Do y'all remember Darren McGavin? He was a wonderful actor, probably best known for his role as the hilariously foul-mouthed, leg-lamp-loving father in A Christmas Story. But I first took notice of him in TV-movies and a series from the early 70s called The Night Stalker, where he played a newspaper reporter named Kolchak who investigated—and battled—evil creatures of the night: vampires, werewolves and the like. Kolchak stalked at night because, well, that's when his prey came out: at night. Nicodemus, the original night stalker, comes at night not because that’s the only time Jesus is up, but because of reasons of his own. And John doesn’t tell us what they are, but we assume it has something to do with his position as Pharisee, and member of the San Hedrin. We assume that it’s embarrassment, or even fear, that sends him lurking out after Jesus in the night. After all, though Jesus wouldn’t rip your throat out like the things Kolchak stalked, he was dangerous to the powers that be just the same. He threatened the dominant power structure of temple authorities and their Roman overlords, a structure in which Nicodemus was firmly entrenched.
So Nicodemus appears out of the darkness like a wraith, and by way of explanation, he says “Rabbi, we know you’re a teacher from God,” and I’m not quite sure who the “we” here is . . . does he represent a group? Is he the spokesman for a whole cadre of stealthy, but curious, Pharisees? Whatever it is, the reason he gives for knowing that Jesus comes from God is the signs he has done, the miracles which are described a little bit earlier in John: “many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing.” Perhaps that was it: Nicodemus was talking for all those folks, identifying himself with the many who saw those signs.
But note how Jesus answers him. He doesn’t complement Nicodemus on his perspicacity, he doesn’t congratulate him and the people on their newfound “belief in his name,” whatever that means. No. He launches into a discourse: “Very truly I tell you”—and when he puts it that way, you just know he’s serious—“no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” And always I have to stop right here because this is the first instance in this passage—but not the last—of what some people call “double-words.” In the original Greek, the word translated here as “from above” can also mean “again,” as in “born again.” And in fact, when I look in my Bible software, I notice that both the New International Version and the New American Standard Bible render it like that: “unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And that’s the way Nicodemus clearly takes it: he very deliberately says “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” And in case we fail to get it: “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
So the heart of this story seems to be a misunderstanding: Jesus is talking one thing—from above—and Nicodemus takes it to mean something else. Or does he? It’s possible that Jesus does mean “born again,” or perhaps—and this is what I think—he means both. Because Jesus is speaking about both a second birth, a re-birth, but also a different kind of birth, as he goes on to explain. “No one can enter the kingdom of God,” he says “Without being born of both water and spirit.”
But isn’t it just like a hyper-religious person, just like a counter-of-theological beans to flatten it out like that? Isn’t it just like an expert in religious law to reduce it to a matter of numbers? He seems to think that faith comes down to weighing the evidence and drawing logical, sane conclusions. How can this be, he asks, how can one enter the birth canal, enter his mother’s womb a second time? Wouldn’t that, I don’t know . . . hurt?
Maybe in addition to being the original night stalker he’s the original Presbyterian as well . . . always reasoning, always figuring, always counting the beans . . . he’s fascinated with evidence, with what he sees with his own eyes. After all, he’s one of the ones who believed in Jesus’ name—again, whatever that means—after he saw Jesus performing some miracles. In fact, in the paragraph just before our story, John tells us that Jesus wouldn’t entrust himself to any of those who believed simply because they’d seen.
Jesus takes a dim view of that sort of faith, that’s gained after seeing signs, and it becomes one of the gospel of John’s major themes. And Nicodemus is exhibit A of that philosophy, and Jesus tells him that you have to be born of both water—i.e., the waters of physical birth—and the Spirit. And this second birth comes from above, it is an act of God, for who else can confer the Spirit of God but God’s own self? And Jesus goes on to explain: what’s born of the flesh is flesh, and that born of the Spirit, from above, is spirit. What comes from flesh, from human nature, is more of the same: it’s flesh, which we all know is perishable. What we do on our own, without it being born from above, is perishable. Only what is done through and by the Spirit is spirit, is eternal.
