First Presbyterian Church
Rev. Sam Pendergrast
February 17, 2008
John 3:1-21
“With Jesus at Night”
This reading from the third chapter of the Gospel of John contain some of the best known words in the all of the Bible. If I asked you to tell me what verses of scripture you know by heart, many of you might include these in your “top ten.” They rank right up there with “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” “The Lord is my shepherd,” and “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” If I asked you to quote me John 3:16, many of you would respond immediately that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
Despite the fact that many Christians could tell you what John 3:16 says, there is a growing Biblical illiteracy in our churches. I would not be surprised to find Biblical illiteracy in a football stadium. I would not be surprised if, in response to the “John 3:16” sign being held up in the stands above the end zone, someone wondered which player was John and why they couldn’t see a jersey with number 316 on it. (Of course, that would be a bad case of football illiteracy, too.) Neither am I surprised that many Christians and church members do not know the Bible, because pastors and churches have done a poor job of theological and Biblical education in recent decades. As I said last week, many Christian leaders and many Christians have made way too many assumptions about what “everyone” knows and have done far too little to form people in faith and give them tools to interpret both the Bible and the signs of the times. Many Christians simply would not know that the famous John 3:16 comes from a conversation between Jesus and the Pharisee, Nicodemus. Nor would they be likely to know that the well-known phrase “born again” traces its origin to that conversation.
Our Protestant heritage has been diminished by new movements that have substituted simplistic slogans (like “born again”) for mystery, certainty for faith and entertainment for worship. In a post-9/11 world, the temptation to settle for certainty and safety has made it all the more difficult to live out and to proclaim a belief that we live by faith, we are not in control and that we find life by dying and being born from above – being born anew. At its heart, Christian faith is not about what we know and can be sure of, but about Who we trust.
If it is true that there are many Christians who have retained the form and ritual of our religious heritage but have lost much of the content, it is also true that there are plenty of people out there who don’t have a clue what we’re talking about, to whom our vocabulary and statements of belief are a foreign language. We talk about Jesus as someone who is both divine and human, the “incarnation,” as we say, of God in human flesh. How do we know this? How do we dare to speak of such a mystery as glibly as we would talk about the weather or the latest basketball game? If we do not tremble even as we make such affirmations, maybe we don’t have enough appreciation for the awesome nature of what we are trying to express and the utter impossibility of human persons ever being able to capture what is, in the end, beyond our capacity to define or to understand? If we are to bear an honest witness to our faith, we will do so with the humility of those who know how little we really know.
Nicodemus thought he knew something. He thought he could define Jesus, thought he had him pegged. “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” The reader has been warned a few verses earlier, at the end of chapter 2, that Jesus knew many people were impressed with the signs he performed. The problem was that they were drawn to him by his celebrity status rather than because they wanted a whole new life. So we really don’t expect Jesus to be taken in by Nicodemus’ flattery. Poor Nicodemus. He knew just enough to be confused. Just like many of us. And then Jesus comes back at him with a non sequitur that must have made his head spin. “No one can see the
Nicodemus did not get much of an answer to his questions. What he got was Jesus. He got this one who, especially in John’s Gospel, presents himself in ambiguous images and poetic sayings. The wind blows where it chooses. You must be born of water and the Spirit. John could be talking about the waters of physical birth; he could be talking about the waters of baptism. Either way, when we come up out of the waters of baptism we are born anew by God’s Spirit. We are not in charge of being born, whether we’re talking about physical birth or spiritual birth. The new life God gives us is a process of renewal and transformation that lasts our whole life long. We never arrive. We never have it all figured out. Despite our best systematic theology, there is always a provisional character to all of our doctrinal statements. We live on the edge of a mystery that is not in our control.
There are churches today that achieve popularity and a measure of worldly success by offering simplistic answers, systematic steps to happiness and slogans for every situation. They give the impression that Christian faith can be reduced to a self-help book. If we give the impression that Christians are people who have it all figured out and have defined Jesus so we can keep him in our pocket and believe everything with no further doubts or questions, we have deceived ourselves as badly as had Nicodemus. But Jesus always eludes our attempts to hang him on a peg (or a cross, for that matter). When we reject him, he rises again from death. When we think we’ve got him pinned down, he baffles us with talk about wind and water, the Spirit and new birth. Jesus is elusive, free, sovereign. He is the living God who makes sense out of us, rather than we being the ones who make sense out of him.
Nicodemus did take a risk. He did take the big step of even coming to Jesus at all. After all, in John’s Gospel, that is how people come to be disciples. They seek him out. They say, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” and he says, “Come and see.” And their lives are never the same. There is a lot of imagery of light and darkness in this encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes to see Jesus at night. He was brave enough to come. He was not brave enough to come in the daylight. Although, given the fact that John speaks of Jesus as “the light of the world that the darkness has not overcome,” maybe Nicodemus’ world is made brighter by his nighttime encounter with the Light. After all, it was Nicodemus who came with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to help Joseph of Arimathea bury Jesus’ body. It appears that his encounter with Jesus changed him in some way. Did he become a disciple? Did he find a new birth? How was he changed by visit with Jesus? We don’t know. What we do know is that it is not up to us to define Jesus. It is Jesus who defines us.
Jesus seems deliberately ambiguous in this scene. Nicodemus probably left that night with his head spinning. Even if your head is not spinning, the Christian faith is confusing to some people; it is boring to others; to some, we Christians are simply too smug and have too many pat answers to the ultimate questions of life. Jesus and religion are confusing enough. Let’s not add to the alienation some people feel whose faith is a delicate balance of doubt and trust.
David James Duncan wrote a novel called The Brothers K in which one of the characters in a family with a wide-ranging religious experience, talks about how confusing Jesus is.
Personally, I’m not sure just who or what Christ is. I still pray to him in a pinch, but I talk to myself in a pinch too – and I’m getting less and less sure there’s a difference. Mamma tried to clear up all the confusion by saying that Christ is exactly what the Bible says he is. But what does the Bible say he is? On one page he’s a Word, on the next a bridegroom, then he’s a boy, then a scapegoat, then a thief in the night; read on and he’s the Messiah, then, oops, he’s a rabbi, then a fraction – a third of the Trinity – then a fisherman, then a broken loaf of bread. I guess even God, when he’s human, has trouble deciding just what he is.
That’s a humorous expression of what, for some, is a painful and confusing mess when they try to find meaning in times of stress and struggle. We live out our trust in God in an in-between time, in between the cross and the end of history, in between Jesus’ victory over sin and evil and its final culmination when all things are made new. We live out our faith as faith – not certainty but a trust that the God who holds us is faithful. The God who loves us knows that we are dust, knows that we are mortal and finite. If we act as though we know all the answers we will offend or alienate those for whom belief is a struggle. In fact, if belief is not a struggle, maybe we have too much of a sense that we are in control and have not appreciated the reality of being born from above, being born anew.
An Orthodox priest, Kallistos Ware, put it this way: “In the Christian context, we do not mean by a ‘mystery’ merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God.”
Another pastor tells the story of a friend who grew up in an old-fashioned, traditional conservative church which took pride in demanding that all its children memorize the catechism so that they would know the answers to all the important questions of faith. His friend dutifully came to catechism classes where he was taught all of the right answers to all those big questions. But as an adult, he grew away from the church, and says that he lost his faith. The good news is that he came back. He said, when this other pastor asked him what brought him back, “I wish that my church had asked me about my questions when I was a kid. All they gave me was a list of answers. So I got all the right answers, but I never got the reason for the answers. Now I’ve got Jesus who is a lot better even than the right answers.”
Maybe old Nicodemus would have said something of the same thing. Not immediately. He seems still to have been in the dark at the end of his conversation with Jesus. But he did come to the Light, even though he came at night. After he helped Joseph bury Jesus, and after the resurrection, who knows what he knew? Maybe he knew what the best of us know – that we don’t need to have it all pinned down, that we are O. K. with unanswered questions and doubts, that doubt is a part of faith, and that Jesus knows that we are mortal and see and know only in part. The Spirit blows where it will. We cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. We can only let out our string, hang on and try to keep our kite out of the branches. God has the answers. And God has us. And God will never let go.
One of my favorite books of meditations for pastors includes these thoughts on Mystery:
Do not forget that you serve a Mystery that neither you nor your father’s father nor your mother’s mother began. And the laughter and the tears that accompany your labor are not born of your cleverness or your holiness, but are reflections of the Mystery of God in the still waters of the eternal lake by moonlight. The God you serve is like an eternal lake whose waters are always calm and clear like glass, reflecting truth to all who gaze upon them. A million million reflections and the lake remains the same. It is not your job to stir the waters but to show the way to the lakeside.
My friends, I hope you can trust that all will be well and that God is for you, whether you think you have the answers or not, whether you are full of doubt and struggle or whether your life is calm and tranquil. We are safe in the mystery of God. Amen.