March 29, Lent 5; When Jesus Wept

Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45

“Unbind him, let him go.” Mic drop. That’s it. No “Hello, Lazarus, dearest friend, and welcome back!” No joy, no laughter, no embracing. Does Jesus just turn away? “Look, I did it, what else do you want? You think I did this for me? Don’t you know how soon I’ll be losing him again?”

This story is the last of our Lenten dramas by St. John. It’s in three acts. You didn’t hear the third act because it was left off by the lectionary. The third act is the denouement, the aftereffect. It takes place in a council chamber in Jerusalem, where the Judean leaders decide they must get Jesus killed. The third act is crucial to the larger story, but we we’ll not get into that today.

Act One takes place outside of Judea, where Jesus is keeping safe with his disciples, across the border of the Jordan River. Act One sets up the issues that the second act develops. I won’t say more about Act One.

Act Two takes place four days later, back in Judea, near Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem. It has three scenes: the Martha scene, the Mary scene, and the Lazarus scene. With each scene St. John gathers more characters on stage.

First, Martha meets Jesus, on the road outside of town, with his disciples in the background.

Second, Mary meets Jesus, at the same spot, plus the crowd of mourners right behind her, and the disciples.

Third, the whole lot go the tomb, and the last to make his entrance is the dead man, at the command of Jesus. Then, “Unbind him,” and the dead man comes alive. Lazarus, born again.

The three scenes are in tension. Martha, Mary, Lazarus. Belief, grief, relief. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Positive, negative, resolution. Discussion, emotion, release. The unbinding is less a triumph than a letting go. It’s not for jubilation but for vindication, for demonstration. Yes, it’s a miracle, it’s a wonder, but it’s only a sign, because Lazarus will die again someday. It’s a sign to demonstrate what Jesus says to Martha, and to vindicate what Martha says to Jesus.

The conversation of Martha and Jesus is the thesis. It goes: Martha, Jesus, Martha, Jesus, Martha. So, Martha: “If you’d been here.” Jesus: “He’ll rise again.” Martha: “I know he’ll rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 

Mind you, she did not mean the Christian vision of resurrection but the resurrection that the Judeans believed in. It’s not in the Torah. It got started with Ezekiel’s prophecy of the dry bones. That prophecy was intended as metaphorical, for the revival of the Judean nation after the catastrophe of Babylon. But in the six centuries following it came to be taken more literally—that at the end of time, God would raise up every Jew who had ever lived, to live a second time around, this time with the blessed kind of life that God had always promised them. And it was for Jews.

Jesus answers her and changes it. He makes it universal, and for the present, not the end of time, and he makes it a claim about himself. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believe in me, though they die, they’ll live, and will never die. Do you believe this?” Martha confirms what he says in her own way: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” 

Well, Martha, there’s a faith-claim, the strongest one so far in John’s Gospel. Only Thomas will make one stronger, and only after Jesus’ resurrection. And to vindicate what she says and to demonstrate what he says is why Jesus uses the sign of Lazarus. The strong claims of the two of them are the thesis.

And just as strong is the antithesis, the Mary scene. From the positive to the negative, from the belief to the grief. I think that when Jesus weeps it is the strongest moment in the whole story, even stronger than the miracle. I assume that’s by design, by St. John’s dramatic and theological design.

When Jesus wept, a falling tear
in mercy flowed beyond all bound.
When Jesus groaned a trembling fear
seized all the guilty world around.

This past week was the week of weeping. The previous week we were frantically adjusting—making plans, changing plans, taking stock, stocking up, getting ready. But last week you started crying. When you had to let employees go. When you got laid off. When you felt your isolation, when you felt how much you would be losing. Now, stuck at home, your feelings hit you and you wept. We have not yet wept for a death in our congregation, but we all have lots for us to grieve about.

And in our grief is anger too, which is often true of grief. An anger we can’t pin down. Notice that Our Lord was angry too. Twice it says that Jesus was “disturbed” and “greatly troubled.” Disturbed is putting it mildly. The Greek word has heat in it—groaning and growling. What is Jesus angry at? The whole situation. The power of death in the world. The resistance of unbelief. The mendacity of the leadership. How this situation is putting his own life at risk. He growls in his grief.

You hear people say that the weeping of Jesus shows how fully human he was. Okay, if that corrects our tendency to underplay his humanity when defending his divinity. But honestly, I think that gets it exactly wrong. I think it’s showing something about his divinity. St. John is telling us that God weeps. Indeed, it’s partly so that God could weep that God became incarnate. In Jesus God is one with us in all our grief and suffering. It was the grief of God when Jesus wept.

