Wednesday after Lent 2
February 27, 2002
Lutheran Theological Seminary Chapel
Dr. Timothy Wengert

In the name of Jesus. Amen

John 3:1-17

This Lent, on four successive Sundays, we read large portions of the gospel of John. Four stories about Jesus’ encounters with human beings like us: In chapter 3 with Nicodemus, in chapter 4 with the woman at the well, in chapter 9 with a blind man, and, finally, in chapter 11 with the dead man, Lazarus. John reminds me of an Irish-American professor of German history I know. After hours at a conference, you can sit at a table with him and he will tell stories. With a twinkle in his eye and a twirl of the mustache that hangs on the side of his greying lambchop sideburns, he can spin a tale that will leave you breathless -- not knowing whether to smile or weep or believe.

John tells stories so masterfully that it is not so much where the story ends as the way you get there that amazes the hearers. Take Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus. He comes secretly, by night. Already you know there is something wrong. Nicodemus comes to the light of the world in the dark. And he is in the dark. With one question and we have him pegged. He is a fawning, manipulative man, who comes to Jesus in order to remain at arm’s length. Listen to him: "Rabbi" -- he is oozing with charm -- "we know" -- not ‘I know’ but the indefinite ‘we’ -- "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." How sweet! What a compliment! At the end of the gospel he helps to bury Jesus, but here -- he remains aloof and analytical.

Then comes a single statement of Jesus that proves he has seen through this show. It comes down to a single Greek word, anothen, that can mean two very different things. We cannot duplicate the pun in English, so the translators have to choose. For hundreds of years they chose to translate what Nicodemus heard; only in our present translation have they had the courage to write what Jesus meant.

"Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born anothen." Jesus means, "born from above," that is from God, just as John had announced in the very first verses of his gospel: "To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of a male, but of God." But Nicodemus has no clue. The joke -- and this really is a kind of Johannine joke -- is on him. He thinks Jesus means that a person must be born again, so he asks -- almost with a sneer in his voice for having encountered such a silly teacher -- "Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?" I don’t know about you, but my mother would never stand for it!

Jesus is patient with this supercilious Pharisee. This does not have to do with worldly matters -- with flesh and blood -- but with God, with the Holy Spirit. "No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Don’t be so surprised that I said you must be born anothen." Not of flesh but of Spirit; not again but from above. But what does Jesus mean by "flesh" and "spirit"? With Martin Luther, I understand Jesus to be talking of flesh not as material things but as a nickname for Nicodemus -- a person turned in on himself, so full of himself he doesn’t expect to learn anything from anyone. Someone just like us! And Spirit is God’s Holy Spirit and the life of believing that comes from the Spirit’s power and grace.

But why does he add water? Water. Next week, we will hear John tell the story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well and his offer to her of living water. And in John 7, he will cryptically quote Scripture about himself: "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me ... as the scripture has said of me, ‘Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’" And then, on the cross, as only John records, the soldier will pierce his side and blood and water will come flowing forth. Why born of water and the Spirit? Because that same crucified water was poured over you in baptism, and through the Holy Spirit you were born from above.

How often don’t the Nicodemuses of this world confuse us all with their questions! One Christian encounters another, and an innocent conversation suddenly turns deadly. "Have you taken Wengert’s class?" "Built houses for the poor?" "Learned to contemplate?" They ask. And it soon appears that there is something missing from our Christian life -- something we haven’t done, like climb back in our mother’s womb, or obey God’s will completely, or decide to make Jesus our Lord and Savior. We’re always looking for something to do; and now it appears that we haven’t done it. The sad thing is, no matter how religious it may sound, it is all from the flesh -- that center-of-attention Nicodemus that is in us all. In fact, we should be asking a quite different question: "Have you been born from above, by water and the Holy Spirit. That is, the birth into God’s kingdom is not up to you and what you do but up to God and what God does beginning right over there in that font, where you and I are born from above by being plunged into the wounded side of Jesus.

Just to make his point even clearer, Jesus uses another pun. In Greek and Hebrew the word for Spirit and the word for wind are one and the same: pneuma in Greek; ruach in Hebrew. "The wind/Spirit 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 Wind/Spirit." When I was nineteen, I was in Sequoia National Park, camping with my sister and her family under those enormous trees. And we heard the wind whistling through those skyscraper branches, but we could not even feel it down where we were. It was completely out of our control. So it is with our birth in God. When I tell you that you are not just children of your parents but children of God, you are witnessing an amazing miracle -- God stoops down in the darkness, breathes Spirit into you, and makes you children of the Light! And all you hear is the wind.

Nicodemus does not have a clue. He has been given two easy pictures -- birth and wind -- neither of which we control; neither of which we understand. "The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not mastered it." "What if," Jesus asks, "I had spoken of heavenly things?" Then you would really be in the dark -- the weakest link; then you really would not believe." Our life with God depends on God. Just as we cannot control the wind; just as we did not decide to be born, so we cannot control our relation with God and God’s grace. It all depends on God. "No one has ascended into heaven!" We can’t do it; there is no ladder long enough to climb -- no work, no decision, no extra-credit activity. It depends on God.

The children of Israel were dying in the wilderness of snake bites, just as we are dying of sin and evil and death bites. So God commanded Moses to make a bronze snake, lift it up on a pole so that anyone who saw it would live. And now, the Son of Man must be lifted up on the pole of a cross. That’s the heart of it all -- the crucified bronze serpent who rescues the snake-bit, self-centered people on this earth and gives them life, because there is no one else they can trust for it. Martin Luther’s right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon, whom I study for a living, thought so much of this verse that he made it the basis of his family coat-of-arms: a snake wrapped around a T-shaped cross. For it all depends on our Lord Jesus.

Then comes what Luther called the gospel in a nutshell, John 3:16 and 17. I know they hold up these numbers at football games, but they do not so much belong on a banner as they belong in your ears and engraved on your heart. "For God so loved the world." That word "so" is perhaps confusing to us; other translators have put it this way: "For God loved the world in this way," that is, "just so," that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."

God loved the world. The world teeming with Nicodemuses like you and me. With women at the well, and men blind from birth, with Lazarus’s who have died and with Mary’s and Martha’s who are left to grieve. God loved the world, loved you, so that you are born from above by water and Spirit, blown by this Holy Wind into the very arms of God. O my dear Christian brothers and sisters! Can you believe it? God loved the world.

"In this way." How? "That he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life." We do not decide, or work, or earn our way into heaven and God’s good graces. Instead, the only Son comes down, into the dust, into the first birth canal, into the sin and evil, and, especially, into death -- lifted up on the cross like a bronze snake on a pole. So that anyone who looks on him will live.

Why? For you! "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." Here is your salvation; here is the One who rescues us from sin and death; here is the One who bears us when we falter and wipes away our every tear; here is the One who feeds us with his Body and Blood, broken and poured out for us on the Cross. Here is God’s love, in the flesh, in water and Spirit, on the pole of the cross, for all to see and believe. Here is God come down for you. Amen