How Can This Be?

Lent 2A: John 3:1-17

How can this be? That’s the question secularists and skeptics put to us today. How can it be that God exists when there is no proof? How can it be that God is good, when the world is full of evil and suffering and tragedies like natural disasters and cancer? How can it be that God is real, when our best philosophers tell us that God is just a myth, a projection of our own psychological needs, a story the powerful wield to justify their rule. We all “know” there’s no Sky-Daddy up there dictating rules for humanity. Our lives are what we make of them. The world is the result of atoms colliding into other atoms eons ago, right, and we humans are but the result of our historical, psychological, and genetic development, nothing more. You say that God exists and is involved in our lives, but how can that be?

Nicodemus asks that same question in today’s Gospel lesson. Nicodemus, we understand, is a Jewish leader, a respected man. But more than that, he’s smart. He’s got a list of credentials as long as your arm—advanced theological degrees, honorary doctorates, half-a-column in the Jerusalem edition of Who’s Who. Nevertheless, this Nicodemus seeks Jesus out, comes to him at night, most likely because he doesn’t want to be seen associating with an unlettered teacher like Jesus. Yet he hopes Jesus might be able to shed some light on a question he’s been wrestling with.

Only, we don’t find out what that question is, because, before Nicodemus is able to get through his introduction, Jesus cuts him off. He says to him, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.” Nicodemus is immediately caught off guard. Whatever question he had is forgotten in the face of Jesus’ declaration. “Born again—how can this be?,” Nicodemus is thinking. “How can it be that someone old like me can be born again? Am I to crawl back into my mother’s womb?” Jesus doesn’t answer his question but doubles down, “Unless one is born of water and the spirit, they cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

What on earth is this guy talking about? Seeing Nicodemus’ befuddlement, Jesus razzes the revered leader: “Aren’t you supposed to be part of Israel’s educated elite? You should know these things, but you clearly don’t. You claim to be ‘in the know,’ but you are ‘in the dark.’ You can’t even tell which way the wind is blowing, a worldly matter. So what would you know about what the Spirit is up to? ‘How can this be?’”

At the root of Nicodemus’ misunderstanding, we recognize, are the words Jesus uses. When Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be “born again,” Nicodemus takes it straightforwardly, literally. “Do I have to climb back into my mother’s womb and be reborn?” But the word Nicodemus hears, that is translated “again,” the Greek word anothen, is in fact a ‘double entendre’; it has two meanings. It can sometimes mean “again,” but more often the meaning is “from above.” And so, what Jesus tells Nicodemus is he cannot enter the Kingdom of God unless he is “born from above.” That may strike you as a trivial distinction, “born again” vs “born from above,” but it’s not. Because, in that word, we grasp just what it was that Jesus was getting at, and what Nicodemus was missing.

You see, to tell someone who’s already grown old that they need to be “born from above” necessarily implies a second birth. But being born again is not what is important, but rather the character of that birth, the kind of birth, where are we born out of. All of us have been born of our mothers, born on earth. And we have our life from the earth; we get our sustenance from it. But by saying that one must be “born from above,” Jesus is suggesting a new kind of birth, a birth not like the one we’ve all had, from the earth, but a birth “from above,” from heaven. To be “born from above” is to come from above, that is, to have our being, our sustenance, and our direction from “above,” as opposed to “below,” from earth.

What Jesus is implying here is a “two-story universe,” where the world we know, the one we can see and hear and touch, the world of rocks and water, plants and animals, physics and chemistry and biology—is on one level, the bottom level, and the upper level is the spiritual level, the level of God, angels, heaven, and the like.

Only, we shouldn’t think of these levels in spatial terms, with the earth below and heaven literally above the earth, in the clouds, or outer space. That spatial relationship—above and below—is not to be taken literally. It points rather to the ranking of these two realms—the spiritual level is “higher” than the earthly level, because it’s more important, has “higher authority.” It’s also higher in the sense that the higher covers the lower, encompasses it, includes it. That’s to say, when we speak of “spiritual” things, we are not speaking of something other than the things of this world, but rather about how ‘the above’ relates to ‘the below,’ and how it gives the everyday world a new quality, a new dimension, new meaning. It is to look on the earth and on history from a heavenly vantage point.

Which is why the metaphor of a “two-story universe” doesn’t work in the end. Because really, there’s just one “story,” one level, one world, the world of matter and spirit, where the earthly, physical realm is infused by the spiritual. Just like how it takes a clarinet and breath together to make music or wood and heat to make a fire, creation involves both the material and the spiritual.

To enter the Kingdom of God, then, Jesus says, one must first recognize that there is more to this world than just what we see, that there’s a reality beyond, behind, above this reality, which animates and directs this world. One must be able to perceive in this world signs of heaven, to see this other, invisible reality manifest in the visible world, to see the spirit in the substance, the meaning in the matter.

