This week we’re diving into one of the most well-known chapters in the whole Bible—John 3 and the story of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus. This is one of those passages, however, that often needs a fresh look because our familiarity can sometimes blind us to the deeper layers of meaning John gives us here.
Nicodemus is one of the leaders of the Jews, an expert in the Jewish law. He is, in other words, a lot like Nathanael who we met in chapter 1, but even more so. Nicodemus was clearly respected among the people, both the elites and the common folk. He comes at night to meet with Jesus (I almost entitled this sermon, “Nick at Night”).
As with nearly everything in John’s Gospel, there’s a double layer of meaning here. Nicodemus may be coming at night because he doesn’t want to yet be seen by his peers as one who is intrigued with this Jesus. Remember, the leaders of the Jews would be the ones who would eventually call for Jesus’ crucifixion. Coming at night provided a kind of clandestine way for Nicodemus to find out about Jesus without arousing questions from others about Nicodemus’ own character.
But there’s another layer to this story that takes place at night and it has to do with one of the major themes in John: light vs. darkness. We see that in chapter one (v. 5 – “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”) For John, “darkness” or “night” is a metaphor for separation from the presence of God, or a place of unbelief, sin, and death. Nicodemus, though he is a respected teacher of the law, comes out of a place of spiritual darkness that, like his peers, prevents him from seeing Jesus as the true light that has come into the world, the very glory of God, as John calls him in chapter one. For John, the light defeats the darkness.
When I was a kid I used to go and visit my grandparents who lived on a little farmette in rural western PA. Pap had an old shed on the property where he kept a lot of his gardening tools, so every so often he would ask me to go fetch something from the shed.
Now, truth be told, the shed scared me to death. It was always dark in there and really dusty, with cobwebs everywhere and all kinds of sharp and rusty instruments everywhere, kind of like a medieval torture chamber. There was one bare lightbulb hanging from the creaky ceiling and you had to turn that on to find anything. What I hated the most was the moment I flipped the light switch, because as soon as that light came on I would hear all kinds of scurrying as all the various mice and snakes and critters bolted for the dark corners, out of sight. Talk about creepy!
For John, Jesus’ coming was kind of like flipping that light switch on in the shed. Jesus’ coming, the Word made flesh, shed a bright light on the evil of the world and exposed it, causing it to run scurrying for the dark corners. You will see John use this often throughout his Gospel.
Nicodemus approaches Jesus not with a question, but with a statement: “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” (3:2). “We” is Nicodemus and his peers in the Jewish leadership, and this “we” sees Jesus as a “Rabbi” or “teacher” who has come from God, the evidence of which has come from the “signs” that Jesus has been doing, like turning water into wine and cleansing the Temple. Nicodemus is pretty sure that Jesus is someone special, like one of the prophets, but John wants us to know that he’s still in the dark as to the full meaning of who Jesus is: The Word made flesh, God himself come to dwell among his people.
Jesus’ reply to Nicodemus thus took the Jewish leader off guard: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus expects Jesus to respond to a complement, but Jesus’ response reveals that Nicodemus doesn’t know who Jesus really is because he doesn’t yet have the eyes to do so. To be able to see Jesus as he really is requires a whole new orientation to life—a new birth.
The Judaism into which both Jesus and Nicodemus were born had a lot to do with being born into the right family: the family of Abraham. If you were born into that family you had a certain identity that marked you as a particular member of that family. The mark was even a physical one: circumcision. You were one of God’s chosen covenant people simply as a matter of birth.
Jesus, however, essentially tells Nicodemus that a new family is being formed—a family where your identity comes not so much from your biological and ethnic heritage but from “above”—meaning, from God and at God’s initiative. You need this birth in order to “see” the kingdom of God and, by extension, to really know the truth about the King himself.
Remember what “kingdom of God” means in the Gospels. It does not mean “heaven” in the sense of a faraway place above the clouds. It means God’s reign and rule on the earth. The kingdom of God is God’s redemptive mission for the whole world—a mission that humanity has been called to participate in as people created in God’s image. To participate in that image means that you have to be born the first time—our birth is our emergence into God’s good world. Our birth as children is a marvelous thing, which is why we celebrate it and remember it year after year.
But Jesus says that birth from our mother’s womb is only one part of being a citizen of the kingdom that is coming on the earth. We don’t become people of the kingdom through our ethnicity, but through a new birth that comes from God—a spiritual birth that enables us to move out of the darkness and into the light of the kingdom, which illuminates Jesus as God’s redemptive king.
Nicodemus, steeped as he is in his identity as a son of Abraham, can only frame things in terms of his ethnic, physical birth. You mean I have to crawl back into my mother’s womb a second time, he asks?
Jesus’ expands the teaching: to be able to see and participate in the life of the kingdom of God, one must be born into that kingdom as a child of the king. That birth is, to borrow another metaphor, “mid-wifed” by the Spirit of God who makes that new birth possible by God’s grace and love offered through Jesus, the one who was himself born, as the Gospels tell us, in the flesh AND by the Spirit. It is, in other words, a birth that enables a person see the movement of God’s Spirit in the world, to know where Jesus has come from and where he is going, and to be able to take the first steps in following him into the new future he brings to the whole world.
The point of birth, however, is not to stay an infant but to grow up. I mean think about babies. They’re so cute right? But they’re also leaky, burpy, screamy, wake you up in the middle of the night six nights in a row, drive you nuts, little bundles of …whatever. When someone says about a baby, “I wish they could stay little forever,” they’re exercising selective memory. Greatest days of our lives were when both kids were out of diapers and both could buckle themselves in the car seat! They grow up fast, which is hard, but they do grow up, and helping them get there, rather than holding them back, is our biggest task as parents. We are preparing them for the life ahead, a life of meaning, a life of vocation.