God grieves our mortal weaknesses and illnesses, even when they’re natural and morally neutral. This virus is just a weird form of life that is trying to maintain itself, as every life-form does. And as usual, God does not intervene. As Jesus let his best friend die. God does not intervene and yet God loves us and suffers with us, and God grieves our natural suffering, when Jesus wept.

But the anger in God’s grief is over the more grievous suffering that results from unbelief and sin. God grieves our violence and dehumanization, our pollution and desertification, our wanton destruction and our destruction of God’s image in us. This too God grieves, when Jesus wept.

And Jesus weeps for himself and his own death. He knows the price that he must pay, that the sign of Lazarus will be the death of him. He growls and groans for what he will lose, like his friendship with Lazarus. That’s why the mic drop, and why at the climax he turns away. To gain his friend he’ll lose it all, when he gets killed. His miracle of life does not cancel death, nor soften it. Where Jesus shines his light is in the valley of the shadow of death. The sign of Lazarus does not ameliorate our suffering nor soften death, rather it stands up in the midst of death and dramatically against it, and the mic drop is the angry NO of God to the proud pretensions of death in the world. For now.

But the mic drop is not the very last thing in Act Two. The last thing is that “many of the Judeans who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did believed in him.” That’s why he did all this—and he said so, that the crowd could believe that his Father in heaven had sent him, and that if Martha believed, she would see the glory of God. He did this demonstration and vindication that you too might believe, even you who are looking at your computer screens, even in this strange Lent enforced on us.

Who of us knew what we’d be giving up this Lent? That I’d be giving up my last Easter service in the sanctuary? That we’d be giving up Holy Communion, and the pipe organ? That you’d be giving up your social life, and employment, and income and security? Some of you have had to give up far more than I have, during this unexpectedly grievous Lent.

I have no good news to tell you about this pandemic. My good news is for your belief. My news is that your grief and anger are not the denial of your belief, but your proof of it. That your losses and your fear of greater loss are not the negation of your belief, but your reason for it. That this Lent enforced on you is not the repudiation of your Easter faith but your preparation for it. And that you can believe this kind of news is why you are watching your computer screens right now.

When Jesus wept, the crowd said, See how much he loved him. That is why God grieves and why God groans. Not because God is powerless, but because God is love, and God so loves the world. You are watching right now because you believe this and you want reminding of your belief, that in this trial of the world your belief in the love of God is what sustains you in your hope for the world.

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

March 22, Lent 4: Are We Blind?

1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

I feel like we are driving blind. We don’t know what’s ahead of us a week from now, or even a day from now. I remember driving blind. We were driving on Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania, in the mountains, Melody and me and the kids. A snowstorm hit us and it was bad. So I got behind a semi and we followed it for miles. I remember him going faster than I liked, and I remember the tension in my body as I held the wheel, and being scared, but it seemed less dangerous than pulling off somewhere. That same tension I felt again this week, and a lower version of that same being-scared.

I feel like we are walking blind through “the valley of the shadow of death,” the shadow from the pandemic, and though the Psalm says “for thou art with me,” begging your pardon, I can’t see you, O God. I can see my enemies, and right now there is no table God is spreading in the presence of our enemies. We can’t do our healing station to anoint our heads with oil. The Psalm says that “he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake,” but those paths right now I cannot see. I feel like we are walking blind.

At the end of our Gospel story, the Pharisees ask if they are blind. Their moral blindness is the judgment of the Lord Jesus on them. But when I feel blind this week, I do not want to be judged for it. I don’t think it’s a moral failure,  it’s just my creaturely limitation. I’m supposed to lead this congregation, but for the first time I can’t see where to lead us. That’s the tension I can feel in my body, and the being-scared. When I was driving on the highway I assumed we would get through it, as I think we mostly all do now, but who can see what’s coming and what unthinkable choices we might be facing?

I have to say that the Consistory has been amazing. Their extremely hard-working and creative response is an inspiration to me, and convicts me that I have no right to sulk with God. I have to confess and guard against my tendency to self-indulgent anxiety, which would disrespect them. But maybe you yourself have felt this way these last days, and as you anticipate the next few weeks. Are you anxious? Are you scared? Do you feel like you are walking blind? Does your faith give you any help or any assurance? If you have any testimony here, I would love you to share it with me.

