John 3:1-16 | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

Second Sunday in Lent | March 5, 2023 | John 3:1-16 | Paula Murray |

3 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. ²This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” ³Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” ⁴Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” ⁵Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. ⁶That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ ⁸The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” ⁹Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” ¹⁰Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? ¹¹Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. ¹²If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?¹³No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. ¹⁴And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.¹⁶“For God so loved the world,^[i] that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

You have all heard the phrase, if you cannot say something nice about someone, say nothing at all. As a reminder that gossip wrecks all sorts of damage and it is not our job to judge the sins of another, this bit of moral guidance has its uses. But if it functions as a means by which we fail to discern the motives and means of the people around us, say something nice or nothing at all can be every bit as injurious as gossip or slander. I present for your consideration Nicodemus, whose early interaction with Jesus has been, frankly, caricatured as timidity, lack of faith, and out and out cowardice. All of these less than fully admirable characteristics are likely attributed to Nicodemus as a consequence of this morning’s Gospel story, when Nicodemus pays a clandestine visit to Jesus over the course of a night. The apparent timidity of his opening question does not help, especially where it appears that he is buttering up a possibly annoyed Jesus. I mean, it is night, time for resting not conversations with rattled rich men. And Nicodemus, he was a rich man, and a well-connected one, too. The nighttime visit is clearly a matter of Nicodemus hiding his interest in Jesus from others of his own class. But is that cowardice, or wisdom?

I do believe that we must at least grant the possibility that Nicodemus’ nighttime visit to the itinerant Rabbi was cautionary and not cowardly. Jesus’ preaching and healing has attracted attention because God clearly works through Him. Crowds of people follow Him, crowds of hundreds and thousands, and the very size of His following is terrifying for the leaders of both the Temple and Judea, not just because Jesus’ preaching and teaching draws attention to their abuse of power but because it also may make their foreign oppressors nervous. Remember, Judea is governed not only by its own small-time kings but also the armies and the administrators of Rome, the most powerful Empire the world had ever known in that day. Nicodemus is a player in a world full of players, all rich and influential men, and he has been privy to their panicked speculations about Jesus and their willingness, increasing daily, to put an end to this problem of theirs once and for all. It makes sense, then, for a man not blinded by the wealth and power of Jesus’ enemies, to find a way to speak with Jesus privately, that he might make up his own mind about who this Jesus guy is. For reasons of the social and political environment of the day and Nicodemus’ own position within it, it makes sense that Nicodemus meet with Jesus when the meeting cannot be seen by the gossips.

Not that Nicodemus necessarily returns to his own home that night knowing what he needs to know for a path through the quagmire that was life in Jerusalem in that era. It was, for old Nicodemus, a most confusing talk, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but as confusing as that talk was, Nicodemus did not walk entirely away from Jesus. He gave Him his support, and we know that because there are two more instances in the Gospel of John when Nicodemus has a role in Jesus’ life and His ministry.

The second time the Bible records Nicodemus’ role in Jesus’ affairs is found towards the end of the seventh chapter. The Pharisees and other leaders have moved by this time from merely thinking about killing Jesus to actively planning His death. In fact, they send soldiers to arrest Jesus, but the soldiers, after listening to Jesus preach, refuse to arrest Him. The leaders who sent the soldiers angrily accuse them and the crowds around Jesus of being deceived by this upstart Galilean because they are all ignorant of the law and cursed by God for it. Clearly, that is not the way God saw it, nor did Nicodemus see it that way. He asked those who sent the soldiers to arrest Jesus, “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” And those men with whom Nicodemus dined out and who depended on his funds and his power to further their causes turned on Nicodemus, and accused him of being one of those dumb, provincial Galileans, too. Nicodemus clearly put himself in a dangerous situation with the powerbase of Judean politicians and priests, and he does so again at the end of John’s Gospel, chapter nineteen, when, again in secret, he takes an unbelievable 75 pounds of expensive myrrh and aloes, spices, in other words, to the place where Arimathea received Jesus’ body after getting permission from Pilate to take Him down from the cross. Together, the two men do what they can to prepare Jesus’ body for burial given that it is almost time for the Passover, and they bury Him in an unused tomb.

Despite the secrecy involved in two of the three occasions in the Gospel of John where Nicodemus has some part to play in Jesus’ ministry, in no way does Nicodemus reveal himself to be timid or cowardly. Cautious, yes, and he had the right to be cautious, given even the rich and powerful can be undone when they counter the ways of leadership. Nicodemus seems rather to be an honest seeker after God, and willing to risk himself if he absolutely must to seek the truth about God’s work through Jesus for our salvation. When Nicodemus snuck into the house where Jesus was staying one night, his first remarks to Jesus demonstrated that he had seen a difference between the leaders of Israel perceptions of Jesus and what Jesus actually did. So, he said to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” Notice that Nicodemus calls Jesus’ healing the sick and dying a sign and not a miracle. That’s the Apostle John for you; from the beginning of his Gospel to its end he speaks of signs pointing us to Jesus and the knowledge that He is the incarnate Son of God, born to die to accomplish what we cannot, our redemption from sin and death.

