Lent 2A
March 5, 2023
John 3:1-17
INTRODUCTION
Today’s texts are all about faith. In Abraham’s case, he trusts a God who is basically a stranger to him and his kinsfolk, doing something that likely seemed ridiculous to everyone he cared about simply because this stranger God told him to. In John, we will hear the story of Nicodemus, a devout teacher of the law, who comes to Jesus by night with his questions. This text will include the most famous thumbnail expression of the Christian faith: John 3:16. Psalm 121 and Romans 5 will offer us commentary especially on Abraham’s remarkable faith, but also on the practice of faith in general.
Faith. It’s something we all claim to have, or at least try to have, though some days may be better than others on that front. And yet, it is also something notoriously difficult to understand or describe. As a pastor, I hear a lot about people’s joys and their struggles with faith, as you can imagine, and most of the time, people have more questions than answers about their faith. If this describes you, today’s readings are for you! Whether you are a lifetime believer and practicer of faith, like Nicodemus, or someone very new to encountering God, like Abraham, or somewhere in between, there is something here for you today.
We will hear our questions theme show up loud and clear today. As you listen, think about which of the many questions you’ll hear resonates most with you and your heart today. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Remember these? [show baptism drop] We handed these out in January, on the day we celebrated the Baptism of our Lord. The sermon that day was about how God draws near to us, especially in baptism, but in any number of other ways as well. You were challenged to watch this year for how God is drawing near to you through the word on your water drop (water to recall your baptism). Remember that?
The word on my baptism drop is knowledge. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t thrilled with it when I got it, and I’m still not. Not because I don’t love and value knowledge, but because I sometimes think I love and value knowledge too much already! I come from a long line of highly knowledgeable and educated people, in which degrees of higher education are the norm. I have a hunger to learn, and even in my faith, I tend to approach it head-first. I have shelves full of books to prove it! In fact, my team of mental and spiritual health professionals have urged me to branch out a bit from my constant interest in gaining knowledge and leading with my head: my counselor once told me I needed to stop reading self-help psychology books and read more fiction. And my spiritual director has told me more than once to give my busy brain a rest and let myself “drop into my heart place,” approaching God with heart open and soul bared, rather than with an intention to figure something out.
All this to say: I really relate to Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, meaning he is highly educated. He is committed to the law, to the ways that law is expressed in the Torah, and he can see that there is something compelling, if unnerving, about Jesus, who claims to be a rabbi. Nicodemus doesn’t completely understand, but knows that this Jesus is worth paying attention to. Now, if this were 2023, maybe Nicodemus would have stayed late in the office, after everyone has left, so he could privately Google this conflict, typing into his search engine key phrases like “signs and miracles,” “powers and God’s presence,” and, “is it scientifically possible to turn water into wine.” He was curious, and wanted to learn more, yet he could not let his colleagues know of his interest in Jesus. So, he approached his questions in the next most secretive way: by going to the source, but doing so by the shadow of night, so he wouldn’t be seen.
I should add here, though, that while this may have been Nicodemus’s motivation for coming to Jesus by night, St. John has a different motivation in telling us the time of day. In John’s Gospel, darkness and light have deeply symbolic meanings. In short, with Jesus, there is light and belief and understanding, and without Jesus, there is only darkness and lack of understanding or belief. You remember back on Christmas Eve, when we turned out all the lights and lit candles and we heard from the beginning of John’s Gospel, “A light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it”? That set the tone for John’s purpose in writing this Gospel. So, whenever John mentions darkness, what he is really saying is, “This is a situation that lacks true understanding of who and what Jesus is.”
With that in mind, let’s look at this dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus. Here is Nicodemus, with his apparent intellect and knowledge about the things of God, coming to Jesus by the dark of night. His first statement seems respectful enough, and seems to acknowledge that Jesus is a teacher from whom he could learn something. “Rabbi,” he says, “we know you are a teacher who comes from God, for no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” The words are right, but he grounds that belief not in who Jesus is, but on what he does. In other words, he is basing his assertion on evidence, not relationship.