At the beginning of our Gospel story the Lord Jesus says something which I have always noticed but never preached on. “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Well, if the night is coming, it is not yet, and we can still work. (Thanks to electricity we can even work at night, not to mention online!) We do have the light, we have the light of the world. How does the light of Our Lord help us to see, when we feel like we are blind? If I feel like I am walking blind into these next few months, how does his light help me to see? What does he want me to see? What should be visible to us, as a congregation?

So let’s go to the second lesson, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. It uses the same metaphors as the Gospel, but differently. And I had never noticed before that St. Paul says that “we are light,” we ourselves. “Once we were darkness but now, we are light.” That is very positive about us. How can we be blind if we ourselves are light?

Then St. Paul adjusts the metaphor to “we are children of light,” which adds an emotional appeal. Our kids love to sing this as “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light!” And then St. Paul extends the metaphor when he says that the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. For “fruit of the light” think of fruit trees in the sunlight. The fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true, which is very also very positive, this time about the world, and encouraging.

It’s encouraging because although our creaturely limitations may blind us to the future, we are not blind to all the things around us that are good and right and true. So in these next few months, we do have signs to direct us, the signs are all the good and right and true things in the world, no matter who does them or under what name!

Okay, there are signs that are not good and right and true, and we’re supposed to “expose the unfruitful works of darkness, and take no part in them,” but we expose them just by being the light and the children of light, not by digging in the darkness to attack them. Notice that Jesus did not judge the Pharisees who asked if they were blind, he simply let them judge themselves as they were exposed within his light.

As St. Paul says, “Everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light.” Which is a curious thing to say, that “everything that becomes visible is light!”  How can that be? Or is it possible that in the ancient world they already understood how optics work. When your eye sees a visible object, what your eye actually sees is light reflected from that object. Your mind tells you that you are seeing the visible object itself, but actually it’s only light itself that is visible, so it’s true that everything that becomes visible is light. Did St. Paul understand this? I don’t know, and I haven’t checked my Aristotle, but the point is that the Epistle is very positive and hopeful about our seeing what we need to see within the world.

And yet we have to see the world not as the world sees the world. That’s what our first lesson tells us, the well-known story of Samuel anointing David. “The Lord does not see as humans see, for they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” And yet, despite this, the writer of the story winks at us by telling us how good-looking David was! We see the world both as the world sees the world and not as the world sees the world! We’re not exempted from how the world sees the world. We have to do both, and see the world both ways.

For example, our church is a public institution, and though the Consistory is responsible to God, it’s also responsible to the public in many ways. So we have to operate with a double vision—as the world sees, and as the Lord Jesus sees.

Back to the Gospel story: the blind man came to see as the Lord Jesus saw. That was Our Lord’s gift to him, when he recreated the man from the wet clay that God had used to create Adam in Genesis. The man was born again, and he saw when he believed. His belief was his sight. We are told that seeing is believing, but the Gospel story tells us that believing is seeing.

Your believing is your sight to see ahead. And so for this church, as we chart our way forward in the challenging uncertainty before us, we can move forward because of our belief. Your only necessary sight forward is your belief. You don’t have to see into the future, your belief is how you aim yourself into the future. You drive through the snowstorm by faith, not sight.

And yet, you are not blind, Do you know how the eyes of cats seem to shine in the dark? Well, they actually do shine. You know how it looks like light is coming out of their eyes? Well, it actually is, even though it’s reflected light. I want you to imagine that your own eyes give out light. Even in the daytime. Reflected light, generated light, whatever. As St. Paul says, You are light! You have the power in you to light up what you see. You light up all that is good and right and true in the world just by your looking at it.

This is how we will make our way. As we have to make new decisions and adjustments, having to make choices that we’ve never had to make before. We will look into the future by our belief, and we will look all around us in the present to light up all that is good and right and true, and we will see all we need to see. You know, that’s pretty much what you’ve been doing already, I’ve been watching you.

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

March 15, Lent 3: Jesus Talks to a Woman

Exodus 17:1-7, Psalm 95, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42

Once again the Gospel of John uses an encounter to advance some metaphors, and again the Lord Jesus opens the conversation with wordplay, and again the wordplay is missed. When he says “living water” the woman takes him literally, not metaphorically, because “living water” was the term they used for spring water as opposed to standing water in a cistern.

I had an Aunty Betty and she had a key to a spring of living water. She was my mom’s older sister; her Dutch name was Bartje, but she went by Betty. She lived in Haledon, New Jersey, an old suburb of Paterson. And over on Tilt Street was the Haledon Spring. The water was very good, especially compared to the local tap water, which was rather bad. The Haledon Spring had been enclosed in a concrete shed, for which you needed a key. And my Aunty Betty had a key.

