John 3:1-21 – Jesus is God’s answer to a dark and broken world
Introduction
This week was the first of our Lent reflections series, where a few of us met in the chapel and sat with this same reading and also with the painting you see on the screen, using them as a lens for prayer and discussion.
The image is called ‘Nicodemus visiting Jesus’ and was painted by the African American artist, named Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1899. His father was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Tanner, after his move to France in 1890,s rose to international acclaim for his work, often including issues of race in his paintings.
I’ll be referring to the painting at different points, and you’re invited to study the painting in tandem with the sermon this morning. Notice what stands out to you and how the different parts of the text are represented in it.
The familiar words of John 3:16, so often quoted on its own, sit squarely as part of this story of a 1st century theologian’s encounter with Jesus.
That “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” is practically a simple summary of the message of John’s Gospel, and of this story with Nicodemus.
It has been said that this verse is “the background of the canvas on which the rest of the Gospel is painted.” Which I think Tanner illustrates for us, while Jesus and Nicodemus dominate the foreground of the painting, the background is no less important. The wooded hillside, the slumbering city and the expanse of the cosmos that lies behind the night’s curtain are not just a backdrop.
It is what God Loves. The world, all of creation, all the creatures and people, is what God loves and gives Jesus to save. The world, in the darkness of the night of its rebellion in the background, is the reason Jesus and Nicodemus are having their conversation in the foreground.
Jesus is God’s answer to a dark and broken world.
Come to Jesus with Curiousity
On a practical level, Nicodemus comes to visit at night, probably not in an attempt to be incognito, but to get some one-on-one time with Jesus. We have what is likely a highlight or the main thrust of a long conversation.
He is like the curious student at the end of the lecture who engages the professor in conversation while everyone else files out of the class. Except Nicodemus is a professor himself, and the best sort.
He is curious.
He’s seen what Jesus is doing, notices that it doesn’t seem to fit with his group’s understanding of what God will do in the world, but he doesn’t write Jesus off. He’s come looking for understanding.
The motif of darkness, of not being able to see clearly, is one that the author of John uses often in this Gospel, and so the placing of this scene at night does double duty. The author wants us to see Nicodemus as being on a journey of understanding who Jesus is, but the direction of travel is from the darkness of not seeing clearly, toward the light of belief and trust. Nicodemus pops up in John’s Gospel twice more, once in chapter 7 and again after Jesus’ crucifixion.
Nicodemus thinks he can see something of Jesus, but is looking for the rest of the puzzle pieces. Jesus essentially responds that noone can find the puzzle pieces unless they are born from above. Some translations have the more well-known rendering: Born again.
I wonder how you feel about those words: Born Again. Maybe you have an experience of coming to faith that was dramatic, perhaps even painful, but life-giving.
Or, maybe you’ve never known a time that you were not a Follower of Jesus, and you’ve encountered, perhaps even hurt by, that term used as a label others have used to mark themselves out as more spiritual. A born-again Christian instead of a Christian.
Despite how we may feel about it or have heard it used, I think it’s important we don’t sideline the idea behind it. We too can learn from Nicodemus approach. The idea didn’t fit with his view of the world.
For him, belonging and participating in the Kingdom of God was a matter of belonging to the family of Abraham. But Jesus is pointing not to human birth, where we are alive to the world around us, but a heavenly birth, where we are alive to God.
When he talks of being born of water and spirit, he’s likely echoing Ezekiel, who spoke of God sprinkling the remnant of God’s people with water to purify them and putting a new spirit in their hearts, replacing a heart of stone with a heart of flesh.
For Ezekiel and Jesus, being in God’s kingdom, or in God’s family, isn’t as much about what’s on a birth certificate as it is about the transformation of our hearts. A transformation only the Spirit of God can accomplish, the Spirit that moves as the wind, unseen, unrestricted, but we see and hear, where it’s blowing!
Our being born from above isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ type of event. But it is an ‘event’, be it memorable or not.
