Nicodemus

Although I’m not yet ready to make a commitment to this every week, I’ve been thinking that since I’m doing a lot less preaching these days I might offer some thoughts during the week on the upcoming readings for Sunday. The world doesn’t need another Biblical commentary and surely not one from me. But maybe some homiletical ruminations can be of help to those preparing sermons and to those preparing to hear sermons. With this in mind, I’ve been thinking about Nicodemus, who makes an appearance in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading in John 3:1-17

I want to say three things about the encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus. But there is a larger point before doing that, which comes at the end. Even sports fans with no Biblical literacy know what John 3:16 says. But together with John 3:17 it is worth pondering in these shrill and polarized times: we are told that God so loved the world. We are told that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save the world.

The world in Greek is a familiar word to us in English as well: it’s cosmos. God doesn’t only love all the people of this world. God loves the planet. God loves all creatures, great and small. God loves the whole creation. The sun and moon and stars that God created in the beginning. God loves the whole cosmos and the incarnation is not about condemnation but salvation. 

When a church preaches condemnation, it’s not focused on Jesus anymore. Full stop. If God does not condemn the world, then who do preachers think that they are when we do it? As former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry put it, if it’s now about love it’s not about God. If it’s not about saving the world, healing the world, repairing the breaches in this world, it’s not about God either. If it’s about condemning God’s world, then it’s not of God.

Three details to notice about this encounter between Nicodemus and this upstart rabbi from the northern hills of Galilee.

First: notice that it’s nighttime when he comes to Jesus. It’s quite possible that Nicodemus doesn’t want his respectable neighbors to know the company he’s keeping, so he avoids coming to Jesus during the daytime when he is likely to be seen. He chooses the cover of darkness for this meeting. He comes nevertheless, apparently because he is drawn to Jesus, seeing that the signs Jesus does are clearly of God. But he is tentative.

Second: Jesus tells Nicodemus that if you want to grasp all of this you must be born from above. At least that’s how the NRSV puts it. But the Greek is ambiguous; it’s anothen And anothen has three perfectly valid interpretations.

If you look this verse up in an NRSV Bible (and not just on a Scripture insert) you will see a little notation after “born from above” that offers an alternative: “you must be born anew.” If you are an NIV Bible-type, then you’ll read, “you’ve got to be born again.” But there, too, you’ll find a little note from the editors that says, in tiny little letters, “you’ve got to be born from above.”

So which is it: born from above, born anew, or born again? Yes!

Now I point this out because perhaps some of you have been approached on a street corner (or maybe even at Thanksgiving Dinner) by someone who only reads the NIV translation and then asks you if you have been “born again?” And sometimes when that question is asked it feels like there is a specific way we are supposed to respond. It means you are supposed to have a datable moment in time when you became a Christian. It can sometimes seem as if the answer, “I was raised in the Church and have always known Jesus and I have had many moments of little conversions along the way rather than one big one” is not the right answer.

But if you listen to this text I think you will see that that aspect of a particular kind of Christian ideology has very little to do with this encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus.

That’s American evangelicalism, not what the far more nuanced Jesus says.

Nick initially misses the point—he hears “anothen” in a literal way and connects it only to a literal return to the womb, to being literally born again. Which Jesus says is silly. Jesus then clarifies by saying that what he is really talking about is being “born by water and the spirit.”  That is Baptismal language, which is one reason that the lectionary puts this reading into the context of Lent. Because Lent is all about Baptism.

In the early church, Baptism only happened at the Easter Vigil, after a long period of preparation. Lent was that season for final preparation before being buried with Christ, in order to be raised with him into a new resurrected life. So this is liturgical/sacramental language—and I think it’s way past time that Episcopalians and other liturgical Christians re-claim it as such. We don’t need to pick a fight or insist we have the whole truth, only that there is indeed sacramental language here, in this text. And that Jesus seems to be saying that if you are baptized by water and the spirit then you are born anothen—regardless of what some may tell you about that. By water and the spirit we are born anothen—dying with him in order to be raised again to the new life of grace. And then the journey of faith is living into that reality, one day at a time.

Third: this isn’t the last time that we see of Nicodemus. On Good Friday, in John’s telling of that day’s events, he comes with Joseph of Arimathea to claim to corpse of Jesus. The text says that Joseph, a member of the Council, “was a disciple of Jesus.” It doesn’t make that claim of Nicodemus, only that he came with Joseph and that he brings “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds of weight.” (John 19:39) Together, Nicodemus and Joseph take Jesus’ body and bind it with linen cloths and with the spices, following the burial customs of the day. In broad daylight. That suggests to me that Nicodemus was listening and that he was changed for good by this nighttime encounter.