Seeking an answer - A Sermon

 John 3:1-15                                                                        

Introduction:

Nicodemus is a man on a journey; we meet him three times in the gospel story, today’s reading captures a snapshot of his first meeting with Jesus – and although this is his first meeting with Jesus, he certainly has been on a journey with God. The importance of his encounter with Christ is that he learns that things are not at all as he expected.  He comes to Jesus expecting answers, and leaves with more questions – but questions that eventually lead to belief. I want to encourage you to do the same. I hope that by exploring Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus today, you will ask of yourself the big questions that deepen your faith in Christ.

Who was he?

We learn a lot about this man from the opening line of chapter 3, and can build a surprisingly detailed picture, and we can begin to speculate about his motivations, hopes, and fears.

The scripture tells that he was “Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ² He came to Jesus^[a] by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God”

Let’s begin to break this down, starting with his designation as a Pharisee. Now, the Pharisees get quite a bad rep; Jesus calls them (among other things) “blind guides “ (Matthew  23:24) “a brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:33), and  “Whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27). This is strong language, condemnation indeed, but we mustn’t misunderstand – They were *almost* right. This is the problem, not that they were so far from the God revealed in the Prophets, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah. It wasn’t that they were just wrong, it was that they were *so* very nearly right, and yet unchanged. So close that they were without excuse.

The Pharisee movement started, as so many movements start, with good intentions. Biblical intentions, godly intentions. But as with so many movements, it became bogged down in legalism, lip service, and mechanistic following of rules. The Pharisees were lay people, “normal” people, not priests, not “chosen”, they wanted to take the holiness of the temple, which had been reserved, and hidden away from the people, and they wanted to live out that holiness in their daily live. This urge is to be commended, not condemned, but they do it in such a way as to by-pass the point of holiness, the point of these laws. The point of all these laws, the point of holiness of life, the point of living a ‘different life’ is to “love God, and love your neighbour” (Mark 12:30-31). We can fall into the same trap, of forgetting that the lives we lead are in thanksgiving to God, and mistakenly thinking that we can impress Him with our actions.

Nicodemus has found himself in this tradition of Lived Holiness, of strict observance, and hope – we must not forget the hope of the devout Pharisees, that if they ‘could just get the people to be holy, even for just a moment, then God would send his Messiah, his Christ, and free them from the Roman occupation. Free them from the tyranny of empire, from corruption of gentile unclean-ness’. Of course we, on this side of Calvary, know that God had something much bigger in mind; freedom from the tyranny of death, freedom from the corruption of sin.

What did he want?

Just as we so often do, Nicodemus builds Jesus in his own image “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God”; Rabbi basically being a title meaning “teacher”, Nicodemus seems to think Jesus is very much like himself, a better version of himself, a more gifted, more holy, more righteous, but a version of himself nonetheless. He wants Jesus to come with a more sophisticated understanding, a more rigorous approach, a more reliable method; something, anything, so that Nicodemus could train himself, discipline himself to better to please God.

Jesus doesn't even engage with this line of thinking, as we pick up in verse 3, “Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Jesus refuses to be drawn into a debate about rules, and ceremonies, but instead, he uses this moment as “teacher” to challenge the very basis of Nicodemus understanding of his relation to God. Nicodemus, a good Jew, understood that as a child of Abraham, he had been selected, elected, chosen to live in a Covenant Relationship with God. He believed that his people were in a sense, married to God (as we pick up from the prophet Hosea) and all he had to do was be faithful.  Jesus contradicts this understanding; it is not one’s birth of a Jewish Mother that marks a person out as a Child of God, but it is their “birth from above” their “birth anew” as some translations have it.

What did he learn?

Whatever Jesus said to Nicodemus, it is clear that he heard “you must be born again”, unable to leave behind his belief in, his trust in his Jewishness, and the assurance that comes from being a son of Abraham, he could not envisage a birth other than the birth to a Jewish mother, for which he would have praised God daily. Jesus challenges us to throw away our assumptions about our own holiness, and our own importance, knowing that spiritual life comes from God, not from the circumstances surrounding our lives.  In verse 6, Jesus underlines this point “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” – he is saying, ‘indeed you are a child of Abraham through your natural birth; but to be fully a child of God, you must be born spiritually, too’. For us, we can never change our biological parents, we cannot, indeed, return to the womb, and be born a child of Abraham in the literal sense; but we can, and we must come to God, seeking spiritual rebirth.

If you don’t quite follow, don’t worry – you are in good company- verse 9 records forever that Nicodemus doesn't get it - “How can these things be?” he asks. Jesus’ response, although slightly cryptic, is key to understanding the whole exchange:

“¹² If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? ¹³ No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man”

Jesus is not just “a teacher”. Jesus is not just “a rabbi”, as long as Nicodemus, or we, approach him looking simply for moral teachings, we will miss the point. Jesus has descended from heaven. He is God-with-us. We repeat it, too often by rote, and fail to be challenged profoundly when we say it. We become like the Pharisees, expecting Jesus to help us live right, expecting him to condemn those who fail to keep to our standards. Jesus rejects this. “of course you don’t understand” says Jesus to Nicodemus. “you are trying to make things right by a moral code” and so often we persist in the same approaches. As long as we approach Jesus in the same way that Nicodemus does here, demoting him to Moral Teacher, we will fail to understand the gospel.

And what is the gospel? Jesus gives us a hint in his closing exchange with Nicodemus:

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,^{[f] 15} that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

Nicodemus must be dumbstruck at this; it seems too easy – “everyone who believes may have eternal life”. Of course it is not at all “easy”, because it was not easy for Christ. This “lifting up” to which refers is his cross; and to believe in Christ means to follow him, bearing our own cross daily. This is a call to participate in the Life of God, it is a call to take part in God’s action in the world. By believing in Christ, being born of the Spirit, we live out the will of the Father – And this is what Nicodemus had wanted all along, he just couldn't yet see it.

Amen.