Still, Nicodemus is feeling pretty good about himself right now about: he has started off the conversation by proving that he is someone who Knows Things, a worthy conversation partner. He finds comfort in his knowledge of these things. Jesus’ response to him is, shall we say… a bit cryptic. It seems like a non sequitur. “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above, born anew.” Huh? Nicodemus, trying to keep up appearances, accidentally lets show his lack of wisdom about God by taking what Jesus says literally. With a laugh he scoffs, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Maybe he’s trying to joke with Jesus. Maybe, by means of a rhetorical question he is challenging Jesus’ statement. Regardless, the fact remains: Nicodemus has shown himself as one who has all the knowledge the world can offer, yet he lacks what it takes to step into the light that is Christ: he lacks belief.
So Jesus explains again: “You must be born from above, born of the Spirit, not dwelling in the worldly ways of the flesh. You see, there are some things that you just can’t know with your brain. You have to know them with your heart. But, that’s how it is when you’re born of the Spirit.” I can’t imagine Nicodemus liked that answer much – the suggestion that there was something that he couldn’t or didn’t know! Knowledge hadn’t failed him yet, after all! Yet he has to admit, that he is no further along in understanding, and so he offers a question that has niggled at all of our hearts at some point: “How can these things be?” With this, Nicodemus reveals that the knowledge he has counted on and trusted in all his life is failing him in his effort to grasp something that he surely realizes is very important, even life-giving and life-changing. This cannot be explained. It’s a realization that can leave us, too, feeling uneasy, with nothing to hold onto, floating in a vast space of un-knowing. Our brilliant human minds have limits. We cannot depend upon knowledge alone, at least not the sort you can read in books. “How can these things be?”
I’ll admit that Jesus’ response to this aching question has never been one of my favorite Jesus moments. “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” I have felt with Nicodemus the shame around being called out for his lack of knowledge about something clearly important.
But this time, I’m reading this question not as one meant to insult (because that’s not the Jesus we know and love!), but rather, a question offered with humor and compassion, intending to remove one of the barriers between Nicodemus and God, so that he might draw closer to the God of life. Almost as if Jesus is saying, with a twinkle in his eye, “Ah, you see, all the books you’ve read and studying you have done are not enough to let you understand the ways of God. That, my friend, takes a different kind of knowledge. It takes not knowing about God, or even about me. No, it takes knowing me, directly. It takes being in a relationship with me. And by this relationship, by this faith, this belief – that is how you will be renewed, reborn. That is how you will truly come to know God.”
Now, I still love knowledge, and gaining knowledge, and reading all different sorts of books and studying the Bible, and I’m as prone as anyone to falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. I want to know things. And I want to be clear that human knowledge is not a bad thing, nor is it unfaithful. On the contrary, study can open our minds, and prepare us to ask the sorts of questions that open us to different perspectives and experiences, help us to think more deeply and compassionately about our neighbors, and even ripen us for an encounter with God in the world, like it did for Nicodemus.
But knowledge like this is also not everything. Because the truth of it is, that God is bigger than all the human knowledge in the world. My shelves full of books and my fancy degrees will not, in the end, show me who God is, and if I think they will, then I have made knowledge into a kind of idol, just like I think Nicodemus did.
What will bring us closer to God, out of the darkness of night and into the brightness of day, is relationship. It is trust in the one who made us and loves us and gave Himself to save us – trust even when our brains want to ask, “How can these things be?” It is suspending our need for hard evidence, instead leaning on a knowledge that is apart from the knowledge of earthly things. When we can find that balance – seeking human knowledge even as we know and trust that God exceeds it – then we can surrender our hearts and our minds to the One who came that we may have life, and have it abundantly.
Let us pray… Omniscient God, we long to know things, to understand things, and most of all to know and understand you. As we seek you out through our questions and our learning, make us also content simply to trust in you and your marvelous ways, even when we don’t understand. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment