jesus suggests there is another kind of life, life in the Spirit, which is as different from the life we know now, as life in the womb was from life after birth.  And we come to this new kind of life by means of a second birth, a birth in, through, and from the Spirit.  

To be born of the Spirit is not something that we see with our physical eyes.  To be born of the Spirit, or wind (the Greek word is the same for both), is to be like the wind in the sense that it is not visible directly, but has great indirect, invisible, subtle power.  Just as we can see the effect the wind has on things because they are blowing around, so also we can see the effect on a person, and on the world, of having been born of the Spirit.  We can hear the sound of the wind, says Jesus, but we have no idea where the wind came from or what it’s going to do next.  

People who are born of the Spirit are like that.  We know them by their fruits, their actions, by the way they move things in the world.  It is similar to other images that Jesus uses for life in him: like leaven, light, and salt.  We see these things largely because of the effect they have on the things they touch.

At first Nicodemus apparently takes rebirth literally, and asks if it is about somehow climbing back into his mother’s womb, which is ridiculous; but that may have been a rabbinic way of pressing Jesus to be more precise.  Later Nicodemus is baffled by the wind imagery.  Maybe he thinks people born of the Spirit become disembodied spirits or ghosts, invisibly and mystically flying around messing with people.  It would make logical sense for him to assume this, anyway.  In any case, here he just says in bewilderment, “How can this be?”

II.

Which gives Jesus the opportunity to clarify still further.  He focuses on an obscure story from the Old Testament Book of Numbers, about a time when the Israelites in the desert were dealing with a plague of poisonous snakes.  God tells Moses to make a statue of a snake out of bronze and fix it to a pole, and lift it up.  Everyone who was bitten by a snake would look at it, and this would somehow heal them.

Jesus then says that what he is talking about operates the same way.  The Son of Man will be lifted up like that metal snake, and whoever looks at him and trusts in him will receive eternal life from him.  The act of seeing, and trusting and believing, has the effect of transferring important qualities from the object to the one looking at it.   

Snakes have an ambivalent meaning in the Bible and ancient cultures.  Obviously, the snake comes off poorly in Genesis, and elsewhere is said to represent the devil.  Yet snakes also have this mysterious ability to shed their skin; some people even considered snakes, if not to actually live forever, to be a symbol of immortality or eternal life.  And it is precisely a kind of shedding of the old self, the self of flesh, and the birth of a new self, in the Spirit, that Jesus is getting at here.  

Jesus says that he, the Son of Man, functions like Moses’ bronze snake.  If we look at him truly comprehending who he is and what is going on when he is lifted up, we will receive his life in ourselves.  His life is imputed to us.  On the cross and in his resurrection and ascension he represents us, we identify with him, and he kind of carries us along with him.  

This reminds me of the psychological phenomenon called transference.  It happens in therapy when the patient transfers feelings from a childhood relationship to the therapist.  But it happens in a more general way at other times as well. This is why we cry at the movies; we have transferred our personal feelings onto a character.  This is why I feel personal satisfaction and triumph when some guy from Cuba who happens to be wearing a blue-and-orange uniform hits a homerun.  It happens in relationships all the time, as we unconsciously work out with our spouse issues relating to people from years or decades before.  

We relate to each other instinctively and naturally.  Advertising wouldn’t work if we did not see ourselves in that poor guy who’s losing his hair, or that woman who needs car insurance.  It even works with animals; we transfer our feelings onto them.  Or machines or trees or rivers or just about anything.  It is com-passion, our ability to feel-with others, and we identify with them.

I wonder if there isn’t more to this than merely a psychological thing happening in my own brain.  I wonder if it isn’t an example of the ways we really are connected to each other and to all creation.  Unless we are some kind of psychopath, we feel with and relate to each other and everything.  And it’s a good thing.

III.   

So, if we are stuck in our shallow, narrow, limited, unconscious existence, and we look at Jesus, and we see him hanging and dying on a Roman cross; and if we see in him ourselves, our old selves, our flesh, our, little egocentric, self-centered, fearful selves; and if we can identify with him in his suffering, and then see how his lifting up in death continues in resurrection to new life, and ascension into a state of ever presence in the Spirit… that may jar our consciousness enough to make us aware that maybe there is more to us than our old selves.  It may occur to us that maybe we can follow Christ and lose those old selves with him, and realize a second birth, in the Spirit, of new selves.

This is what Paul means when he says, “if we have been united with him in a death like his we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.  Our old self was crucified with him” and we are free to live forever with him in the Spirit.  Paul indicates that it is what is going on symbolically in baptism, and Jesus here also says this new birth happens by “water and Spirit.”  Baptism is like a performative version of what Jesus is talking about.  We too are raised up when we emerge from the water of baptism.

Now, for lots of folks, they hear the story, or look at the cross, or even a crucifix, and it has no effect on them.  They don’t — as we say — get it.  Just some guy being tortured to death, which is kind of gross, and I’m glad it’s not me!  Just some hapless loser.  They don’t automatically identify with others.  They don’t empathize.  

People can be pretty hard-hearted, actually.  We hear about a war, or a famine, or an earthquake, or human trafficking, or a murder, and we don’t necessarily have compassion for the people undergoing such horrors.  Especially if it is far, far away or happening to people we have been taught don’t matter that much, or are our supposed enemies.  Especially when we hear so much of this sort of thing, it is hard to get up the compassion for them all.  We would be paralyzed by grief and sorrow.  But to have a lack of all compassion to the point that Palestinian, and Syrian, and South Sudanese children don’t affect us at all, that attitude will kill us in a way that does not resolve in resurrection.  To be that dead to another’s suffering is to stay dead, in the end.

Those Israelites, 1400 years earlier, looking up at Moses’ graven snake on a stick knew it was life or death because they had the venom inside them already!  That’s the urgency we need!  We have the venom of death already inside of us, and unless we identify with others’ suffering we will not identify with Jesus’ suffering, which means we will not participate in his life either.  We will, as Jesus says, “be condemned already.”  The venom, the poison of our own self-centeredness, will eventually take us.  Jesus is saying that we have to realize that the stake we have in others’ suffering connects us to him.  That’s  where he joins us in our shared humanity, in our suffering.

IV.

Of course, embedded in this passage are the most famous words of the New Testament, the summary of the good news.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  It is all about God’s overwhelming love in entering our life, even taking on our flesh, to demonstrate that there is a way out of this existence of fear and violence, this blind, small, lame, constricted, terrified, and distorted way of life that is destroying our souls and the beautiful planet placed in our care.  There is another kind of life which is our true life, our original life as God’s Image, our real life, and it lasts forever.

And he, the One lifted up, is the Way.  He is the Truth.  He is the Life.  And it is through following his path of self-emptying love that we release all that separates us from God and each other, and even from our true selves, and we are filled with him.  In following him in his humanity, we receive from him by grace even his divinity, and find union with and in God.

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