Being “born again” and “born from above” is the beginning of citizenship in God’s coming kingdom in the present, and the beginning of a lifelong vocation of working for that kingdom to become a reality. Paul uses the language of “growing to maturity” often, and our own Wesleyan heritage is based on the idea that the new birth is just the beginning, not the end of process. To grow to maturity in Christ means that we can begin to know which way the wind of the Spirit of God is blowing and we see how it is shaping the world into the mold of the kingdom. “So it is,” says Jesus, “with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (v. 8).
Nicodemus has a hard time grasping this. “How can this be?” he asks Jesus. Jesus chides him—if you are a teacher of Israel, how did you miss this? “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe,” says Jesus, “how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?”
Jesus tweaks Nicodemus with this ironic statement. As a teacher of Israel, Nicodemus would have understood that the place where earthly things and heavenly things came together was the Temple. John’s placement of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus comes right after Jesus “cleanses” the Temple at the end of chapter 2, which is rightly interpreted by the “Jews” (read Nicodemus and the religious authorities”) as a “sign.” For Jesus, turning over the tables in the Temple was the sign that this long-held icon of Israel was being judged by God. Look back to chapter 2 v. 18. “The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?’ Jesus answered them, “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.” This was a baffling statement. It took Herod the Great 46 years to rebuild the Temple (and it still wasn’t done during Jesus’ time). How could this supposedly holy place, signifying the place where God dwelt with the people of Israel, the place where heaven and earth meet, be destroyed and then replaced in three days?
Jesus reveals the answer to the confused Nicodemus. Look at 3:14- “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted [raised] up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Jesus refers to a story from the Exodus, which is found in Numbers 21. The people of Israel are grumbling and complaining loudly against God and against Moses. So God sent poisonous serpents among the people, whose bites killed many. Hard to imagine a worse plague than that!
The people then come to Moses, repenting and asking forgiveness for their complaining, and God tells Moses to fashion a serpent out of bronze and set it up on a pole and, God said, “everyone who is bitten shall look on it and live” (Num. 21:8). Later, that bronze serpent would be a decoration in the tabernacle and, later, the Temple, as a reminder to the people of this story.
Did you catch this? A serpent on a pole, lifted up for all to see. It’s kind of like a caducious, that symbol of the medical profession. It’s a symbol of healing. But snakes were also a symbol of evil. God tells the people through Moses to gaze at the snake to be healed from the snakes. What’s the cure for snakebite? Antivenin, which is made from—snake venom. The cure for snakes is a snake.
Jesus will get lifted up, raised up, on a cross—a symbol of evil, a symbol of shame, a symbol of death. And Jesus says, like Moses’ serpent, I must be lifted up in order to bring life in the midst of death. Those who look to the cross, those who trust and believe in what it represents—evil turned to healing–will have everlasting life. Death is defeated once and for all.
The cure for snakes was a snake. The cure for death would be a death. His death, raised up for the world to see. It is in the cross that we see heaven and earth come together in an explosive way. The cross becomes the new Temple, the place where human evil meets divine love, the place where sins are forgiven through the blood of the true Lamb, the place where human pain meets divine healing.
It’s with this image in mind that Jesus offers the verse that most people remember- John 3:16.:
For God—the creator of the universe
So – in this way, the way of the cross
Loved (not despised) the world (God’s whole creation)
That he gave (sacrificed, offered up)
His only Son (his very life)
That whoever believes in him (whoever looks at Jesus on the cross and trusts in his power to forgive, to heal, to reconcile, and restore them to life)
Should not perish (succumb to the poison of evil and sin)
but have everlasting life (present tense, not just in the future, now).
See, says Jesus, God didn’t send me here to condemn the world as being beyond hope. No! He sent me here so that the world might be saved at the cost of the cross. Those who will look at my pain and trust in a love that will go this far, they will see themselves healed. Those who don’t, well, the snake will be nipping at their heels all the way to the end.
“Now is the judgment of this world;” says Jesus in John 12, “now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (12:31-32).
What the Temple did for a people born into Abraham’s family, the Cross did for all people. To see it, we need fresh eyes of faith. We must be born by water and the Spirit.
This story of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus doesn’t have a quick resolution. Nicodemus doesn’t just suddenly say, “Oh, now I get it!” The story is just kind of left hanging. We do see Nicodemus again in the story, however. In chapter 7, Nicodemus is in a meeting where the rest of his peers want to have Jesus arrested, and he reminds them that the law says that they have to have a hearing before they can arrest anybody. He doesn’t come right out and expose his conversation with Jesus and his own curiosity, but sticks to the tenets of the law. He is someone who John sees as still on the way to knowing who Jesus really is.
We see Nicodemus again at the end of the Gospel, when he brings a hundred pounds of spices to help Joseph of Arimathea anoint Jesus’ body for burial (a hundred pounds being wildly and extravagantly expensive and way more than was necessary). With that action, Nicodemus’ devotion to Jesus became public.
Nicodemus reminds us that it’s not easy to be a disciple of Jesus. It can take time. When a baby is due, we’re used to waiting awhile, and sometimes the labor can be very painful and go on for a long time. Spiritual birth can be like that, too. Sometimes we need to struggle a bit before the new life emerges. Sometimes the pain of leaving behind the old life is so great that it feels like we’ve been dumped into a snake pit.
But the good news is that God can deal with that pain. When we bring ourselves to the foot of the cross, we can be healed. When we crawl out of the darkness and into the light, we can be made new. And when we feel like our lives are going nowhere, God offers us the chance to be born all over again into a new life.
