Today’s passage is a remarkable dialogue between our Lord Jesus and a key leader among the religious higher-ups, who, generally speaking, were very hostile to Jesus.
Nicodemus had a different response though to Jesus, he had a different spirit about him. He took his role of spiritual leadership seriously. He wanted to know all that God had for the nation of Israel, including himself,
and he had been impressed by and convinced by Jesus' presence, his teachings and his miracles and so he sought an audience with Jesus, under the cloak of night.
John 3:1 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council.
So Nicodemus was a part of that leadership group whose hackles Jesus was raising, and throughout the book of John, that tension we can see growing very significantly.
Nevertheless, Nicodemus wants to meet with Jesus, but again wants to do so without being detected. As a member of the leading council, he was fearful of being seen with Jesus one on one. He needed to keep up appearances, to make it appear that he was still in lockstep with the Jewish ruling council, despite his growing positive fascination with Jesus.
This was because God‘s spirit was at work in him. It takes great courage to be a free thinker, to not go along with the dominant viewpoint around you. It takes some hutzpa to go against the grain.
2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
In verse 2 Nicodemus says “we know you are a teacher from God“, and here, speaking in the plural, he clearly identifies the fact that he was not alone among others in the ruling council in wondering about Jesus, and wondering if he is who he says he is, if he just might be the Messiah.
But Nicodemus, it appears, was the one among those who were open to Jesus, who found the strength and resolve to go against the grain and simply have this conversation with Jesus.
It’s interesting that for most of the formal spiritual leadership, thus far and in the future, Jesus' miracles were not something that piqued curiosity. They were not wonderful demonstrations that God had arrived.
They were instead a real irritant, they were perceived as being a real problem, because the leaders knew that such miracles could not be from the darkness, could not be from Satan.
As Nicodemus said, no one could do those impossible things, those miracles if God were not with him.
This demonstrates a solid basic knowledge of the character of God that Nicodemus had. He understood that God is good, and that God only ever does good things.
So his conviction, however much it was against the norm, was that God was with Jesus. Just how that was true he is in the process of figuring out in this passage.
The fact that Jesus is God had not yet fully dawned on Nicodemus, as it had not on any of the followers of Jesus.
But here we can identify Nicodemus as someone who was in the process of weighing the cost of following Jesus.
What’s so interesting is that Jesus doesn’t seem to directly respond to the questions or statements of Nicodemus. Notice that?
But what Jesus has is an ability to understand the undercurrent of the questions, the question beneath the question. Jesus had the full range of spiritual gifts at work in him, so his responses, rarely specifically answering with clear forensic precision, his answers nevertheless get to the heart of the matter. And so they carry the conversation forward so that Nicodemus has more questions.
Nicodemus is clearly perplexed. Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” What does that mean? It means that there is a way to see and there is a way to not see, there is a way to understand, and a way to not understand.
Here Jesus is indicating that the way to see is not through human wisdom not even discoverable by human investigation. The kingdom of God can be seen and begin to be understood only when a person is born a new, born from above, born again, spiritually reborn.
This is something quite unique to the Christian faith, and it does challenge the frequent human desire to earn knowledge through investigation, to gain status through understanding. But Jesus here in response to all that Nicodemus has said so far, is saying that what Nicodemus seeks can only be attained through God revealing himself to Nicodemus.
This of course is universally true. People can investigate the Christian faith, they can actually become quite impressed with all of the evidence: The resurrection of Jesus, the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus to his disciples and hundreds of others provide compelling evidence for the truth of the resurrection. The number of fulfilled Messianic prophecies in the OT about Jesus is over 300.
In addition to messianic prophecies, the Old Testament continually prophesies about events that have happened: Israel’s future into exile, nations that will be destroyed, Israel’s kingdom being restored, etc.
These predictions further demonstrate that we can trust the Bible as truly inspired by God.
And the personal experiences of transformation in the lives of believers. All of that and more can inspire a person to look further into the claims of the Christian faith. But that investigation, using human wisdom and human reasoning will not, by itself, result in a person coming to know God.
God has to move. God has to move because there is much in humans that resists truth that is not convenient.