Haledon is a Democratic town. My other relatives were all Republicans and did not live there. Haledon was mostly Roman Catholic and pro-union and it allowed liquor stores and bars, and stores were open on Sundays. My Aunty Betty was a Democrat. She had been the wild one, growing up. She was pretty, and always had boyfriends, and not from church. My mom remembers her dating a rich guy with a convertible.

And then she went and married a Catholic. They had four kids. She didn’t go to church, but she sent my cousins to the Presbyterian Sunday school, not Dutch Reformed, and we looked down on them. But my Aunty Betty had that key. So I remember that my other relatives would bring her their empty bottles and she would go and fill them up for them.

The Samaritan woman is the first evangelist in the gospel. Her relatives and her neighbors got the benefit of the fountain that started welling up in her, and Jesus had the key that opened up her heart. The fountain flows out of her when she tells the villagers to “Come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did.” But all he had said about her life was just one thing, just that embarrassing comment about her five ex-husbands and her current boyfriend. When he said that she tried diverting their talk away from herself, and towards theological disputes, and mission, and the Messiah coming.

He surprised her. “I am he!” And that’s what opened her up. The whole truth of her life welled up inside her, and the truth made her free. He did not have to tell her much to tell her everything. He just used his key. Her life rose up in her, and poured out for the other villagers.

Her name we are not told. But she’s one of the five women in the Gospel of John who are a big part of the story. She, and Martha, and three Mary’s: Mary his mother, at the wedding in Cana and then at the cross; Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, raised from the dead; and Mary Magdalene, who on Easter Day met Jesus in the Garden, whom the later tradition suggests had been a prostitute, although the Bible never says that.

This woman-at-the-well seems more like Mary Magdalene than Jesus’ mother. But she is like the Virgin Mary in giving birth to a new life that has been conceived in her by the Holy Spirit. She is a model for you all. As I said last week, to be “born from above” is for you to give birth to the new you whom the Holy Spirit has conceived in you. You are simultaneously the new you in the old you, your new nature conceived in the womb of your old nature by the Holy Spirit and being born again. Each one of you is a Virgin Mary, even if you think of yourself as a Mary Magdalene or a Samaritan.

Jesus does not require that you deny your past, nor does he help you escape it. Your old nature lives on in you. What he does is free you from the guilt of your past and the grip of your old nature, and the Holy Spirit makes your old nature the virgin mother of your new nature. All your sin and your pain and your frustration and mistakes and loneliness and suffering give birth to your character and your hope and your love. Not the stagnant pools of love you thought you had to accept, but God’s love, poured into your heart and overflowing out.

The woman has tried to love, apparently, maybe too much, and in her frustration given up, and her current lover is a lover only physically. The sign of her frustration is her coming to the well alone, at noon, not sociably in the morning with the other women. She’s not respectable.

This well is the well of Jacob—Jacob who came as a stranger to a well and asked a woman for a drink and then it got romantic. She knows that story. And here is this stranger who is crossing all the social boundaries, who wants to put his lips upon her jug, and she thinks, “the story of my life.”

She doesn’t serve him silently, she engages him. Not done! Their engagement would have been seen as flirtation, and the disciples are embarrassed. But her flagrant openness allows her to run back to her village and shamelessly tell her neighbors to “come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did.” “But we already have a good idea of everything you ever did!” How close to the old self is the new self.

Your two natures always come together and they are both in everything. They are as distinct as life and death but they also are as inseparable as life and death. Don’t look at yourself and say, “that good thing I did there was my new nature, and that bad thing there was my old nature.” There are both of you in everything, no matter which of the two is at the moment in control. So you have to believe in the new one. Your old nature claims all the evidence, so you have to believe in your own new nature when you believe in Jesus. Believe in it and go with it. The villagers believed in her and went with her, they could sense new water rising up in her.

What’s the key? The truth that Jesus told about himself, which propelled the truth about herself that he told her. When he told her to go get her husband she answered him with a half-truth, but he responded with the whole truth. That’s when she diverted the conversation to theology. Jesus patiently goes with her, but still engages her. He does not judge her to condemn her, but as he talks about his mission she can sense the judgment in his words. Spirit and truth. Energy and solidity. Vitality and fidelity. Movement and commitment. Novelty and faithfulness. That’s her issue. She recognizes herself. She thinks, “the story of my life,” but now in hope instead of resignation. His talk of himself is what unlocks her. That’s what Jesus does. He tells his truth, for us to learn our truth.

