Nicodemus: John 3:1-17, 2nd Lent, 2014

“St Augustine is walking along the beach when he sees a little boy digging a hole in the sand and running back and forth from the ocean to fill the hole with water. Curious, Augustine asks the boy, ‘What are you doing?’ The little boy replies, ‘I’m putting the ocean in this hole.’ Augustine says, ‘ Little boy you can’t do that the ocean is too big to put in that little hole.’ The boy who is really an angel responds, ‘And so Augustine is your mind too small to contain the vastness of God.’”

The Gospel of John,  is about remembering Jesus core message and purpose. To embody in heart and mind the absolute outpouring love of God. And as we do, he looked back as  the mystic and poet Evangelist who writes sixty or seventy years after the death of Jesus. It is somewhat like the older man I am, as all of us look back at what Jesus’s message and life means to us and our communities.

Each day is a reminder to be born again

John uses Jesus and Nicodemus as a teaching opportunity for the emergent and struggling early church. Nicodemus represents the seeker who wants simple answers. Nicodemus is a world class scholar of the Law. The Pharsees were in fact re-interpreting the law to its root foundations in the Love of God, of Neighbor and Self. Still when Jesus says, “One has to be born again, ” Nicodemus asks the lawyerly question: ” How am I born again? Do I enter back into my mother’s womb?”

We looking back may understand Jesus response: “You have to be
born again with water and the Holy Spirit”. Many may have no idea what Jesus is talking about at the time John writes. John’s church was at work to establish Baptism as the rite of initiation into the Christian community. As such Baptism was and is the river into which one dips or plunges to receive the Holy Spirit.

And yet Jesus (and John) may have had something more in mind:, a lot more. Maybe Nicodemus’ idea of God was too circumscribed, narrow and acculturated. Being born again has something to do, John says, with  unfurling the sails to catch the wind of the spirit and inhale the breath of God. Nicodemus idea of the infinite capacity for God’s unlimited  love may be too hard for him. The reality that next to him, wasn’t only a remarkable teacher of the kind admired by the Pharisees,  He was the living incarnation of that love. And here’s the way , he says , to become the love and mind of the divine in the present reality. Your mind the little angel said to Augustine is too small to contain the vastness of God and of that divine love. It needs to remember from where and whom you come. You are God’s beloved and you live in the creation as a beloved looking out at everything as included in God’s love.

 

Although Jesus can be powerfully present to those who choose to be in relationship with Him, to be born again is more than to have the warm feel of Jesus’ nearness. It’s a pleasant experience to be sure, certainly a bit uncomfortable and yet devoutly hoped, Yet there are dangers if you take it too far. One risks placing God in a box, tie God up in a nice package name it Jesus and stop looking, become closed and smug and self-satisfied. And make Jesus our own little circumscribed Messiah. Jesus was not American, he was a Jew and saw theworld through the lens of his people who were oppressed by a foreign occuper. His view of the world was a poor man’s perspective with a vision of the Absolute abundance of God’s love for the creation. He was to big for any of our boxes. Yet we continue to try to harness the wind of the spirit. Only if we could control where it comes from and where it’s going. Let’s make rules and laws, that will give us certainty. That way we’ll keep control.

 

Jesus did not come to be another box for God. He came as a door opened to the world and time through which we can pass with new eyes and a new heart. ( O’Driscoll)

Jesus works for us who are already believers as this prime door opener. Don’t you think that Jesus would find joy in any who would access the door to the Eternal? If people can find any door to the eternal are they not among the blessed? That’s what I want for every one, to find that way to the spirit, the door to a wider compassion, to justice, to a loving and merciful heart and mind. For John and me that way is the face of Jesus. We show as much of that face as we can as an offering and a bridge to the holy. We try to keep the door unlocked and open.

We are in the same boat as John, looking back and remembering how to open to God with John’s images and metaphors coming to us in our prayers:

“Be born again.
Become flame.
Listen to the wind.

Be washed and cleansed from your broken places.
Drink living water.
Be still and know that I am God.
Be light.               Life.            Truth.                          Peace.
Be.”

“Have mercy.” Love one amother as I have loved you.”

What part of me is like Nicodemus who wants simple answers to eternal questions ? I need the language of John whose images and words of Jesus visit my prayers and remind me that “the mind is too small to contain the vastness of God.” And each day is a reminder to be born again.

 

I send you a story from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which is in the preface to Mary Oliver’s wonderful collection of poems entitled Thirst.

“Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will you can become all flame.’”