Nicodemus and New Birth

John 3

When I was still in college, I worked as a pastor for a small rural congregation.  This church sat right on the Kansas/Missouri border in the middle of farming country.  Two of my favorite people were Ronnie and Glenda Wolf.  I'm not sure Ronnie liked church but he did like the Royals, so we got along just fine.  During the summer I worked with Ronnie on his farm.  Once, one of the four dogs that roam the farm bit me on the back of the leg so hard it broke the skin through my jeans and left a bruise that lasted a month.  When I told Ronnie what had happened, he laughed and said, “Well you can’t let ‘em get behind you!”

When Glenda went to the hospital to have their first daughter, I was told that it was my job as the pastor to go and pray with her.  And so I did.  Now I was 21 and didn’t have a lot of delivery room experience.  But I can pray pretty quickly, so I figured I’d be in and out in a snap.  It didn’t work out that way.  

So I stayed well past my comfort zone, and got out just before the show reached its peak!  I learned that day that birth is a wonderful thing, but I prefer to hear about it from a third party.  I’m still dealing with the emotional scars from that experience.  And then my wife went and had three children of her own.  She made me stay the whole way through.  When there’s a delivery scene on TV, my whole body tenses up.  She won’t change the channel but she does mute it for me.  Babies are cute.  The birth process itself, not so much.

Jesus says the only way to see God’s kingdom, the only way to share in the eternal life God offers, is to be freshly born into a new family.

3:1-2 Nicodemus

We meet Nicodemus rather late in his life.  He’s lived long enough to make most of the important choices a person can make.  He’s already invested considerable capital in building his life a particular way.  He’s a Jewish man who belongs to the party of the Pharisees.  As a “ruler of the Jews,” Nicodemus was part of the Sanhedrin, the powerful religious group that governed Jewish life in Jerusalem.  He’s not the kind of person who is looking to make changes. 

But Jesus was performing powerful signs and Nicodemus was curious.  So he comes to Jesus at night.  Was he hoping not to be seen by his colleagues, who by and large were opponents of Jesus?  Or was darkness the only time to find Jesus without all the crowds?  We don’t really know.  But he comes to Jesus like many of us.  He’s divided.  He’s hedging his bets.  He wants to find out more about Jesus and he also wants to keep his distance.  He wants newness but also wants to protect what’s become familiar to him.  He is attracted to the powerful worker of signs, but he’s also counting the costs in his own head - he stands to lose quite a bit if he decides to believe in Jesus. 

3:3-9 New Birth

He addresses Jesus as “Rabbi” and teacher.  “We know that you are a teacher come from God.”  And he’s right about that of course.

But Jesus doesn’t want to talk about his powerful signs.  He changes the subject to new birth.  This blunt resistance to Nicodemus may surprise some of us.  Yet the bafflement experienced by Nicodemus is often the path of true spirituality.  We gather up all our questions in prayer before God only to find out, maybe even years later, that we’ve been having the wrong conversation.  Many times people come to church full of questions and find themselves compelled to trade these in for better questions.  This is humbling and disorienting of course.  But Jesus doesn’t seem that interested in answering all of our questions.  It is, in fact, our lives that are questionable.  God looks into our lives and asks us, “What do you want more - the life you’ve built or the kingdom of God?  What do you want more - your resume of experiences or the eternal life I’m offering?”  

Nicodemus thinks he’s insightfully recognized that Jesus is acting by God’s power.  But Jesus does not congratulate him on this insight nor does he offer him prizes.  Jesus says something Nicodemus could not have expected:  “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above [anothen]”.  You may be more familiar with an older translation of Jesus’ words, “born again.”  The language he uses can mean “born anew” or “freshly born.”  Or it can mean born “from above” as in “born from heaven” or “spiritually reborn.”

Now what should we do with this teaching, that we cannot see God’s kingdom, we cannot receive eternal life, unless we’re “freshly born from above”?

1)  Let me say first something that is so basic, so obvious, that it is often overlooked.  Women, not men, give birth (not with seahorses, my son would remind me).  So Jesus’ invitation to new birth immediately ushers us into an imaginative world which pictures God as the Mother who gives birth to those in her family.  Jesus focuses on the Spirit’s role in all this, so perhaps the imagery is that the Spirit too is the Mother who labors and bears us into this new family.  So, one of the central and most well-known teachings of Jesus in the Bible - “you must be born anew” - imagines his heavenly Father as a heavenly mother who gives us birth!

2) Second, I’d like to make another point that is so basic it hardly needs mention.  The language of being “born anew” is passive language.  It’s something that happens to you, not something you do.  When a baby is born, we don’t typically say, “Good job getting out of there!”  You don’t congratulate a baby for being born.  You don’t look at a sweaty, exhausted mother, eyes bloodshot and heart rushing, every nerve frayed, vessels burst in spidery redness, the searing pain still pulsing - you don’t look at this mother and say, “Hey, your baby found its way out!”  No, it is the mother’s body, in all its complex mystery, that gives birth to this child.  The baby doesn’t help.  The baby doesn’t even know what happened.

