Trinity Sunday
Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
It’s night when Nicodemus comes to Jesus. Somehow I find that easy to forget when I read the verse that comes later in the reading, so familiar as an encapsulation of the good news: ‘God so loved the word that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.’ I imagine that being said in bright sunlight, or at least in the radiant dawn of a new day. Not at night, in the shadows, under cover of darkness.
Why does Nicodemus come by night? Is it because he’s a leading Pharisee, a ruler among Jews, an esteemed teacher of Israel? That’s a lot to lose if you end up being tainted by association with this troublesome rabbi from the sticks. He has a reputation, position, influence to think of.
Or is it because, for Nicodemus, this conversation can only be had at night? In the daytime he has to be all those things – the respected leader, the wise interpreter of the law, the good Pharisee. You can act the role in the daytime. It’s at night that the doubts set in, when the questions in your mind chase each other through the darkness, when the desire to discover more about whatever it is you have glimpsed in this rabbi compels you to throw caution to the wind and seek him out.
And it’s as one rabbi to another that Nicodemus approaches Jesus. ‘Rabbi’, he says, ‘we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God’. It’s a diplomatic overture: in John’s Gospel Nicodemus comes to Jesus after Jesus has thrown the money-changers out of the temple, so it’s not obvious that the leaders of Israel would regard him as a teacher from God.
But Nicodemus does. He’s been impressed by the signs that Jesus has done, and wants to know more. Jesus, though, isn’t interested in engaging him in rabbinic disputation. Instead, he tells him ‘No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ And Nicodemus, patron saint of the literal-minded, is stumped. ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’
It sounds outlandish, this talk of being born anew. How can you start again, have a fresh beginning? There is this life, and what we do with it, and some of it is joyful and some of it is painful, and some things you try to live with and some things you do your best to forget, and if you’re a good Pharisee, like Nicodemus, you know that you can stay on the right track by keeping the law, and that gives you a guide to hold onto through life and all its complexity, and if you’re lucky you get to a stage where other people think you’ve got it sorted, and you can even convince yourself, some of the time, that this is the full, the good life that God intends for you. And then this rabbi talks about being born anew, about a Spirit that blows where it wills, right through the carefully constructed boundaries of your life, carrying with it on the wind the dangerous scent of freedom, of a life unconstrained by convention and fear.
No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. Nicodemus can’t stay sitting on the fence. If he wants to know more he will not find it in books or learning, important though they are. He will have to topple off the fence, into the new life that Jesus is talking about. It may cost him his reputation, his position, and his influence. It will upend what he thought he knew about God. As with a baby emerging from its mother’s womb, this new life will feel startling and strange. It may feel safer to stay under cover of the darkness in which he has sought out Jesus, to keep a distance, to hedge his bets.
But you can’t do that, says Jesus. Not if you want the life God wants for you. If you want to see the kingdom of God, which in John’s Gospel means knowing eternal life, you have to be born from above. And that’s not in your power to control. It means putting yourself into the hands of the living God, being born anew into a life that is more dazzling, more radiant, than you could have imagined.
Nicodemus has sought out Jesus. Something about him is compelling, and makes Nicodemus want to know more. Nicodemus recognises that the signs Jesus does can’t be done apart from the presence of God. But he hasn’t reckoned with encountering the very presence of God incarnate in Jesus. For Nicodemus, God spoke through the law and the prophets. He doesn’t recognise that in Jesus God is speaking to him face to face.
To be born from above is to become a child of God: to be born, as John’s prologue puts it, ‘not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’. The Hebrew Scriptures, in which Nicodemus was well-versed, called Israel God’s son or child. ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I have called my son’, says God in Hosea. The people of Israel were called and chosen to be in relationship with God. And time and again we hear how this relationship goes wrong. The people forget the God who called them. They decide they prefer other gods. They deny God with their injustices and idolatries. They return to God and fall away again. They recommit to the covenant and then break it. And still God calls them. ‘Can a woman forget her nursing-child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you’, says God in Isaiah (49.15).
God gives his people the law so they know how to live in relationship with him. He sends them the prophets to call them back to his ways. He looks on this people he has made for himself, and sees some of them struggling for holiness, and others indifferent to his call. He sees the rich trampling on the poor, and the oppressed crying out for justice. He looks on this world he has made for love, on the people he formed for relationship with him and with each other, and has pity on us. And God does what we couldn’t do. He sends his Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life. As the serpent lifted up in the wilderness saved those who looked on it, so the lifting up of Jesus on the cross will bring salvation for those who believe in him, for Jesus’ death destroys death’s power.
It’s a lot for Nicodemus to take in. And we don’t know if he does, for he disappears from the story, making a further brief appearance to argue for hearing the evidence before the Jewish leaders judge Jesus and decide to arrest him, and then reappearing at the end to assist Joseph of Arimathea with preparing Jesus’ body for burial.
And the tomb is a fitting place for Nicodemus to re-enter the story. Because the new life that Jesus is describing to him, the life that comes of being born from above, is the life lived outside the tomb, the life made possible by Jesus’ resurrection. Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night and Jesus invites him to live in the light of eternal day. He comes with his reputation and status and all that they mean to him, and Jesus knows that his true value lies in being a child of God. He comes reluctant to be seen by others, obtuse, even, in the face of what Jesus says to him. And Jesus wants more for him, wants him to break free of the convention and fear that keep his life small and constrained, wants him to be a new creation of the Spirit who blows where she wills.
So how can he do it? How can one be born again after having grown old? You can’t do it yourself. This is a work of grace, an action of God. If you have come to Jesus by night it is to follow him into the day. It’s to throw your lot in with the unlikely band of people he calls to follow him. It’s to let God claim what is his, as in the font we are born anew of water and Spirit, and baptised into the very life of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.