a Homily for the First Sunday After Pentecost, year B
Text: John 3:1-17
seeing with different eyes
The most important verse in this morning’s pericope is not John 3:16, but 3:8. Here’s how we get there.
As you may have noted, we covered this part of Scripture back in Lent. We had this same conversation with Nicodemus, good ol’ Nick. Then, we were focused on darkness and light. Nick visits Jesus in the dead of night, in secret, so he wouldn’t be discovered. Jesus expounds later in the chapter about light/goodness/public and dark/evil/secret. That in coming to Jesus in secret, Nick is starting from an evil place.
We encounter this Scripture again this morning with different eyes. We have gone through Lent and endured Holy Week. We have praised the Risen Christ and been prepared for His departure. We celebrated His Ascension. And last week, we encountered the Mighty Wind which swept in as something more powerful and important to us than Jesus. This Scripture for us today speaks not about secrecy, but the power of the Spirit.
The structure of this pericope is a dialogue between Nick and Jesus. The heart of this discussion is how confusing Jesus is being! We must admit that there is reason Nick doesn’t follow Jesus’s line of argument. “Born from above”? What is this nonsense?
blinded by dualism
Jesus’s teaching of Nicodemus is confusing. We are just as likely to not follow Jesus here because we are only using half of our vision. Jesus talks about “born of flesh” and spirit and earthly vs. heavenly things and in it, we hear Western Philosophy’s natural dualism. Things are black or white, either/or. This goes back to the philosopher Plato, who described the world as having a dual nature: the light and the dark, the flesh and the soul. He saw our bodies as grotesque and evil while within us resides a soul that is pure and perfect. You can see how this Greek influence pervades the Roman interpretation of Jesus and the church. The Jews, like Jesus, however, did not possess such a philosophy. There’s was more holistic and less confrontational. So for Jesus and Nicodemus, being earthly and heavenly need not be mutually exclusive. We may be born of flesh and spirit.
Yet, this still brings up all of the big church fights:
- What is the nature of baptism?
- What is heaven?
- What of evil?
- How do we know what is GOD’s doing and what is ours?
- Is Jesus the only way?
- What does Jesus mean by “belief”?
Ugh! It makes my head spin. Is Jesus really saying all that we attribute to Him here?
where earth and heaven meet
Many say so. I don’t.
It sounds more like Jesus is trying to teach this teacher to see what it means to live in two worlds at once. The world he was raised in and the world GOD has called for. The world that is and the world that could and will be. Both worlds he should know about already.
How we know that other world; the world of being born from above and of heavenly things; is the Spirit. Hence verse 8:
The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
The Greek word for Spirit is also the same as wind. “The Spirit/Wind blows where it chooses…so it is with everyone who is born of the Wind.” Same goes for verse 6:
What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.
“What is born of the wind is wind.”
This earthly image of our spiritual connector shows both that essential tie between the two worlds and the vehicle by which Jesus is trying to get Nick to catch fire! He will see heavenly things when he hears the Spirit in the wind and sees the work of GOD in this world and by these people.
in both worlds
The Spirit’s work is all around us. Jesus says “don’t be astonished.” This is how GOD is moving us. And make no mistake that we are being moved. We are always being moved. Like the Hebrew people in the desert after GOD liberates them from Egypt, we are being led on a huge journey. And the sooner we realize that we “hear the sound of it, but [we] do not know where it come from or where it goes” the better off we are. Because this is how we get there.
Our earthly selves may find that thought troubling—that we are following something we can’t see, we don’t know where it came from, or where it is going. But our heavenly selves are ecstatic. Because this is trust. This is the ultimate faith in GOD. Our fates are not ours to control independently. We aren’t the masters of our individual destinies.
Instead, we are promised something better. We are partners: with God and one another: dwelling in two worlds and moved by the wind; whose power surpasses all understanding. It is with this wind and this dual nature, that we are a kite rising up and taking flight.
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