We resist truth that shakes us up. We resist truth that seems to have weight to it, that might bring about change - even good change - in our lives. God has to break through, supernaturally, to enable us to see.
4 “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
Nicodemus asks a good question, and this is a good response to what Jesus has just said, because, for him and most other people around him, which he said would be very confusing. So Nicodemus approaches Jesus' statement by trying to sort it through in the natural, taking kind of a forensic view of trying to figure out what Jesus is talking about.
His first run at interpreting Jesus' words is kind of literal: 4 “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” And, he’s right. Sometimes it’s important to state the obvious in order to get beyond the obvious.
Ever said a thought that you had while processing new information out loud that you regretted because those listening to you mocked you. They think it’s obvious. That’s happened to me. It’s super important to let people process information at their own speed and to not demean folks for being a little earlier in the processing of information than you are.
It was an obvious question on the one hand, but it was also a question with layers of meaning, because it was in response to Jesus’ talking about the Kingdom of God, again the reign of God. Jesus says a person must be born of water and of the spirit.
It was understood then as now that without water, nothing can get clean. So Jesus reference to “water“ here can refer, to a person being made clean through repentance. 1 John 1:9 says: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, so that he will forgive us our sins and will cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So here we can see this connection between confession, repentance, and being made clean. Water represents here, repentance and “spirit“ here simply refers to the movement of the Holy Spirit, who works upon us, works on our hearts, works on our spirits, to turn our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, our hearts that are spiritually dead and unresponsive, to hearts that are alive and able to respond to God in faith.
Have you noticed that you can never, or rarely, talk about or think about God without wondering about your connection to God.
For me it’s hard to think about God without thinking about hope, about mystery; without thinking about love, and our ultimate purpose here on earth. So behind the obvious, I think Nicodemus' question was a question about hope, a question about how people connect with God.
And the question he asks really boils down to the type of question that many of us have asked at one point or other in our lives. How do we come closer to God? And attached to that question is always another question, and that is: “What is God like? What is the identity of God? What is the nature and the character of God?
Is God an idea? Is God a reality, but one that is so abstract and impossible for the human mind to comprehend, that there is no point in trying to go any further with that question? When I hit 17 years of age, even though I’d never believed in God or given the slightest thought to there being a God, when I met some people who followed Jesus for real.
When I got to know them and discovered how completely differently they thought about life and experienced life, and then when I first heard these words of Jesus, I started to think about those questions for the first time.
I wondered: is there a God, and is God somehow knowable? Beyond that I wondered, “Is this thing called the love of God something real? Is God someone, who can be known, perhaps NOT by human capacity or ingenuity, knowable, but is God knowable through any other means?
And those are questions that for those who lean toward such thoughts, are very important.
They are questions that we want to find answers to, if there ARE answers, so that we connect the dots of our lives together, and so that we can perhaps locate ourselves in the bigger story of God’s world, and so that we can find meaning in this life. We want to know: Can God be known? And who is God? And if God can be known, how do I know Him?
And behind that question, if we’re honest, is perhaps another question: Where do I stand in my life now because of who God is? This dialogue between Nicodemus and Jesus winds up in Jesus making what has become an iconic, well-known quote.
He says: 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
Quickly, I want to consider three notions that come out of this passage - one that talks about God, one that talks about our problem with God, and one that gives us the greatest personal hope that a person can have.
The first 5 words of John 3:16 are this: “God so loved the world”. This tells us of God’s posture, His attitude, His motive, and His affection. Elsewhere in his 1st letter, St. John, the writer of this gospel says: God is love.
God doesn’t stand firstly as judge, nor even primarily as Creator, and absolutely God does not fulfill the traditional idea of ‘the angry guy in the sky’.
Those are purely human ideas. God is first a lover of the world. His posture, His stance is of one who loves - who feels and acts on that emotion. Who embodies it so much that we can say: God is love. When God does something, it’s because of love. That is the root reason for everything, including all of creation.
You, created in the image of God, are sitting here today because God wanted you to be alive, because He loves, and He loves you. God loves. That is His motive for everything He does. And what, or who, He loves is people. You, actually. God’s love led Him to act. Love is a verb, perhaps more than it is an emotion. I’d say that love matters as an emotion when it leads to action, to loving action.
