Sermons
Sunday 16th March 2014, Lent 2, morning
John 3:1-17
by Revd Chris Palmer
‘There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus.’ Nicodemus: he crops up three time in St John’s Gospel and nowhere else in the Bible. The first time he appears is in this reading we’ve just heard. He visits Jesus at night, and they engage in a rather strange conversation. Later he crops up a meeting of Pharisees – he’s one of them – speaking up for Jesus, when the rest of them are intent on lyching him. Speaking up for Jesus might be too strong a description; speaking up for due process would be more accurate – but it still makes him suspect in his own circle. Finally near the end of the Gospel, when Joseph of Arimathea is burying Jesus, the bible says that Nicodemus came ‘bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing a hundred pounds’, which they used to adorn Jesus’ body. I remember quite distinctly being moved by that verse in prayer once. A hundred pounds weight of stuff to anoint Jesus! He couldn’t have carried it; he’d have needed a cart – or servants. It’s one of those stories that is filled with the lavishness of God and how God’s love prompts a lavish response.
And that seems to me to be the journey that Nicodemus makes – summoned by Jesus out of his safe and dependable world, onto a journey of faith that is both dangerous and rewarding, that explodes his inherited assumptions and reveals his deep down generosity. It is a journey of faith that God also invites us on; the details of our stories will be different – the questions we ask, the ways we show devotion – but the essential risk of exploring who Jesus is and discovering life with him is the same for everyone.
So let’s go back to the beginning and ask how we see our story in Nicodemus’s story. ‘There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night…’ By night? Days and nights are important in John’s Gospel. The night is the time of hiddenness, even of evil; it’s the time when people get up to no good, or when people get up to good that they don’t want others to see; it is the time of fear. And all of these are mixed up in Nicodemus’s mind. He doesn’t want others to know he’s visiting Jesus; is it a good move, or social suicide? He’s a leader of the Jews – that’s how the bible describes him – but he starts wondering if he might be a follower of this suspicious law breaker. He’s not at all sure what’s the best thing, but he feels compelled to go.
It’s difficult to hear in our hearts if the worries we have about taking courageous actions are true warnings or false temptations. I’m sure Nicodemus wasn’t sure. What are the risky actions we might be called to take? The courage to leave a job and set up the business of our dreams? The courage to confront an issue in our relationships? The courage to speak up for our beliefs – religious or political or moral? The courage to share our failings with someone else? Sometimes the discouragement we feel is simply a temptation to avoid the way of healing; at other times it will be God’s spirit warning us off. It is hard to tell. The key question to ask is, what action is leading me to love God more?
Nicodemus’s courage in coming to Jesus is mixed also with humility. He is a leader, but he comes as a learner. That also is good. True humility is usually a sign that God is at work – even if the humble person doesn’t acknowledge God themselves. But humility is a much abused concept. We’re all used to the false humility of the person who runs themselves down mainly in order to draw attention to themselves. That is not humility God-style. And we’re also used to people who run other people down to make themselves feel big. Humiliation is also not the same as humility. The truly humble person is the person at ease with their humanity and fully accepted of their life as it is; a person who is teachable and can teach others without this becoming a cause of status; a person who doesn’t live feeling entitled to a certain life or certain treatment, and who doesn’t play the martyr.
Nicodemus is feeling his way towards humility – in a good way. And the fact that he’s ‘feeling his way' is also OK. His questioning, uncertainty, openness to Jesus’ truth, but not yet ready to commit, his wanting to understand are all signs of God’s spirit at work within him.
And Jesus engages him in a strange conversation. I used to think that these rather rambling conversations you get in St John’s Gospel were kind of stylised theological reflections, unlike the rather short pithy one-liners you get in the other Gospels. But as I read them now, I’ve rather changed my mind. People don’t talk in pithy one liners – as truthful as one liners sometimes are; it’s the other Gospels which give us stylised theology. This conversation is what real conversations are like: not quite joining themselves up; slightly meandering. I’m not making out a case for reading this as a an accurate transcript of an actual conversation Jesus had historically, but I am saying that Nicodemus’s conversation with Jesus is what conversations about faith are like – trying to get our mind round things that are just beyond our comprehension. We also are struggling in this way, so often.
And the particular thing Nicodemus is trying to get his mind around is Jesus talk about being ‘born from above’, or ‘born again’ in the older translations. ‘Born again’ has entered the English language as a phrase for a particular sort of earnest and enthusiastic Christian. That’s a secular caricature, of course, and in this sense the phrase is rarely polite. But at the most basic level Jesus is getting at the reality that we become God’s children, not merely the children of our parents. And being God’s children shakes up our allegiances. Jesus goes as far as saying we should call no one on earth ‘father’, because our father is in heaven. I’ve sometimes said to baptism parents that, in having our children baptised, we put them up for adoption – by God. And if God has the first call on our children’s lives, then we don’t.
OK, the metaphors are sliding around: is it adoption or rebirth? Both are used in the bible. The point is that our relationship with God inducts us into a new community as profound as entering a new family. That is why Nicodemus is struggling and uncertain; it’s not somewhere you get all at once. And we see this in the life of the church too. People come and teeter around the edge and test out worship and faith and fellowship. Maybe that’s you. And why not? Who’d be so silly as to make a deep commitment to someone we haven’t got to know. God can wait, and if we stay open to God he will guide us to where we should be – even if it’s not the place of outward commitment that the church would count as belonging.
And that openness to God’s guidance is the final thing I want to talk about: this sense that God does his own thing and won’t be bound by our expectations. As I read this next bit, remember that the word ‘spirit’ and the word ‘wind’ are the same word in Greek. Jesus says, ‘What is born of the spirit is spirit… The wind (or spirit) blows where it chooses… so it is with everyone born of the Spirit/wind.’ To come to God is to expose ourselves to what is unpredictable and unsettling. I don’t for a minute believe that God is capricious or vindictive or sadistic – though life can feel like that at moments. But God often draws out our love and challenges us in ways we’d rather not face. And it’s sometimes difficult to see this at the time it’s happening. But the wind of the Spirit is also exciting, exhilarating, and refreshing – if we will yield ourselves to it.
Nicodemus’s own story goes from this night-time encounter, to standing up for Jesus’ rights as a lone voice in a lynch mob, to the most extravagant act of devotion, even when it seemed everything was lost – that hundred pounds of ointment was devoted to someone who by every worldly standard was a failure. Our questioning, our exploring, our conversation with Jesus are also leading us to unexpected places. Do we have the courage to let the spirit blow us?