And now Jesus starts admonishing him:” Don’t be astonished that I said to you ‘You must be born from above, ‘cause the wind blows where it wants to, and you can hear it, but you don’t know where it’s going to or coming from.” And here’s the second great double-word, the second great word-play in this passage: the Greek for wind is the same word as that for Spirit, and the same as that for breath. And everyone born of the Spirit is like that: they are the stuff of spirits, they are spirit, and you just don’t know where they’re going to be . . . and I find this to be a remarkable claim, don’t you? Being born of the Spirit, being born from above, a person is one with the spirit, and you don’t know where they might end up: the wind of God, the spirit, God’s very breath, blows where it will, and blows them where it will, if they’ll let it.
Well, one place you know the spirit-born will be is the Kingdom of God, and by this, John doesn’t mean heaven. For John, you are part of the kingdom as soon as you are born of the Spirit, as soon as you’ve had a genuine encounter with the Christ. For John, the Kingdom of God is on earth, and it is as much a way of being on that earth during life as it is of being with God after that life is over.
And Nicodemus doesn’t get any of it: the last words out of his mouth in this passage are “How can these things be?” And notice that he’s still trying to rationalize, still trying to relate these teachings to things he can understand, good proto-Presbyterian that he is. And Jesus answers him with no small amount of irony: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?" And this is the last word we hear from Nicodemus, he fades back into the darkness, and Jesus turns to a broader audience: from this point on, he uses the Greek plural, which I fancy can be rendered "you-all," and he’s speaking to everyone like Nicodemus, everyone who believes due to what they have seen, not due to the invisible blowings of the spirit-breath across the land.
And he might be speaking to those of us in this modern age, as well--those who are locked in a world of provablity, of cause and effect . . . If you can't measure it, if you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist . . . This is the world-view of the neo-atheists, like Sam Robards and Richard Dawkins, who I liked a lot better as a populizer of biology than his current role of defender of rational thought. They are as smug in their certainty as are the most intolerant fundamentalists you can imagine.
But you know what? The spirit-wind goes where it will, and no one--and that means neither you, nor I, nor the Reverend Billy Graham knows where it goes or from whence it comes, and that's a lesson we all have to learn, whether we are fundamentalists or the most liberal, tolerant Presbyterians in the world. And it means this dividing up of the world into the good guys, like us Good Christians, versus the bad guys,. like those smug atheist, i.e., those who are in versus those who are out, is nothing anyone should be doing. And yet, we—and in this I definitely include myself—continually do so, we pooh-pooh those who use the term "born again," for example, or those folks who get all emotional when they worship, throwing their hands up in the air, for St. Peter's sake, or rolling around on the ground, speaking in tongues, or singing idiotic praise songs . . . ours is a rational faith, our hymns have meaning, we do things decently, and in good order . . .
But the Spirit goes where it will, and it's dangerous to deny that fact . . . It causes religious wars, schisms, such as the one this denomination is currently undergoing, and crusades. It is not a feature of the Kingdom, which Jesus, in our passage, characterizes as what he himself, in his role as the Son of Man, has experienced and does: the Son of Man has ascended to and descended from the heavenly realms, and he must be lifted-up like that serpent that Moses stuck on a pole in the wilderness. And here is the final double-word, the final play on words, of our story: the Greek word for "lifted-up" also means exalted, and of course, Jesus was not only exalted, but lifted-up on a cross to die.
So the kingdom is characterized by this dual meaning: Jesus' exaltation, which is at the same time a humiliation, a gory death . . . and it is living out of—and living in—this reality that Jesus characterizes as believing in him, as opposed to, perhaps, believing in his name, so that that whoever believes in him may have eternal life, and this is arguably the most famous verse in the Bible: “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." And talk about separating those who are in from those who are out, this verse has been used as a way of weeding the sheep from the goats for a long time, as in if you don't believe in Jesus in exactly the way I believe, you're going to that other place. But notice that the word "believes" is a participle (and in Greek it's a lot more clear), which implies an ongoing thing. More importantly, it implies nothing about how that belief came about, so that you could put it this way: everyone who is believing in him, or is in a state of belief, may not perish but have eternal life. And since Jesus said right at the first that this re-birth comes from above, that it's god's doing, not ours, not any choice we make, how is it an indicator of any goodness, any superiority, in those who are believing? How can we use it to exclude anyone from who we think are the chosen people?
I am convinced that if those who use this verse to exclude, to brand, to draw a circle around those whom they don't like, or those who believe differently, if they were to read and really internalize the verse just after John 3:16, they--and indeed all of Christianity--would be much better witnesses to the risen, forgiving God than they tend to be. "God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." That's save the world, the whole world, no exceptions. The Spirit goes where it will, indeed! Amen.
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