Sermon: Born from Above

Delivered at Dunean United Methodist Church in Greenville, South Carolina on June 3, 2018

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Born from Above

Audio Version

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.  He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, 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.”  Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”  Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, 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.  Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’  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.”  Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”  Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony.  If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?  No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.  And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“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.

“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.  Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.  And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.  But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

John 3:1-21 (NRSV)

What's going on inside of me?

I despise my own behavior

This only serves to confirm my suspicions

That I'm still a man in need of a Savior

I want to be in the Light

As You are in the Light

I want to shine like the stars in the heavens

Oh, Lord be my Light and be my salvation

'Cause all I want is to be in the Light

From “In the Light” by DC Talk

In the Gospel of John, we read about a man named Nicodemus.  Everything we read about this man indicates that he was a prominent member of society.  Nicodemus was quite wealthy and very religious.  He was a Pharisee, a person who set himself apart to strictly follow the Jewish Law as interpreted by the scribes.¹  He was also a leader of the Jewish people, who served on the Sanhedrin.  The Sanhedrin was a ruling council made up of 71 members selected from priests, scholars of the Jewish Law, and people of prominence.²  The Jewish people were actually ruled by the Roman Empire, but the Sanhedrin served as a supreme court in regards to all things religious.³  As you can see, Nicodemus was a pretty big deal in Judea.

Jesus of Nazareth had doubtlessly gotten the attention of Nicodemus and the rest of the Sanhedrin during the week of Passover.  One day, Jesus entered the Temple of the Lord, and, when He looked around, He saw merchants selling animals for sacrifice and money changers exchanging Roman coinage for currency approved for use in the temple.  Something about this normal temple business didn't sit well with Jesus, so He made a whip out of some cords and started cleaning house.  He cracked the whip at the money changers and the merchants, shouting, “Take these things out of here!  Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!”  Some of the religious leaders confronted Jesus afterward, demanding that He provide them some sign to justify what He had just done.  Mysteriously, He replied, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  Jesus gained a following in Jerusalem because of the things people saw Him do.⁴

Something about Jesus intrigued Nicodemus, so Nicodemus once approached Jesus at night, under the cover of darkness.  Given his position in society, he understandably did not want to be seen in broad daylight with such an incendiary figure.  Upon meeting Jesus, Nicodemus said, “Rabbi, 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.”

Jesus then said to Nicodemus, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  Throughout the Gospels, Jesus speaks metaphorically about this Kingdom, but what exactly is the Kingdom of God?  We find one hint toward the end of the Gospel of John.  When Jesus stood trial before the Roman governor, He was asked, “Are you the King of the Jews?” to which He replied, “My kingdom is not from this world.”⁵  When Jesus said that His kingdom is “not from this world,” He suggested that the Kingdom of God is fundamentally different from the Roman Empire or any other kingdom the world has ever known.

The Kingdom of God, as mysterious as it might seem, is something that Christians around the world pray every day that they may see.  Whenever we pray the prayer Jesus taught His followers, we say, “Your kingdom come.  Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”⁶  The Kingdom of God is not Heaven but rather Heaven on Earth.  It is any place where God reigns – any place where God's will is done.  It has been described as both “already” and “not yet.”  The Kingdom of God is, to borrow imagery from the prophet Isaiah, where wolves live peaceably with lambs⁷ and where weapons of war are converted into farming equipment.⁸  The Kingdom of God is the world as God intended it to be.

At the recent wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, delivered a sermon that struck a chord with many people.  Curry asked his audience to “imagine a world where love is the way.”⁹  He proclaimed,
When love is the way, then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again.  When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook.  When love is the way, poverty will become history.  When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary.  When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more.  When love is the way, there's plenty good room - plenty good room - for all of God's children.  Because when love is the way, we actually treat each other, well... like we are actually family.  When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all, and we are brothers and sisters, children of God.  My brothers and sisters, that's a new heaven, a new earth, a new world, a new human family.¹⁰
I cannot help but think that Bishop Curry was describing the Kingdom of God.  If “God is love,” as we read in Scripture,¹¹ then God's Kingdom must surely be a place “where love is the way.”  Sadly, we don't have to look very long at the world around us to see that it is not as God intended it to be and that so often the way of the world is not love.

The world is not what God intended it to be, because we are not what God intended us to be.  Jesus told Nicodemus that nobody can see the Kingdom of God unless he or she is somehow reborn.  Nicodemus seemed to be a bit confused by Jesus' words.  He asked, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?  Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”  Maybe Nicodemus was taking Jesus' words just a bit too literally, or maybe he was already familiar with the concept of spiritual rebirth but simply could not see how such a profound change was even possible.¹²

In the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus began His public ministry, He proclaimed, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”¹³  The Greek word translated into English as “repentance” is metanoia.  The first half of the word, meta, refers to a change or a turning.  The second half of the word, noia, refers to perception.  When used in a religious or spiritual context, the word metanoia refers to a change of heart and mind that results in a change in conduct.¹⁴  We must not allow ourselves to become set in our ways: we must be willing to change and be changed.  If God is doing something new in the world, then we must be made new.  If God is transforming the world, then we too must be transformed.

Jesus, in His conversation with Nicodemus, described this change of heart, mind, and conduct as a rebirth.  The Greek phrase Jesus used to described this rebirth is gennaō anōthen.¹⁵ This phrase has a range of translations which is reflected in different versions of the Bible.  In the old King James Version, the phrase is translated “born again.”  In the newer Common English Bible, it is translated “born anew.”  In the New Revised Standard Version, which we heard earlier, the phrase is translated, “born from above.”  Perhaps Jesus wanted to communicate all of these ideas to Nicodemus.¹⁶  The idea that we must be “born again” suggests that a profound change must occur in our lives, but the idea that we must be “born from above” suggests that this profound change is not something we can accomplish by ourselves but is rather something God accomplishes within us.  We turn to God, and then God transforms us from the inside out.

The Kingdom of God is so fundamentally different from the kingdoms of this world that to become a citizen of the Kingdom of God is to be so profoundly changed it is as if we start over from scratch and are rebuilt from the ground up.  In the words of Scholar William Barclay, “To be born anew is to undergo such a radical change that it is like a new birth; it is to have something happen to the soul which can only be described as being born all over again; and the whole process is not a human achievement, because it comes from the grace and power of God.”¹⁷

If we must be born again in order to see the Kingdom, then perhaps we must learn to see everything with new eyes.  Maybe we need to repent of our certitude.  Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’  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.”  In both ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew, wind, breath, and spirit are all represented by the same word.¹⁸  If the Spirit of God is as unpredictable as the wind, as Jesus suggests, then we would do well not to think that we have figured God out, and we must be willing to let the Spirit guide us in unexpected ways.

Jesus said to Nicodemus, “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.  And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”  In the Book of Numbers, we read that, at one point while the Israelites were journeying through the wilderness, many people were killed by poisonous snakes.  The people begged Moses to pray to God on their behalf, and, when Moses prayed to God, God instructed him to craft a bronze serpent and to set it atop a pole.  From that point onward, whenever one of the Israelites was bitten by a poisonous snake, he or she could look upon the bronze serpent and be healed of the snake's venom.¹⁹

Jesus, referring to himself as the Son of Man, told Nicodemus that He would be lifted up in the same way that the bronze serpent was lifted up in the wilderness.  What He meant was that, in the not too distant future, the Sanhedrin – the very same council to which Nicodemus belonged – would conspire to eliminate Jesus.  They would collude with the Roman government to have Jesus executed by crucifixion, like an enemy of the Empire.  At a place called Golgotha, Jesus would be “lifted up” on a cross.²⁰

When we look upon the cross, we see how messed up the world is, and we see how badly the world needs to be saved from itself.  The prologue to the Gospel of John tells us that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.”²¹  In Jesus, God became a “son of man” and “descended from heaven” to live with us – and we killed Him.  We might not have personally driven the nails into His hands and feet, but we are all complicit in His murder.  We are all part of a world in which the One who embodied pure goodness and love would be brutally murdered.  We would be fools to think that Jesus' crucifixion would not happen in our day and time.  The assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. last century show us that those who cry out against the evils of society, as Jesus did, are still persecuted and put to death, as Jesus was.  The numerous genocides of the last century show us that the kingdoms of this world are no less brutal than the Roman Empire of Jesus' day.  We have not come very far in the last two thousand years.

When the Israelites looked upon the bronze serpent, they were forced to confront the creature whose deadly venom had infiltrated their veins.  They were also forced to confront their own sins, for they believed that the snakes were punishment for their impatience, their griping, and their lack of faith.  When the Israelites looked upon the serpent they also found healing.  Likewise, when we look upon the cross, we are forced to confront our sin and our sickness, but we also find healing for our souls.  When we look upon the cross, we see forgiveness, mercy, and grace.  We see the One who prayed on behalf of those who had just nailed Him to the cross, saying, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”²²  When we look upon the cross, we see the true nature of God.  In the words of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.”  When we look upon the cross, we see how badly we need to be saved, and, when we look upon the cross, we see our salvation.

When we look upon the cross, we must not forget the end of the story.  The evil of humanity put Christ upon the cross, but could did not defeat Him.  “The light shines in the darkness,” we read, “and the darkness did not overcome it.”²³  On the third day, Christ was raised from the dead, and the decisive blow was dealt in the age-old battle against sin and death.²⁴

This world is not what God intended it to be, but God has never given up on the world, and there is nothing humanity can ever do to change God's mind.  God's intention to save the world is the very reason Christ came.  Jesus said to Nicodemus those now famous words that many of us memorized in Sunday School, “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.”  Martin Luther is thought to have said that these words are “the Gospel in miniature” or, as we might say nowadays, “the Gospel in a nutshell.”

God loves this broken world dearly, and God is intent on saving the world and setting all things right.  This is truly good news for the whole world.  Sadly, it seems that many Christians have more bad news to offer the world than good news, and so often this bad news comes as words of judgment and condemnation toward people they don't like.  If we want to share the good news of Jesus Christ, then we need to leave behind a mindset of condemnation.  As Jesus said to Nicodemus, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  The Gospel is a message of hope and not a message of judgment.

On another occasion, Jesus said, “I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly.”²⁵  The prologue to the Gospel of John tells us, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”²⁶  Christ came into the world to bring light and life, not judgment and condemnation.  The question is whether we will step into the Light and experience the abundant life Christ offers us or instead condemn ourselves by hiding from the Light and missing out on the life Christ offers.  This is the choice Jesus presented to Nicodemus, and this is the choice Christ presents to each of us.

Nicodemus makes two more appearances in the Gospel of John.  At some point after Nicodemus's secret conversation with Jesus, the Sanhedrin deployed the temple police to arrest Jesus during a festival.  The police returned empty-handed, because they were so captivated by the things Jesus said.  Nicodemus suggested that the lawful thing for the council to do would be to allow Jesus to speak for Himself before they decided to take action against Him.  His suggestion, which raised a few eyebrows, was immediately dismissed.²⁷  Maybe Nicodemus was simply committed to following due process, or maybe He thought that Jesus' message was something the council needed to hear.  Later on, after Jesus died on the cross, another secret follower of His claimed the body.  Nicodemus purchased a large amount of myrrh and aloe, and the two men buried the body in a garden tomb.²⁸  Jesus died a criminal's death, but because of Nicodemus's generous gift, His body was given a royal burial.²⁹

I think that, as we follow Nicodemus through the Gospel of John, we can see signs of rebirth in his life.  The Bible does not tell us anything about what he did after Jesus' resurrection, but Church tradition suggests that he might have been martyred for following the way of Jesus.  Nicodemus is venerated as a saint in both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.  In the Orthodox Church, he is remembered, along with others who are associated with Jesus' burial, on the third Sunday of Eastertide.³⁰

This world is not what God intended it to be.  We live in a broken world because each of us is broken.  God has not given up on this world, and God has not given up on any of us.  Christ offers us the hope that someday all things will be set right and that the Kingdom of God will be fully realized in the world.  We can catch glimpses of the Kingdom of God right now, for Christ offers new and abundant life to all who will receive it.

Thanks be to God.


Notes:

1. William Barclay.  The New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John, Volume One.  2001, Saint Andrew Press.  p. 143
2. Wikipedia: “Sanhedrin”
3. Barclay, p. 143
4. John 2:13-25 (NRSV)
5. John 18:33-36 (NRSV)
6. Matthew 6:10 (NRSV)
7. Isaiah 11:6
8. Isaiah 2:4
9. Michael Curry.  “The Power of Love.”  05/20/2018
10. ibid
11. 1 John 4:8
12. Barclay, p. 146
13. Mark 1:14-15 (NRSV)
14. Wikipedia: “Metanoia (Theology)”
15. Blue Letter Bible: John 3:3
16. Shane Hipps.  “Born Above.”  Trinity Mennonite Church, 03/08/2009.
17. Barclay, p. 146
18. Blue Letter Bible: “pneuma” and “ruwach”
19. Numbers 21:4-9
20. John 19:13-18
21. John 1:14 (NRSV)
22. Luke 23:34 (NRSV)
23. John 1:5 (NRSV)
24. John 20:1-18
25. John 10:10 (NRSV)
26. John 1:3b-4 (NRSV)
27. John 7:45-52
28. John 19:38-42
29. Pope Benedict XVI as quoted by Daniel Burke.  “Nicodemus, the mystery man of Holy Week.”  Religion News Service, 03/27/2013.
30. Orthodox Wiki: “Nicodemus the Righteous”

Nicodemus and Jesus on a Rooftop was painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1899.