So, Jesus’ ministry reveals His nature and His work through these signs, which Nicodemus is slow to understand, for he does not have the benefit of our hindsight. After all, we know how this all ends. Nicodemus does not, not at this point. Jesus’ response does seem out there in left field, until we realize that He is answering the question hidden in Nicodemus opening statement, not the bit of open flattery he seems to offer. Remember, Nicodemus is a politician of sorts, so while he appears to be fluffing up Jesus’ ego, he is really asking Jesus if He is Who those signs declare Him to be, the Messiah, the Savior of the world. Jesus’ answer comes in the form of a glorious sort of “yes, but” as He says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

“Say, what?” responds a confused Nicodemus. There are a couple of interesting things about the Greek in this passage that English translations tend to obscure. The first is that the Greek word at the center of Jesus’ response is anaothen, which can mean again, anew, or from above. Weirdly enough, our Bible translation utilizes the word “again”, which is clearly how Nicodemus interprets it, literally, for his response gives us a gross image of an old guy trying to climb back into his even older mother’s womb. But the rest of the conversation, which is centered on the differences between the flesh and the spirit, shows us that Jesus means anaothen to mean “from above” for the spirit is from the kingdom of heaven, which is from above while the flesh is of this world only. “Truly, truly,” Jesus says yet again. Whenever some word or some phrase is said twice it is for emphasis, so we know to take what follows the trulies seriously. So, says our Lord to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Well, what is Jesus talking about when He says, “born of water and the spirit”? Baptism, yes. The spirit of God imparted to each of us by God goes and does what He wills; we do not control the spirit. Nicodemus remains terribly confused by what Jesus says, and when he asks, “How can this be,” Jesus pokes a bit at him, telling him that he would understand this already if he, Nicodemus, was truly born of the spirit, or born anew from above.

At some point, Nicodemus comes to understand Jesus’ preaching, that only He, Jesus, is come from above, from the kingdom of God, and those of us who believe this are given eternal life when we, too, are born anew of the spirit from above. Otherwise we would not hear from him again in the Scriptures as we do twice more in those citations from the Gospel of John described earlier. We do not know if it happens here, in the third chapter of John’s Gospel, or later, but it happens. Nicodemus becomes, somehow, a disciple or follower of Jesus. We do not know when Nicodemus becomes a Christ follower because this is where the second interesting twist of the Greek comes in this Gospel passage. From verse 11 onwards Jesus is talking to the whole world not just Nicodemus. The word for “you” changes from the singular to the plural, so Jesus reminds us all that we know God’s will from His Word and from the witness of other believers, so it is our failure when we do not see in His healing and preaching the love of God, just as the Israelites did not see the love of God as they wandered through the wilderness. Those defiant Israelites were punished with bites from poisonous snakes, which bites were cured when Moses followed God’s instructions and had a raised stake with a image of a snake wound about it paraded through the Israelite’s encampment. Now, says Jesus, the cure for sin and death will be the raising up of His own holy and sinless body on the cross, and all of us who see that and believe in Him will be given eternal life.

Here, only now, do we get to that most famous of all verses from the Gospel of John, verse 16, memorialized on cardboard placards at football games and parades, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life,” and verse 17, never cited on those bits of cardboard held up for the benefit of camera but every bit as important as verse 16, “For God did not send His Son into the world in order to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.” Jesus’ enemies, those powerful companions of Nicodemus, do indeed see their desire fulfilled; Jesus is raised up on a Roman cross and dies horribly, but their intent is thwarted even so, for in His dying are we all saved. Nicodemus cautious willingness to let Jesus speak for Himself and God’s intent is rewarded with faith and a hope that is eternal.

Like Nicodemus, we see around us people who proclaim loudly and often arrogantly that they do not believe that Jesus died on the cross to redeem them from sin and death or even that Jesus lived. Few of those people have any acquaintance with the Bible, and fewer still will listen long enough to hear another bear witness to the wonders of their life in Christ. The great treasure that God has set before them goes unopened, and like the Israelites in the desert their faithlessness leads only to darkness and death. They are of the world, the world that in its sin-shrouded darkness resists the truth of God’s Word and those He sent to preach it.

That same darkness reaches out for us even now, even though we believe. We ourselves do not treasure our Bibles as we should, knowing them to be the portal through which Christ’s Holy Spirit reaches out to us to not only give us faith but also to sustain us in it. We are too busy for it, or we don’t understand it, or it pales in comparison, we secretly think, to the latest show of Blue Bloods or the WWE or some idiot blog post that keeps our eyes glued not to the Light come into the world but to a vanishingly small phone screen. Then, too often, we think ourselves better than the Nicodemus types of the world, smarter, wiser as we are of this century, not the first century, and because of all the progress the world has made in medicine and law and the like since Nicodemus’ day. Certainly, I prefer to live in an era where antibiotics can be easily obtained, indeed, I only live because such is the case. But it is just as clear that while humanity’s knowledge and technology has advanced, our nature has not. We are every bit as great a group of sinners as those who came before us, we just live more comfortable lives and when we kill we can kill hundreds of thousands of people at a time, not just a few hundreds.

Open then that treasure God gave us that resides in our Bibles and our devotionals, for it is light and life for you and for the world, and you are every bit as much His messenger as was the Apostle John and Nicodemus. As Christ so loved the world that He would willingly die for it, ought we not, who gladly receive the free gift of salvation through His death on the cross and His resurrection, be every bit as willing to share the Good News? Not secretly, as in, “I’ll pray for that silly sinner,” but publicly, in the full light of day, with the expectation that God’s Spirit will open the portal to faith and the love of Christ.

Paula Murray