THE SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT
Genesis 12:1-8
Romans 4:1-5 (6-12) 13-17
John 3: 1-17
Year A
Thomas Cahill, in his
remarkable book, “The Gifts of the Jews”, says that two of the boldest words in
all of literature are: “Abraham went”. Abram never expected to be called by God
to go to a place he had never been before, to begin a completely new life at
the age of 75. Is all came as a complete surprise so perhaps it’s even more of
a surprise that he actually went. What’s more it wasn’t about religion at all,
yet it was the moment living faith was born.
But just what does ‘living’
faith really mean? I sometimes think of the kids I went through Confirmation
Class with as a teenager. Given a load of questions and answers to memorize we
were told this was what we needed to know in order to have a living faith. The
problem is, I don’t have much faith that ever
happened. I wonder how many of those kids are still around the church in any
way shape or form. More importantly, I wonder how many of them actually have a
living faith.
It has often been said that
the church spends a lot of time answering questions that no one ever asks. No
doubt Nicodemus would have understood that statement. Nicodemus had made it to
the top as leader of the Jews. He had reached a pinnacle of eminence as a
member of the Great Sanhedrin, the supreme council of the land. Having reached
this lofty status, he must have found his heart unsatisfied. You can almost
hear him saying, “Is this all there is?”
He is a man whose strong set of
beliefs and strict adherence to orthodoxy has served him – to a point. His
beliefs have made him upstanding, responsible, and respectful, but they have
not given him a palpable relationship with the living God. It is as if his
religion has built him up only to strangle him.
Nicodemus is described as a
leader of the Jews and as a representative of Jewish orthodoxy he is above
reproach. He is a cautious man who knows the value of the position he holds and
does not want to jeopardize it. Part coward, he plays by the rules, but there
were questions in his soul that will not be stilled. Thus, he comes to Jesus by
night; something that no one else in the gospel narrative ever does.
And there, under the
moonlight he finds himself conversing with a Spirit-filled rabbi whose attitude
toward religion is at best cavalier and at worst the seeds of a capital
offense. Nicodemus says, “I have seen the signs that you do. Therefore I know
you must be from God.” And essentially Jesus says to him, ‘You don’t have a
clue.”
The questions which have
driven Nicodemus to come to Jesus by night were probably more along the lines
of “Who am I?” and “Where am I going? Where do I belong?” However, the only questions Nicodemus knew to
ask were questions which reflected an accounting view of life; questions
reflecting the notion that when things add up only then can they
be true. Jesus refused to deal with these questions. Instead, he told Nicodemus
a story of birth, a story about new life.
When he asks Jesus “How can
this be?” Jesus chides him by asking him how a teacher of
As a righteous Jew Nicodemus believed there were certain rules and regulations a person must follow in order to enter God’s kingdom. There were concrete actions and rituals that one could chick off, and thus be assured of being ‘righteous’ before God. But the right direction wasn’t as clear to Nicodemus as he had hoped. There were so many rules, so many hoops, to jump through before a person was reckoned as ‘righteous’. Ultimately Paul too experienced this as an overwhelming weight and burden. This is why Paul declares that Abraham’s relationship to God was based, not on what Abraham did, but in his faith in God’s call.
For most of us faith is more like Nicodemus’s than Abraham’s. It is easy to become like him. We pull back from risky and extravagant opportunities in our lives and faith journeys. Sometimes we call our hesitation discernment and sometimes we call it reality testing. Sometimes we call it commonsense and sometimes we call it religious law.
We get very stuck. We think of ourselves as believing in God because certain things happened to us or we were told certain things. We operate pretty much out of a closed system. And when we treat our relationship with God as a closed system, as opposed to being open to being surprised by God, then we are constantly running the risk of losing touch with God. If faith is something we define in the same way we define car insurance or belonging to the right political party, then we do not have faith at all. We have nothing and our relationship with God is not just in intensive care, it is in the morgue.
Dwight L. Moody, a conservative churchman, once said “The Spirit of God first imparts love; next it inspires hope, and then gives liberty; and that is about the last thing we have in many of our churches.” Sadly, some of the people I know who have left the church have left it not only because of that but because it often seems to focus on questions that no one ever asks; instead of doing everything it can to foster a faith that is alive and in communion with the living God.
Nicodemus is a man whose strong set of beliefs and strict adherence to orthodoxy has served him – to a point. His beliefs have made him upstanding and responsible and respectable, but never could he be accused of being ‘new’ or ‘reborn’ because if you are born again then you must grow up again.
Jesus is saying, “Think about your life Nicodemus. What would you do differently if you had half the chance? How would you change it? How would you re-write the narrative of your life? What might God be asking you to re-think, to re-write?”
Jesus is inviting Nicodemus, and us, to rethink our assumptions about how things are and therefore how things have to be. We are challenged not only to conduct an autopsy on our past, but to look to the future through the eyes of redemptive possibility. How might our lives be different if we were born again?
As we picture Nicodemus, his face in the flickering lamplight, it is an arresting mixture of hope and hesitation. Jesus waits, the silence broken only by the sound of the wind banging the shutter against the house. He tugs at his beard and struggles to rethink his life, seeing his past and future through the eyes of the One who loves him. He is dizzy with the possibility of it all – and so are we IF we are open to the Spirit.
Martin Buber has written that the young, at whatever age, are the ones who have not unlearned what it means to “begin” again.
Abraham and Sarah first experienced a profound dislocation of their lives when they responded to God’s call. Their journey, however, took them from false security to uncertainty, to deep blessing. Faith, they tell us, isn’t a goose-down pillow or a cashmere scarf. It is the willingness to go where God calls; to begin again.
No doubt Nicodemus’s face was a mixture of confusion and curiosity that night as he and Jesus had that intimate conversation by the fire. With only the sound of the wind between them, as it stirred the embers of the fire, Jesus became the Voice that Abraham had heard in a similar way perhaps on a similar night so many centuries before.
We are not told how Nicodemus
responded to Jesus’ words. We do know that Nicodemus accompanied Joseph of
Arimathea to beg for the body of Jesus. He would do it in broad daylight; a
reckless thing to do, risking not just his reputation but even his life
considering the witch hunt that was going on.
In our faith journeys, some
of us need more help than others. Some of us need to come at night, stumbling
our way in the dark, groping our way toward God’s holy presence. So we rejoice
that the Lord keeps evening hours. We rejoice that he invites us to come, to
sit, to speak to him and unburden ourselves from all that keeps our faith
journeys from bursting into flame and new life.
But, he had apparently
decided to throw caution and fear to the wind, to a Wind that was greater than
he was, greater than the Law or the temple, greater than anything he had ever
known before.
When Nicodemus heard that
some of the disciples had seen Jesus, after the resurrection, he wept like a
newborn baby and maybe in a way, that is what he had become.
God only knows what our lives
might be like if we too threw caution to the wind, and moved – like fire, like
wind, like the Spirit, into the kingdom, where life is forever new and new
forever.