Continuing our journey through John
1 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council.
2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
3 In reply Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”
4 “How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!”
5 Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
9 “How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.
10 “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?
It’s interesting if you read this as a dialog rather than isolated statements. Nicodemus strikes a conversation with Jesus, though he states he is a pharisee and many of them disliked Jesus, we can’t tell by this opening what his intent is.
Nicodemus makes a statement about Jesus being from/with God, and Jesus responds with a seemingly separate statement about the ‘kingdom of god’ and a ‘born again’ type of transformation.
There’s a number of things that could be going on here – Jesus is either trying to reroute the question, or he sees deeper into the heart of what Nicodemus is asking – either way he wanted to provoke and challenge Nicodemus to come a little further.
Simply being able to acknowledge that Jesus was a teacher from God was not enough – Jesus wanted to entice him with something more wonderful – the kingdom of God.
Simply knowing that Jesus was working in partnership with God was not enough – he wanted Nicodemus to be ‘born again’ – experience transformation towards a new life.
The conversation continues with what it means to be ‘born again’ and while there’s a number of different analogies that Jesus could use here – he chooses one that goes to the very root of who a person is and one that is seemingly impossible.
Think about the strange statement Jesus makes of ‘You must be born again’. So ‘You’ that means there’s hope for ‘you’. He doesn’t say it’s utterly impossible, he doesn’t say that a person must be annihilated and God needs to just start over and make something new -but something about the essence of ‘you’ must go through a birthing process.
Jesus speaks of different materials of ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ (note this isn’t a separation of our fleshly physical bodies – since Jesus himself was in the flesh) – but of what you’re made of within. At the core. Not simply picking up a new habit, or discipline or external change – but an internal transformation of what guides everything else in your life. With it is a process of re-learning – to see the world new, using new muscles and senses, crawling, stumbling, standing, falling, walking, running – to live life new again in many ways.
Jesus goes on about the wind and spirit and Nicodemus is obviously confused, i’d be too. And here’s the thing, when you really encounter God, something unsettling is suppose to happen. If you ever feel like you’ve got God figured out… then that’s probably not God. God always seeks to lovingly press us on. He’s trying to help us comprehend something that we did not comprehend before.
If we believe that there’s a living and infinite God who walks with us, then we ought to be a bit confused and startled when he speaks to us.