3) But neither of these points gets us to the heart of the matter.  How ill this newness happen?  It’s the born “again” or “anew” part that baffles Nicodemus.  He asks two questions, “How can a man be born when he is old?  Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”  How do you get a fresh start?  Starting over seems hard, and rare.  Do people really change?  When you’ve already arranged your life into patterns and loyalties of a certain sort, can you really break out in new directions?  Can you really find a new community in which to live and love and work?

We have trouble thinking about “newness” because we assume “new birth” language has to do primarily with our individual experience of God.  But for Jesus, birth language is about kids and families.  It’s communal language.  None of the other gospels have the Nicodemus story.  But all of them report Jesus as saying, “Unless you become like a little child, you will never enter God’s kingdom.”  

John’s gospel begins by pointing out that Jesus was opposed by many but was received by a new family.  “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (1:11).  But there were, there are, some who believe in him.  And this community is God’s new family.  “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (1:12-13).  So the Nicodemus story is meant to be heard in this context: God is creating a new family in Jesus Christ by the powerful movement of the Spirit.  Those “born” into God’s kingdom have likely felt something very powerful in their own lives, but it is primarily an invitation into a family of children born anew by the mysteriously blowing Spirit.

The last thing we hear from Nicodemus is a question, “How can this be?”  He responds to Jesus’ teaching about new birth, Spirit, and wind with incomprehension.  We do not know at the end of this conversation whether Nicodemus is moving towards Jesus or away from him.  Of course we almost never know how God’s Spirit is moving in other people’s lives.  The Spirit’s activity always eludes our attempts define or categorize it.  The Spirit gives birth like the wind blows.  We have no way of controlling the wind.  We feel it’s presence blowing across our bodies.  We hear it rustling in the trees and see the grass bending under its force.  We have experienced it but that gives us no purchase to predict what it will do or where it will go next. 

We love our mailman -- Bill from Staten Island.  Bill is a Christian and he figured out after awhile that I was too.  One day he pulled me aside, looked this way and that, and asked me, “Are you born again?”  I don’t know what all he had in mind, but he wanted to categorize me.  He was using “born again” language to size me up.  One of the constant tasks of a Christian community is to take Bible language that’s been hijacked and distorted and find fresh ways to hear it again.  We shouldn’t abandon “new birth” as a way of talking about our lives just because it has fallen into disrepair.  Here are two problems with the way it’s typically been used:

1. Jesus used the language of new birth to describe how ALL of his followers are God’s children.  Yet the phrase “born again Christian” has been used in the last 30 years or so to pick out one particular group of Christians in order to distinguish them from others.  The phrase “born again” often refers to evangelical conservatives who’ve had some kind of conversion experience.  This “born again” emphasis on a conversion experience tends to pick out emotionally expressive kinds of communities like African American churches, Evangelical and non-denominational churches, and Pentecostal/Charismatic congregations.  Jesus wasn’t picking out some believers as “born again.”  He was describing all who believe in him.

2.  Jesus used the language of new birth to describe the way ALL persons are moved by the Spirit to faith in him.  Yet the phrase “born again” is sometimes used to emphasize the importance of a powerful conversion experience.  Some Christians describe their own conversion as an encounter with Jesus Christ that was sudden, shocking, and emotionally charged.  Some of you have had this kind of conversion experience.  I hope that those of you with dramatic and emotional conversion experiences will continue to share them with the rest of us so that we can thank God and celebrate with you.  All of our varied experiences are part of this community.  But there will be other ways of saying Yes to Jesus Christ that will not have this kind of dramatic flair and suddenness.  I personally have never had such an experience.  My life has been more like a kind of gentle unfolding in which, gradually, Jesus Christ has made himself more and more real to me.  The wind blows where it wishes and we don’t know where it comes from and where it’s going.  The Spirit brings us to Jesus Christ in many different ways.

3:10-17  For God So Loved the World

You will have to decide whether this experience of “new birth” makes sense of your own life or not.  Jesus does offer us one clear way to see the Spirit at work in our lives.  He draws our attention to his own death.  He speaks of the crucifixion as a kind of “lifting up,” a kind of exaltation.  Like Moses lifted up the bronze serpent in the desert, so will I be lifted up among my people.  This is a strange way of talking.  He is at his most glorious and luminous when he is crucified for us.  His victory for his people happens in his dying for us on the cross.  This is how the Spirit works to create God’s new family.  The Spirit blows in our lives to draw us to the beaten and humiliated Jesus dying on the cross.  And there the Spirit enables us to say, “There in that dying one is the love of God.  There is the glory of God.”  “For God so loved the world, that God gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (3:16).  If you see in the crucified Jesus God loving you, God loving the whole world, that is the mysterious blowing of the Spirit in your life.  This is how we’re all born into God’s new family.