2nd Sunday of Lent 2023. John 3:1-17
One of the many obvious differences between John’s gospel and the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that John records detailed conversations between Jesus and Individuals to bring forth great truths about the Kingdom of God; which John often just calls life. This is so in todays readings and also the readings for the next three weeks.
Today’s gospel allows us to listen in to a very serious conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus the Pharisee (one of my favourite seekers in Scripture!), containing two of the most famous verses in the bible.
Now Nicodemus believes, sort of. He has just told Jesus that no one could do the signs that Jesus has been doing unless they have come from God. Jesus replied, no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again, or born from above. Nicodemus does not understand this. Nicodemus must approach this just like a new-born baby.
Now the truth of the well know verse that we must be born again, or born from above, would not at all been obvious to the Jews, just as it is not obvious to us. Nicodemus is confused and troubled, he doesn’t understand. Jesus says to him “You are Israel’s teacher, and you do not understand these things” (John 3:10).
To understand the Good News of Jesus Christ, Nicodemus has to let go of all that he has accomplished and understood — let go and become like a newborn baby, ready to receive the world on completely new terms. Some things are hard to grasp not because they are conceptually subtle, but because they ask so much of us. We don’t want to understand, because if we understand, we are forced to make a choice and do something. John says it’s a choice between light and darkness.
God loved the world so much that God gave the Son so that we may believe and have eternal life (John 3:16). What is it about this “simple” Good News that we don’t want to understand?
Well, firstly, we have to contend with the peculiar and troubling image Jesus has chosen to describe himself: he says that he is like the serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness (John 3:14, see Numbers 21:9).
In the story from Numbers, God sent poisonous serpents into the Israelite camp as punishment for the people complaining against God. When the people repented, God told Moses to fashion a serpent out of bronze and lift it on a pole, so that anyone bitten by a serpent could look upon it and live.
In the same way that the serpent was lifted on a pole, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:15). The term translated “lift up” can also mean “exalt,” and John uses that double meaning to communicate a spiritual truth. It points to both the physical lifting of Jesus into the air on a cross, and the lifting up in exaltation of Jesus by God (see also John 8:28, and John 12:32). So if we can bear to look upon the lifted-up and crucified Christ, we too shall live.
In terms of humans being in control of their own lives, of course the cross is a moment of profound humiliation and defeat. But in John, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are collapsed into a single movement of absolute divine control or God being sovereign and in control of everything.
Jesus raised up by God. Just as the Israelites were paradoxically required to look upon the very thing that brought death in order to receive life, so we are asked to look upon Jesus’ “lifting up” in humiliating crucifixion and receive it as part of God’s plan to glorify Jesus and save the world.
Jesus’ arrival, therefore, can lead one out of darkness and into light and life, or it can confirm one’s place in the darkness. God’s motivation for sending Jesus is not condemnation, but love. God sends Jesus into the world, which culminates with Jesus’ own exaltation upon a pole; a Roman cross. Lifted high, Jesus’ broken, and pierced body demands attention.
Jesus’ body, the very location of God’s glory (John 2:21-22), is the most staggering revelation of the whole gospel. Rather than actively judging, Jesus’ form just hangs, to be looked upon by those who dare face the horror, the darkness, of “the sin of the world” that caused the Lamb to die (John 1:29).
Yet, rather than despair, this sight is also the place of life, the sign of God’s profound love for creation. Jesus, the Light of the World, exposes truth all around him. That truth is not all beautiful; most of it is human mistakes, wickedness, and hatred prompted by selfishness and fear (verses 19-20).
So back to v.16, what does it mean to “believe” this Good News that is in Jesus being “lifted up?” On a very basic level, we might say that it requires us to intellectually agree to the proposition that all of this happened in just the way the story describes, and to accept that it means precisely what John claims that it means. To “believe that” Jesus died and was raised to save us is easy to understand in the sense that it requires almost nothing of us.
But such simplicity does not honour the larger story John is telling. This is a story about an encounter with Jesus that left an intelligent and accomplished man, Nicodemus, scratching his head in bewilderment as he went back out into the darkness. This is a story about how any one of us might reject the light offered to us because of the way it exposes what is dark in us (John 3:19–20).
To “believe” this Good News in a way that brings salvation requires more than “believing that” it happened. It requires “trusting in.” To “trust in” Jesus is not simply to believe something about what happened long ago, but also to let our own lives be transformed by the Jesus we encounter in this story.
Just two brief points about this trust.
Firstly, placing our trust in this Jesus means withholding our ultimate loyalty and trust from other things that ask us to pledge our allegiance. The “lifting up” of Jesus on a Roman cross places ever before us the question of who we will serve. And we all end up serving someone. As Jesus says elsewhere, you will either serve God or Mammon. The Lord or the Devil.
Secondly, when we look at the reaction of Nicodemus, placing our trust in this Jesus means noticing that the new life Jesus offered was especially difficult for what we can call the religiously accomplished. The only way we can come to the Lord is as a newborn baby – born from above and instinctively trusting our Father.
One of the biggest blocks to understanding this is a sort of self-satisfied religiosity where we refuse to change but are happy obeying man-made rules of church behaviour.
The “lifting up” of Jesus is a stumbling block for those obsessed with decorum and conformity to tradition, like Nicodemus.
The “lifting up” of Jesus reminds us that the true-life God has promised us is not the life that we can secure for ourselves through self-interest and caution. Rather that this true-life is a total gift through the swirling Holy Spirit, and if we have the courage of Christ on the cross, this new life becomes as natural as breathing is for a newborn baby – and just as satisfying and necessary. And it is through this belief of a new-born that we enter into life in Jesus’s name. Let me pray …