And God’s loving action, His choice of ‘what’s the best, most loving thing I could do?’, was to give His only begotten Son. God sent Jesus into the world as a human being. God came close to us in Jesus Christ. He put on human flesh, He was clothed with humanity.
So God expressed His love through giving, through the giving of His Son, born of Mary-a virgin. And in this form, Jesus, the Son of God, God the Son, lived and dwelled. And He eventually became the rabbi who was having the conversation with Nicodemus that we’re talking about today. God loves. God gives God’s best.
And finally, Jesus unpacks for us why. Why did God give? Why did God give His Son. For what purpose? Jesus says: ”That whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life”.
God’s giving of His Son is to prevent one thing and cause another. Prevent one thing and cause another.
What does God want to prevent? Perishing. He wants no one to perish, to fade away, to live a life of restless wandering, to spend eternity in God’s absence. In God is everything that is good. In God is everything in which our best hopes are fulfilled.
To miss God, to live without Him and then to die without Him is actually to completely miss the point of life in the first place. God wants none to perish. He wants no further peopling of hell. That’s what He wants to prevent. What He wants to cause is for you and me to ‘have eternal life’.
That is the ultimate answer to all of Nicodemus’ questions, whether or not he knew it. And it’s the ultimate answer to all of our deepest questions and longings, whether we’re aware of it or not.
“Eternal life” speaks to having a life that is worth embracing with all of our passion and vigour. It speaks to living fully-engaged, deeply hopeful, purposeful, useful lives right here and now. It speaks to living life knowing that you are loved by the greatest One of all, that you are held in the palm of His hand, that your whole being is safe in His hands.
And it ALSO speaks to what happens when this life we’re all living is done. It speaks to the fact that for those who believe in and receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, when we’re done here on earth, we’re not done at all - not even a little.
There is an eternity of love and joy and community and communion with God and His people that awaits. It is the continuation of that eternal life that we start enjoying now when we come to Jesus Christ in faith, trusting in His saving work on the cross, believing that He died in our place, and receiving Him as our Lord and Saviour.
I end with verse 17: For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Jesus is simply clarifying, restating what He said before in case we’re inclined to want to shake it off.
“I’m not here to condemn you”, Jesus says. I wasn’t sent to be a drag, to be a weight on your shoulders. I was sent to save you. To deliver you. To free you. To give you life”.
And in that, Jesus shows how He is what we need in order to come into a relationship with God, and to begin to understand more of what true spirituality is all about.
How’s that?, you ask? Jesus does for us what the human brain cannot do. We can’t do the most important thing we need to do. What’s that?
We can’t figure out who God is. We can research and discover by scientific method who God is. Put all of the best human minds that have ever been on this planet together, and we can’t by ourselves begin to scratch the surface of who God is.
But Jesus did it for us. How? He revealed Who God is to us. He peeled away the layers. He displayed it in His life for all to see. What we need, if we’re lacking understanding of God, is a revelation from Jesus. And He freely does this for everyone who asks with a sincere heart.
What questions are you asking today? Are you, like Nicodemus, wondering about the spiritual life? Are you wondering about the rabbi known as Jesus? Are you wondering about God? Are you wondering about where you stand with God?
128 years ago, John Coolidge ‘Hallelujah’ Davis, the founder of Yonge Street Mission, stood not far from here and encouraged the people of this community way back then to consider Jesus, to look to Jesus, to place their trust in Jesus. He stood in a long-line of Christians who spoke of God’s love, and then who sought to let people see God’s love in action.
That’s what led to the mission existing and serving the needs of the community, here and further east of us, and up in St. Jamestown and on Yonge Street.
128 years ago many listened. Some believed on the spot. Some eventually came to trust in Jesus. Some walked away, completely disinterested. That’s actually exactly what happened as Jesus Himself spoke to people, individually or in crowds. Go figure. May each of us turn an ear to the living God.
May each of us turn our hearts to Jesus Christ, the author of life, the One given so that you and me could be free - free to live joyful, purposeful lives, free to love, and free to live knowing by faith the close and dear embrace of God.
May God bless you and fill you and give you His peace. Amen.