People say they “tell the truth in love,” but the deepest truth is the love, the truth about the world is the love of God for the world and for every one of you within it, no matter how Jesus finds you at the well. The deepest truth about yourself is the love God has for you. Whatever else you say about yourself when you talk about yourself, the deepest truth about you is the love of God for you.

So back to my Aunty Betty. She endured some suffering in my family. One of my cousins still hurts from the shame she grew up with. When I was ten my uncle died of cancer, and my aunt had to raise four children on her own, including a three-year-old. To make ends meet she had to take in boarders. When I was a teenager my brother and I lived in her apartment for a while.

Our family had moved from New Jersey to Long Island, and to finish our year in high school, we needed a place to stay. There was no question, she took us in. I came to learn her generosity, her sense of humor, her candor and her openness, how direct she was and without pretense, and how, unlike everyone else in our family, she was not always judging everybody all the time. I learned the other side of her. I came to love her.

Years later my Aunty Betty went back to church, where she was the only Democrat, because it was the very conservative church of her childhood, which meant that she had to forgive those people of all their years of judging her. She had to believe in her own life, and I think she could do that because she believed in Jesus.

She died a few years ago, and I am still proud of her. To me, she’s an example of what St. Paul says, that suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us, for God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

March 8, Lent 2: Jesus Talks to Nicodemus

Genesis 12:1-4a, Psalm 121, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17

The four gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three are a trio, and John is a soloist.

I believe that Matthew was written first, and it is the basic gospel, the one that sings the melody that the others depend upon, and the others know that we have Matthew already. But then Mark adds his own sharp, percussive harmonies. And Luke adds his own elegant harmonies with lovely extra flourishes. Finally John takes their music and completely redoes it, with much new music of his own.

John was able to be this soloist because he was Our Lord’s intimate friend, an eyewitness, who had many years to think about what Jesus said. John condensed his memories into a sequence of encounters with specific people, named and unnamed, a succession of conversations developing a set of metaphors: word, voice, light, darkness, water, wind, spirit, life, birth, body, blood, flesh, vine, house, abode, abiding. The metaphors evolve in interweaving through the successive conversations.

For the next four Sundays of Lent we’re getting four of those encounters. Today it’s with Nicodemus, next week the woman at the well, Lent 4 is the man born blind, and Lent 5 is Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. To give us these lessons from John, the lectionary has interrupted our weekly reading of Matthew. The lectionary is a three-year cycle. Year A is Matthew, year B is Mark, and year C is Luke, with John inserted at the high points all three years. If I were Matthew I might be a little put out, because his account has lots of passages appropriate to Lent, but there you have it.

In this story about Nicodemus, the words of Jesus are suggestive and ambiguous and as hard to pin down as the wind. There’s wordplay in what Jesus says, and his words have double meanings.

Is it “born from above” or “born again”? The Greek can be taken either way, and maybe the Lord Jesus means both. Does Jesus mean the “wind” or does he mean the “spirit,” the “breath”? Or both? And does he mean “birth” or “generation”?

And what does it mean to be “born of water and the spirit”? You got born after your mother’s water broke and then you breathed your first breath. Is the water for the womb of your mother, and the spirit for the breath of God? Or is this a metaphor for baptism? It’s the Gospel of John, we can’t pin it down, or we’ll end up as frustrated as Nicodemus was.

I was that frustrated this week. I have written a dozen sermons on this passage in my career, and I wrote three more this week. This one is the third. On Tuesday I scrapped the first one and on Wednesday I scrapped the second one. In some desperation I went to the books in my study for help, and there, lying on top of my commentaries, was a photocopy of an article from the Scottish Journal of Theology that I had no memory of, by a David F. Ford, whose name I did not recognize. And it was a revelation.

Whether it was a coincidence or it was delivered to me by the owl from Harry Potter or by the wind of the Holy Spirit I will let you decide. But it showed me something I had been missing all this time, that all my commentators missed, that the translation in our lectionary inserts misses, and that Nicodemus missed. From right off, Jesus is talking about himself. And to get that, I have to translate it more closely than the insert does.

