Preached at Christ Church, Worton
Romans 4. 1–5, 13-17; John 3. 1-17
“How can anyone be born after having grown old?”
Crijn Hendricksz Volmarijn, Christ Instructing Nicodemus (ca. 1631). In a private collection.
Was Nicodemus a bit thick? I have often found myself wondering this as I have read this passage, where anything other than a very literal understanding of Jesus’ words seems to go over his head.
But Nicodemus is identified as a leader of the Jews, so was presumably a smart cookie. He is also identified as a Pharisee. The Pharisees were big into keeping the rules found in the Law of Moses.
This encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus immediately follows Jesus’ first visit to Jerusalem in St John’s Gospel, where he caused quite a stir by performing miraculous deeds and claiming that if they destroyed the Great Temple, He could raise it up in three days. This seems to have upset some folks, and perhaps that is why Nicodemus – a respected member of the religious elite, remember – came to Jesus by night.
But although Jesus might have upset other people, Nicodemus says that because of these miracles, he knows Jesus must be a teacher from God. But Jesus doesn’t bask in this praise. He replies straightaway that nobody can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. And that’s where we’re left wondering if Nicodemus is a bit thick, because he doesn’t grasp that this might have symbolic or spiritual meaning and starts babbling about going back into your mother’s womb. Then Jesus tells him he needs to be born of water and Spirit – which, from our perspective, is a clear reference to baptism. Baptism is more than a symbol, it is a sacrament: but it has symbolic elements that are obvious, to people then as much as to us now – the water symbolises both washing away sin and also a drowning to the old self, after which the renewed person rises up afterwards.
Part of why this might have been difficult for Nicodemus is that, as we’ve already noted, he thought following God was all about keeping a set of God-given rules. What was all this business about being born again supposed to mean? Nicodemus was already a son of Abraham, known for being obedient and pious—wasn’t that enough?
Jesus tells Nicodemus something quite crushing: that if he can’t even believe in something like baptism, something using very worldly items and very obvious symbolism, how is he supposed to believe Jesus’ really important new teaching, which is that He has actually come down from heaven, and that He will be “lifted up” so that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.
It’s easy for us to slag off Nicodemus for not understanding Jesus at this point. But we know how the story ends, and he didn’t. Nicodemus wasn’t thick at all, but he was trapped in a particular way of thinking. It’s us who can be left feeling a bit thick by today’s first reading, from Paul’s Letter to the Romans because it’s rooted in a lot of Jewish thinking that is now quite far from us, but it was in fact very important. It was effectively the Christian answer to the way of thinking embodied by Nicodemus.
Now, it’s time for a confession – when I was younger I used to hear these difficult, confusingly phrased, passages of St Paul in church, and I would really try to listen and understand them, and sometimes I pretended that I had actually understood them, but try as I might, I often found my mind just wandered off in the middle of them because they made no sense. So don’t worry if Paul made you drift off earlier: let me try to explain today’s reading, and how it links so intimately with today’s Gospel.
When he was younger Paul was, just like Nicodemus, a Pharisee. He prided himself on keeping the Law of Moses and he thought keeping the law was what made someone a righteous person. Unlike Nicodemus, he was such a fanatic that he violently persecuted people whom he thought were enemies of God—most notably, he persecuted the first Christians and was complicit in the lynching of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr.
But after a mystical encounter with Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus, he had to rethink everything. The Letter to the Romans is the most in depth statement of his new beliefs – for one thing, he no longer thought that trying to keep the rules was the be all and end all of obeying God (after all, it had turned him into a murderer) and he thought that everyone who followed Christ could be one of God’s chosen people, not only Jews.
What he does in this morning’s reading is go back to the founding hero of the Jewish people, Abraham, to prove all this using the Jewish scriptures. Now Abraham lived hundreds of years before Moses, so he didn’t have Moses’ law to obey—he didn’t even have the Ten Commandments. But God still promised him that he would have descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky, and because he believed that promise, God counted him as a righteous man. Abraham wasn’t righteous in God’s eyes because he kept the law, but because he had faith.
If that was true of Abraham, Paul argues, surely it was true of all of us. If faith was enough for Abraham—the founding father of the whole Jewish people—then maybe faith in God’s promises, not tallying up how good you were at keeping the rules, was what God wanted of all of us.
What’s more than that, when God made that promise to Abraham, he wasn’t even circumcised! Imagine that! Now, that doesn’t make any difference to us, but to Jews, it meant, well, he wasn’t a Jew at all, but just another gentile! More than that, God told Abraham that he would be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. So although Jews argued they were Sons of Abraham, their own scriptures said that so too would people of many other nations and tribes. For Paul, after his conversion experience, it was obvious that these other descendants of Abraham were those who trusted in Jesus Christ as the Messiah.
This can feel a bit dry and technical, but it is the core of debates that raged in the twenty years or so after Christ and which Paul won, turning Christianity from a branch of Judaism that believed Jesus was the Messiah, into the universalising religion we are part of today. It was how Nicodemus’ way of thinking was transformed into the Christian way of thinking.
What does this mean for you and me? It means you are not trying to persuade God to love you. You are not on probation. Abraham was declared righteous before he had done anything impressive. Nicodemus was told he needed to be reborn, not a better record. Paul discovered that all his rule-keeping had turned him into a violent bigot—but faith led him to love.
You don’t have to earn heaven by being good; God has promised it to you in Christ. God so loved the world. That includes you. When we are still far off, God meets us in His Son to bring us home.
And when you really believe that – when you stop trying to impress God and start trusting Him – something shifts. You don’t obey out of fear anymore. You don’t do good to secure your place. You live well because you already know you are loved.
Live your life like that, and you may even see glimpses of the eternity that awaits you while you are here on Earth.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