Nicodemus, being not only a religious man but part of an educated elite, should have been able to understand this. But instead when Jesus speaks of things that are “above” this world, his words are “above,” beyond, what Nicodemus can comprehend. Jesus is “talking over his head” in more than one sense!

Thinking on this higher level is something a lot of Christianity’s cultured critics aren’t able to do either, strangely enough. I mean, one of the defining characteristics of our intellectual elite is that they are able to comprehend abstractions. They find it easy to think in terms of abstract ideas—things like systems and markets, data storage architecture and mortgage-backed securities, -isms and ideologies, and concepts like rights and equality, justice and beauty. This is in contrast to physical things, like woodworking and wiring, bodies and buildings. Our intellectual elite specializes in abstract concepts, in understanding how words and ideas work and how they can manipulate them and exploit them. This is the world they live in, the world of abstractions, of “higher” thoughts. And yet, when it comes to the things of God, our intellectual elites remain stuck on the ground floor. Like Nicodemus, they can’t imagine anything above this world. They know nothing of the spiritual world that is entangled in the earthly. To them, there’s just one level, one dimension, the dimension of flat reality.

You see this in how secular people talk about God. They think of God as if he were a thing, a being among other beings…not as Being itself, the origin and governor of all that exists. They say that science has never been able to prove the existence of God and so God cannot exist… forgetting that God is not a thing that science can study, not matter or energy, but is in fact the One who set the laws that govern matter and energy. They speak of the universe as the product of random chance, oblivious to the evidence of intelligent design. They reduce ethics to maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain…even though we’ve seen how hedonic pleasures degrade us physically and spiritually and how meaning makes suffering not only bearable, but redemptive. And when they read in Scripture about a talking snake, a great fish that can swallow a man whole, the earth being formed in six days, and people living several hundreds of years, they take these things literally, which allows them to dismiss them and ignore the larger symbolic truths they point to.

But as Jesus tells Nicodemus, in order to understand God, in order to “enter God’s kingdom,” you have to be “born from above,” have to accept the world as symbolic, to recognize the spiritual dimension this world was made with.

There’s a reason this story of Nicodemus comes when it does in the church year, at the start of Lent. In the early church, Lent was not just a season of penitence but also a time when seekers, those interested in becoming Christian, would prepare for baptism at Easter. They would spend a year or more learning “how to be Christian,” taking on the behaviors and practices of the church. And then on the Sundays leading up to Easter, they would hear lessons from John’s Gospel—stories of Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the man born blind, the raising of Lazarus—the stories we are reading this Lent. These particular lessons were chosen because together they progressively unfold the meaning of baptism they were about to experience.

Today’s lesson about Nicodemus and being “born from above,” coming at the start of this journey, highlights for us how baptism “births us” into the spiritual dimension of reality, how becoming Christian opens us to how the world is not just matter and energy colliding into each other, but is the work of a good God who lovingly created all that is with meaning and purpose and significance, that is, created it to be a sign, a symbol of God’s grace and glory, power and love.

Indeed, in today’s reading, we are given a clue to what the meaning, the significance, of it all is, what the overall message of the Bible is, the purpose of God’s actions. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

These are probably the most famous verses in the New Testament, if not the whole Bible, and for good reason. As Frederick Dale Bruner points out, these verses are the “greatest” ever:

God = The greatest subject ever

So (much) = The greatest extent ever

Loved = The greatest affection ever

The world = The greatest object ever

That He gave his one and only Son = The greatest gift ever

So that everyone, every single person = The greatest opportunity ever

Who believes, entrusts themselves to him = The greatest commitment ever

Would never be destroyed = The greatest rescue ever

But would even now have a deep, lasting Life = The greatest promise ever

For those who do not understand, who cannot see from the “second story” of the universe, who live as if there is nothing more to life than what you see, nothing transcendent, this is all nonsense. To them, Jesus was just an itinerant rabbi in a backwater province of the Roman Empire who got caught up in a messianic movement and was sadly executed for it. But John tells us that Jesus was more than that. In this famous verse, he explains the meaning of Jesus, the significance of his death—God wants all of us, everyone, to share in his everlasting, overflowing life.

As we continue our Lenten journey towards Good Friday, towards the cross, the story of Nicodemus reminds us what this is all about, what the Bible and the church say is the reason God sent Jesus: that no matter how far we feel from God, no matter how long we’ve lived ignoring God’s presence in our lives, no matter what we’ve done or how guilty we feel, or wounded or sullied, Jesus came to save us, to redeem us, to give us new life, eternal life, a life that is so abundant that it cannot be contained in this life but spills over into the next.

This truth cannot be seen from the ground level, thinking in purely earthly terms. But Jesus offers us new birth, birth “from above,” so that we no longer have to wonder, How can this be? but can instead accept and experience the new life we have in Christ. And for that we say, thanks be to God!