John 3:16 is
the most ubiquitous passage in the whole Bible. All over this country it’s on
billboards, painted on the roofs of barns; it’s on most of the handed out
tracts that threaten you with the fires of hell. This being Trinity Sunday I
will not really address how it’s understood at large, other than to condemn how
often this passage is used in the service of the sin of supremacy, which Larry
addressed in the form of racism last Sunday.
Tonight I’ll
be focusing on a curious verse that stuck out to me upon reading this week, the
full implications of which I think is very relevant to the revelation of the
Trinity. I’m speaking of verse 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?”
Which is it’s way, an answer to all Nicodemus’ questions.
Story after
story after story in John, Jesus speaks of a spiritual truth and the person who
is listening takes him to be speaking of something empirical and gets totally
confused. Here it’s Nicodemus saying, “How can you get back inside your
mother’s womb?” Which is a disturbing image no matter how you look at it.
So, if
indeed Jesus is speaking of spiritual things here, why does he say he’s
speaking of earthy things? I literally asked myself that question and pondered
it for longer than I want to admit before I realized the mistaken assumption it
contained.
I was
reminded (by a fellow priest) that the Kingdom of God is here on earth. When
Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God he is speaking of earthly things. It’s the
modern mind that makes the empirical earthly and the spiritual heavenly. Both
spirit and flesh exist on earth. Spirit is the life that animates the flesh.
Too often when we hear flesh spoken of in the Bible we think it refers to
bodily matters. But no, to speak of the flesh without the animating spirit is
to speak of the dead.
Jesus speaks
of the spirit as like the wind, and in our creation story God, God’s word, and
the Spirit (wind) is where all spirit animated flesh comes from. And this
threefold God continues her work in the world throughout history. Each person
of the Trinity communicates to us in their own way. This is something humans
experience, here on earth.
Nicodemus’
question, “How can you get back inside your mother’s womb?” makes him look like
a fool… unless you look at it as Nicodemus saying that in the same spirit Jesus
spoke of a camel going through the eye of a needle. That the kind of rebirth
Jesus is asking of him is impossible. We’ll get back to that in a moment. For
now I want to suggest that Nicodemus’ question, "How can these things
be?" contains even more misunderstanding than the former.
When
Christianity is presented to us as a set of doctrines that we must
intellectually assert, then we naturally ask this kind of question. Okay, I’m
supposed to understand this if I claim empirical belief in it, can you explain
it to me in a way that makes sense? But intellectual assertation is not what
Jesus is looking for. “Do you not feel the wind?” Jesus asks.
And I ask
each of you. Do you not see the work of the Spirit around you? Do you not eat
the flesh and blood of Christ? Do you not hear God in the still small voice
within? Do you not marvel at the beauty of creation? Do you feel love in your
heart? Does the phrase God is Love make actual sense or is it something you
feel, that resonates within you?
No doubt you
wouldn’t be here if in some way or other if you hadn’t felt the touch of God’s
love. Nor would you be here if in some way God hadn’t expressed that love by
becoming one of us in Jesus. And God did this so that we might live anew. That
we might enter into God’s kingdom.
More and
more I have come to believe that we as a species are quite literally suicidal.
As in collectively (though perhaps unconsciously) we do think it's better for
us to go extinct. Edgar Allan Poe's the Imp of the Perverse contains more truth
than you’d think the little essay/story could, in that none of our popular
doctrines or philosophies really address that truth. Any will to live within us
is that original animating spirit at work, the spirit we share with all life on
earth. But that clearly wasn’t enough for us. We live in death through torture
and greed. The social consequences are clear before us, global warming for one example.
It is in
this sense that I can read into Nicodemus’ resistance a belief that the kind of
rebirth Jesus is asking of him is impossible. We are hell bent on
self-destruction. God knows this. Which is why Christ invites us, entices us,
coaxes us, loves us into desiring life in God eternal (not in heaven after we
are extinct.) We need a life we don’t want to lose. We need a life that is something entirely
different. That life, and the will to live that life, that is truly our
salvation.
Readings:
