I’m sure all
of you know – or at least I hope you know – someone whose integrity and
sincerity you both admire and value: someone you reckon you can trust – even if
you know they are not perfect and, like all of us, have their flaws and
failings: yet, nevertheless, they are the sort of people for whom playing by
their moral code and standing up for what is right, just, and fair is who they
are. Such people tend not to worry too much about what other people think of
them, are happy to go against the flow if the flow is going the wrong way, and
are motivated by a genuine desire to discover the truth and live by the light
of that truth. I think this Nicodemus was one such guy: there’s a lot to admire
about Nicodemus. I’ve got a lot of time for Nicodemus, the rabbi who, as we
heard in our reading, comes to Jesus because he is a genuine seeker after the
Truth and recognises in Jesus something quite unusual.
We can chart
Nicodemus’ progress in St. John’s Gospel: we see a man, a genuine kind of guy,
who is not content with anything less than the truth. We see him move in his
relationship with Jesus - this new young Rabbi claiming and doing and teaching
things that must have really disturbed this essentially good guy, Nicodemus:
move from CURIOSITY to CONSCIENCE to COMMITMENT. He appears here in chapter 3 and
then again in chap’s 7 &19. And in who he was, the type of person he was,
and how he develops in his relationship with Jesus, we see something of a model
or illustration of how it is when someone who is a genuine seeker after the
truth – the truth that is about life’s deepest questions: why are we here, how
should we live, what happens to us when we die, and other such pressing
questions. Nicodemus thinks that Jesus is worth the risk: and by chapter 19 we
learn that it was for Nicodemus a risk worth taking.
Now I
realise that this chapter and some of its verses are very well known to many of
you. Indeed, I am sure several of you could be up here this morning instead of
me! Some of the verses are either disturbing or liberating – depending on which
way you choose to look at them! So, in this season of Lent, when we are asked
to consider more deeply our own walk with God and the present health of it,
let’s take a closer look at this encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus. I must warn you at the outset; there are
some challenging matters here to consider.
Nicodemus
was a member of the religious and academic elite of his day, something Jesus acknowledges.
But for all his academic ability, his religious knowledge and genuine curiosity
about Jesus, we see from this encounter that he is still very much in the dark about Jesus and who he is;
and this to the extent that Jesus actually criticises him for his lack of
understanding and discernment. Nicodemus’ problem is that he has allowed all
his religious, academic, and cultural presuppositions and prejudices to blind
him to the truth about Jesus up to this point. He eventually comes to a living
faith, I think, because his search for the truth is genuine and, as we see
later, he comes to faith in Jesus for who he is, the long-awaited Messiah, the
Saviour of Israel.
Some of you
will remember the famous Bishop John Robinson who wrote a book called ‘Honest
to God’ in which he very controversially questioned some of the beliefs and
doctrines of the Church. He was a very well respected academic who was made a
bishop in the Church of England, as they often are. Very interestingly though,
it was his genuine seeking after the truth that later in life caused him to
fall foul of his academic peers when he went against them and started to
question and argue against some of the foundations on which his peers and
predecessors had built their academic reputations. As a result he was
ostracised by many; treated as someone who had ’lost it’. But he hadn’t; he had
simply been honest in his search for the truth and, as those who knew him
explained, had, as a result, come to know more clearly the living God.
I had a
similar tussle myself when I was reading theology at Cambridge. I was given to
read for one of my essays a book by a very eminent female German professor of
New Testament studies. Basically, one of those to whom you had to defer if you
wanted a good mark for your essay. That I quickly decided and attempted to show
that this female wunderkind was talking nonsense did not go down well. She
after all was the academic authority: I was but a simple ex-infantry officer
with a faith and some knowledge of the Middle East. Now I have to acknowledge
that she seemed very sincere and, I believed at the time, a genuine seeker
after the truth. I did not get a good grade for my essay. Ten years later
however I stumbled on an article about this dear lady in which she had recanted
all her previous academic insights about the New Testament, showed how the
academics had misled her and their students, and repented of what she had
taught. Why did she do this? Because she had met, at long last, the risen Jesus,
the living God. Through the love and the prayers of some of her students over
the years she was able to come out of the darkness of academic blindness into
the light of Christ. And you know what really made me jump for joy?
Nothing
about my being right after all: no, it was comparing an early photograph of a
young, distinguished and very serious-looking professor with the smiling,
joyous face of a woman now in her 70s who had so obviously come to know Jesus.
Now you may
not be an academic by profession or nature: I certainly am not. But each one of us has to ask ourselves, in
the light of what Jesus says to us Sunday by Sunday, day by day, hour by hour,
what is it in my life, what are the intellectual or social or moral passions or
prejudices that are preventing me from seeing Jesus for who he really is or
from following him faithfully?
In v2 we
learn that Nicodemus has been struck by the evidence of the miraculous signs in
Jesus’ ministry (Read): and what he says to Jesus implies that he thinks there
must be even more to Jesus than what he has seen so far. But Jesus replies to
Nicodemus over the next admittedly puzzling dozen or so verses by telling him
that it is no use trying to understand him and the kingdom of God in terms of earthly
categories, that is, in terms of what we know or like to think we know about
God. (If I had a penny!) But the truth is that a person may only understand God
and his kingdom (v3) and enter it (v5) if he or she is willing to undergo a
complete spiritual regeneration by God. The term for this that Jesus uses is
‘being born again’ or ‘being born from above’: and that can only come through
(v5) water and the spirit. That is to say, through repentance and receiving the
gift of the Holy Spirit. What is more (v8), such things are only understood by
those who no longer try to get their heads around God according to their own or
the world’s ideas but who now see themselves and the world from God’s revealed
point of view; what he has told us about the world and about you and me. To be
quite frank, those who are born of the spirit will often seem quite strange to
those not born of the spirit: because they will have different priorities in
life, different goals; be different in many ways.
This is
still all too much for poor old Nicodemus. (V9) ‘How can these things be?’ he
exclaims. Jesus is not sympathetic to him (v10). If he had interpreted the Old
Testament correctly he would have seen that Jesus’ teaching was not only based
on the Old Testament but that Jesus himself was the fulfilment of the Old
Testament promises and prophecies.
Jesus’
response shows that Nicodemus’ failure to believe was more reprehensible than
his failure to understand. It was St.
Augustine who put the matter so exquisitely, ‘I believe in order to understand.’
Verse 12. Jesus says to Nicodemus that if he
cannot hoist in this elementary spiritual fact that he needs to be born again
in order to see and enter God’s kingdom, then what is the worth of Jesus trying
to explain to him the mysteries of that kingdom.
You see, unless you and I have
been converted to the person of Jesus and the priorities of his kingdom we
shall not be able to understand.
In verse 13 Jesus asserts his credentials
and then in verses 14 & 15
explains, using an Old Testament
illustration, that He must lose his life in order that ‘whosoever believes in
him may have eternal life.’
Verses 16 to 21 are almost certainly an additional
commentary by the apostle John on this encounter and these words of Jesus; a
commentary that spells out the great cost of Jesus’ sacrificial love for the
world and the urgent, vital, and necessary need for people to turn to Jesus and
accept him as their Lord and Saviour. The judgement or analysis of human nature
we read here is not a comfortable one but it is an accurate one for those who
are willing to be honest with themselves about themselves, and who are genuine
seekers after the truth.
The greatest
truth for any of us to learn in this life is that our lives do not belong to us
but are a gift of God, on loan, for a time. In the time that we have here, we
need to understand that our sin is a real problem and that we must allow God to
deal with it in the way that he has chosen; a way that favours no one and
includes everyone -which is through faith in Jesus. Christianity is the most
inclusive – to use the modern politically correct jargon – in the world: but it
is not an optional lifestyle extra as some would like to see it. Such a view is
part of the darkness in which some people choose to live their lives. It is up
to us, to you and to me, to help them to see the light of life and the light to
life, which is Jesus. V16 ‘For God so
loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him
may have eternal life.’
No comments:
Post a Comment