It’s not the endpoint but the beginning of a new direction of travel. It may be quiet, like Nicodemus, gradually coming to understand who Jesus is. But our life following Jesus is marked by growing up to maturity in Christ. And begins and continues by coming to sit with Jesus with curiosity and humility. Seeking understanding of the God revealed in Christ.
Come to Jesus with curiosity.
Our renewal is accomplished by the cross and resurrection
When Nicodemus is asking for Jesus to flesh out how this all works, Jesus makes a comparison to a story from Israel’s time in the wilderness. Essentially what happened is the Israelites start thinking and grumbling that God isn’t going to be faithful to their agreement and so God sends a plague of poisonous snakes among their camp. It’s sounds crazy to us, that’s the part we often get stuck on.
But, more importantly, God provides the remedy for the situation. Moses is instructed to make a bronze serpent and lift it up high on a pole. Whoever is bitten and looks at the lifted up image of the serpent, would live.
A strange and bizarre story for us, but one that made sense to them.
They understood that God was faithful and gracious, and that it was God who had saved them, and would continue to do so.
Jesus says God’s saving power is at work in him, that he too will be lifted up in crucifixion, and exalted in his resurrection and whoever ‘looks to him’ will also live. Believing in Jesus isn’t so much a head thing that we agree with. But it is trusting in Jesus. Looking to him to accomplish our renewal, our regeneration.
What is happening on the cross is in many senses a deep mystery. But it seems that what Jesus wants Nicodemus to understand, and what the author wants us to understand, is that in Christ on the cross we see the sum total of the brokenness and evil that is in the world, and if we can be honest here, that is in us, that Jesus allowed to take out all of its ugliness on himself. We are seeing the end result of our distorted and misplaced love and worship, our poor choices.
But we also see what God has done about it. Jesus lifting up, his crucifixion and resurrection, shows us how high, wide, long and deep God’s love is for all God has made.
God, in Jesus, steps into a world that thinks it knows better, and takes the consequences of disrupted relationships into himself. Offering healing, life, new life, eternal life, the Good Life to all who look to him.
Our renewal is made possible by what Jesus does on the cross and in his resurrection.
Humanity is called to step into the light
There are no speech marks in the Greek manuscripts, so it’s hard to know exactly where Jesus stops speaking and the author starts narrating. But the text is at pains to point out that God doesn’t downplay brokenness, rebellion, or our sin. But Jesus has come to save, not condemn. To rescue, not rub it in our faces.
It also wants to say that if Jesus has come, that people have life and life as it’s really meant to be, instead of the hellish existence of our own making. Then there is the possibility of both.
Nicodemus came at night, for practical reasons, yes, but also in the sense that he was moving toward the light of Jesus.
In Tanner’s painting, there are three light sources; the dim light of the moon provides the general ambience.
But the light cast from the house below lights up the stairs that lead to Jesus. Perhaps indicating that in coming to Jesus, Nicodemus has already been on a journey toward the light.
Thirdly, there that light of Jesus himself. There is light that appears to be emanating from Jesus’ chest, perhaps the love of the heart of God, and the light of not only his face, but in his eyes. Tanner has painted Jesus with a piercing gaze, as if to show us that Jesus looks deep into each of us, sees all that we are, all that we’ve done and all we’re going to do.
But the piercing gaze is not one of condemnation – There is warmth in those eyes.
Jesus really sees you, all you are and all he means for you to become.
Tanner has painted Jesus hand, you may note, as the hand of a person of colour, it’s turned upwards, as if pointing heavenward, but we can also see it beckoning to Nicodemus, to us.
Keep coming closer, closer to the light, into the light.
Not deeper into the night as if our hope lies in someone in the darkness of our failed attempts at fixing our human condition on our own.
Jesus beckons to us. Calls humanity to step into the light of Jesus’ way of living and being in the word. The way of radical and self-giving love.
Closing
The self-giving love of God who steps renews us, makes us new creatures through Jesus work on the cross and resurrection. The Jesus we come to with our curiosity, questions, doubts and fears. Jesus is God’s answer for a dark and broken world.
Amen.