What Jesus says is this: “Amen, amen, I’m telling you, unless someone is born from above, he can’t see the kingdom of God.” Well, who can? Jesus can, he is the one born from above, he is the only one who can see the kingdom of God. Of course Nicodemus can’t see the kingdom of God, it’s not his fault, he’s not born from above, he does not come from heaven, he is not born of God. Only Jesus is. Do not be hard on Nicodemus for not getting it, it takes the whole rest of John’s Gospel for anyone to get it, it takes nineteen more chapters for John to develop his metaphors.

Then Jesus repeats it with more intensity: “Amen, amen, unless someone is born of water and the spirit, he is not able to enter into the kingdom of God.” Again, Jesus can, and so far only Jesus can. He’s the one who is in the kingdom of God, and the kingdom is personified in him. He’s the one who is born of water and the spirit.

First, he is born of the water of Mary’s womb, as you already know from Luke, from her womb on which the Holy Spirit descended to conceive him there, without the sexual involvement of any man, without the will of the flesh, but born of God.

And second, from the water of baptism, as you already know from Matthew, the Jordan River where the Spirit came down upon him and the voice from heaven said, You are my son. Jesus is the one who was born of water and the spirit, doubly so.

Then Jesus brings it back to Nicodemus. He says, “Don’t be amazed when I tell you that you must be born from above, that all of you must be born from the spirit!”

“How can these things be!” says Nicodemus. Then Jesus launches into his long speech about what he knows and what he’s seen, and only he, because he’s come from heaven, because he’s come from God. And that’s when he makes a shift in his language. He shifts from speaking of the kingdom of God to speaking of eternal life.

You already know about the kingdom of God from the trio of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but now in the solo of John, Jesus redefines the kingdom of God as “life,” eternal life, life in his name, abundant life, a life of flesh and blood, of eating and drinking, of water turned to wine, of healing and vision and joy, the life of the Spirit of God come down to earth, and taking flesh, and dwelling among us, because God so loved the world, and God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved, the life of the world. Even St. Paul says that we inherit the world.

Nicodemus came to Jesus because he wanted Jesus to help the other decent Pharisees reclaim the kingdom of God for Israel. And what Jesus offers instead is life for the whole world. Nicodemus is a good man, with good religious sensibilities, and what he wants from Jesus is something particular for his religion, but Jesus makes it universal, and organic, and as basic and secular as life itself—life, that peculiar power that we share with animals and plants and debatably with viruses. He offers not religion but life within the world. He makes it universal and also personal and individual.

This story is about God’s love, but there’s also resistance in it. Nicodemus is a good man, but he encounters resistance in Jesus. He’s a religious man, responsible, loyal, conscientious, educated, supporting institutions, doing the best for his tradition, yet also willing to cross boundaries, and seeking fairness. Later in the story John tells us that Nicodemus defended Jesus before the other Pharisees, and when Jesus died, Nicodemus donated a great amount of spices for his tomb. He’s a sympathetic character, but he stays in the middle, he stays in-between, he won’t go all the way. Is he like me?

What’s wrong with my birth the way I am? Why do I have to be born again? Doesn’t God love me the way I am, if God so loves the world? If God so loves the world, and if we inherit the world, then why do I have to be born from above? Why do I feel this resistance in the words of God?

The resistance is the gift of Lent. The resistance is not the whole story, but that you take your time with the resistance is the purpose of Lent, and take your place with Nicodemus in the middle and in-between, unfinished, unborn, still in the womb.

You are in the dark and not yet ready for the light, and shy of your exposure. When Jesus meets you, you hesitate. Will you defend your framework that limits what you want God to do? Can you more fully imagine and embrace God’s radical and surprising initiatives? Can you be more open to the fresh starts of the moving of the Spirit? Is your desire utterly for the kingdom of God, for birth from above, for life in his name, eternal life, God’s love and light, or for only some of that? Are you in this for religion with safe boundaries? Are you in this to be good, or are you in this for God? Hesitate, breathe, consider. The gift of the resistance is to set you back a bit to consider all such things, and that’s the gift of Lent.

I am inviting you to your own Virgin Birth. You are the virgin mother of your being born again. There is no father, just the Holy Spirit in you to conceive your new self in you. From God’s Spirit you are born from above, and from yourself you are born again. Your new birth is the child of yourself. You are to love your new self, as fragile and unsteady and needy as it may be, and your new self is to love your old self—not hate you, nor be ashamed of you, but love your silly self. All these birth metaphors are love metaphors. All these metaphors are the exploration of God’s love.

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

I need to credit David F. Ford (2013), "Meeting Nicodemus: A Case Study in Daring Theological Interpretation," Scottish Journal of Theology, 66, issue 01, February 2013, pp. 1-17.