John 3:1-17 (Lent 2A)
St. John, Galveston 3/1/26
Rev. Alan Taylor

+ In Nomine Jesu +

Grace and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

    In this morning’s Gospel reading, we find Jesus engaged in a conversation about Holy Baptism with a man named Nicodemus. As it turns out, we don’t know a great deal about Nicodemus because, outside of this chapter of John’s Gospel, he’s only mentioned two other times in the New Testament. Still, we know he was Pharisee. Here in John 3, he’s also called “a ruler of the Jews,” which means he was an important person in the Sanhedrin, the religious ruling council of the Day, since the Sanhedrin elected it’s rulers.

    Nicodemus was a wealthy man. Elsewhere, John tells us that he provided the very expensive spices and oils that were used to anoint Jesus’ body after He was taken down from the cross. That, and the fact that he was one of the men who took the body of Jesus from the place of His crucifixion to be laid to rest in the tomb, suggests that Nicodemus ultimately came to faith in Jesus. In fact, there is a tradition in the early church that suggests that he was eventually baptized by Peter and John and that he lost his status as a Pharisee because of his conversion to the Christian faith. That same tradition, tells us that he was eventually banished from the City of Jerusalem.

    As I read through this morning’s Gospel reading, I found myself wondering though more about Nicodemus as a person. Generally we can think of one word that describes a person. You hear the person’s name and immediately that word, a quality, or characteristic comes to mind. I wondered what that word would be for Nicodemus. I first thought he was a bit of a skeptic, since he questioned what Jesus told him about being born again, or literally, being “born from above.” I looked up the word skeptic though, and I don’t think Nicodemus was actually a skeptic, at least, properly speaking. A skeptic, after all, is someone who tends to deny accepted opinions.

    Next, I thought Nicodemus could be described as a pragmatist. But that didn’t work either because a pragmatist isn’t really interested in truth. No, a pragmatist is only concerned with outcomes. He's the person who believes that “the ends justify the means.”

    I finally came up with a word to describe Nicodemus, but I wasn’t sure it was actually a word, so I looked it, and lo and behold, it was. Nicodemus, I would say, was a logician. Not a magician, a logician, with an L. Logic was important to him. It was an important skill to Nicodemus, I should think, as it would been to many people in the ancient world, since many of them were skilled in debate. It’s a skill, I think, that many of us have lost because we don’t tend to discuss issues with people who disagree with us. Instead, we just right them off, or perhaps even cancel them. Nicodemus though wanted to understand arguments logically. It was his quest for logic though that brought him to impasse with Jesus.

    Jesus told Nicodemus that for anyone to see the kingdom of God he had to be born again. The logician that he was, Nicodemus, if I may paraphrase said, whoa, wait just a minute! Did you say that, to see the kingdom of God, a man had to be born again!? That’s not reasonable! It’s certainly not logical! “How can a man be born when he is old (Nicodemus asked)? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus listened to Nicodemus’ objection, and said, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, 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. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”

    It was heavenly things that Nicodemus couldn’t process in his mind. I don’t know about you, but I find quite a number of things, even in the natural world, that I can’t quite process in my mind. We usually point those sorts of things out by saying, “that’s unbelievable.” The sun burns continuously at about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but it never burns up. And yet, a human being in space without a vessel of some sort, even a space suit to provide protection, would freeze solid in as little as 12 hours. A little closer to home, there is a particular pine tree in the West, called a Jack Pine. It has a unique feature in that the only way it’s pine cone will open to release the seeds inside for regeneration, is by the application of intense heat. In other words, a forrest fire. I find these things amazing, even though I can’t say I understand them.

    Since there are earthly things that are hard for us to believe, it stands to reason, that heavenly things would be even harder for us to believe. Nicodemus discovered very quickly that his reason, or his intellectual powers, were not sufficient to understand heavenly things. When Jesus told him about the need to be born again, he really didn’t know what to do with what Jesus told him, because his mind couldn’t process it. And, what’s interesting about this encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus is that there is no indication, at least from John 3, that Nicodemus ever did understand what Jesus was saying. Which sort of begs a question, “is it necessary to understand everything in God’s word to believe it?” Or, if I may pose the question a little differently, “is understanding a prerequisite to faith, or is it, in some sense, part of the ongoing struggle of faith?”

    The fact is, there are many things about the Christian faith that are difficult to understand. Frankly, there are many things about the Christian faith that are impossible for us to understand. “To see the kingdom of God, you must be born again, or born from above.” There is a lot that goes into that statement. To begin with, to complete the analogy, there’s the whole issue of participation, or of the place of the human will in coming to faith. Let me ask you. What part did you play in your natural birth? I mean, when you were born physically? What part did you play? Did your birth happen as a result of an act of your “will?” Of course it didn’t. So it is, that you must be born from above, by the hand of God, by water and the word.

    But how does God do that? I mean, how can such simple things like water and God’s word accomplish such incredible things? Do you understand how God, in baptism, raises a person from the dead? I don’t. And yet, every baptism nearly brings me to tears because of the incredible thing God does in the lives of people at the font of His grace, using simple water and His word.  

    All this is say, when your reason, be it logic or some other aspect of reason, comes to a wall in the Christian faith, a place where it can’t reconcile what God says with what you understand, or even with what makes sense, it is a critical juncture. Either the Scriptures will be forced to serve your reason, or your reason will be subjected to the wisdom of God and His word. 
    As it turns out, one of the hallmarks of the Lutheran Reformation was Luther and the other reformers being willing to live with unanswered questions regarding articles of faith. They points of tension where we simply can’t explain why something is the way it is. The point for Luther and the Reformers was that we dare not speak where God has chosen not to speak. But we also dare not disregard what God has said. Therefore, we are bound by the word of God. Scripture alone, as we say!

    It seems highly likely that Nicodemus did come to faith in Jesus. Again, after Jesus’ crucifixion, he was the one who provided the spices and oils for the anointing of Jesus’ body. He was also one of the ones who took Jesus’ body from the cross to lay Him to rest in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.

    Thankfully, understanding heavenly things isn’t essential to our faith. God’s word often transcends our reason, which doesn’t make it unreasonable, it simply makes it above our reason. Then again, He tells us as much, doesn’t He? “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.

+ Soli Deo Gloria +