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PERICOPE STUDY
CENTER FOR THEOLOGY, LRC
The Second Sunday in Lent
February 20, 2005
John 3:1-17
1. "Truly I say to you, unless one is born
anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Nicodemus, who comes
by night to clarify his questions, seems yet further confused by Jesus'
assertion of the need to be born anew to see the kingdom of God.
The reader knows, and so did St. John, that the reference is to baptism.
Critics that see the Johannine sitz
im leben to have been last-decade-of-first-century Jerusalem can interpret
the Nicodemus interlocution as at once both Jewish honesty seeking clarification
and Jewish congenital obtuseness unable to comprehend.
But then we should
not expect any one of the ancients to comprehend.
No one prior to Jesus had suggested a new birth.
Moses addressed the failings and the strengths of the old man, the man
from Eden, with the strictures and protections of the law.
The prophets thundered with obedience or consequences. Not a new birth,
but the old birth properly channeled, properly reigned in.
Even Jeremiah postulated a new covenant, written on the heart—but not a
new self, a new being, a new birth.
Aristotle, like Plato
and the other Greeks, understood human nature as always and ever the same.
As Mephistopheles later reported, through Goethe, "Der Mensch
bleibt Mensch." But Jesus
openly asserted the new being, the new birth, and His apostle last called, as
one untimely born, argued that "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new
creation (kainh
ktsis).
Neither the promise
to Abraham nor the new birth is predicated on the law, however useful the law
may be as pedagogue—and none of us is ever in
se sufficiently mature to have graduated from that pedagogy, ethically at
least. But here it is... a new
being, a new birth, a new self. Righteousness
bestowed. Freshly minted … or,
rather, freshly poured.
2. "That which is born of the flesh
is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
At last, God's
salvation ontology, the answer to the plea of the psalmist, prayed so fervently
by all of us on the day of the Ashes: "Create
in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free
spirit." (Ps. 51:10-12)
The new birth, the
new being, is God's creation, in order that we might believe, in order that
faith might be engendered, in order that grace might be received.
The Spirit blows where it wills, the generosity of the covenanting God
extended beyond Eden, beyond Abraham, all the way to Incarnation. The ultimate answer to the problem of Eden, the promise to
Abraham.
3. Why?
Why the effort? Why bother
to reclaim the ones who universally rebel as have all the others since Eve?
A humanity that has gotten ever more sophisticated in denying that there
is a God, other than those of human creation.
A humanity that has become ever more adept at subtlety, moreso even than
the snake could have imagined. A
humanity that has devised yet more cover-ups, higher up and lower down than the
breech cloths of Eden. A humanity
that has asserted its genius for destruction beyond forbidden garden trees to
global fruit of dragon's teeth that glow, radioactively.
Why the effort?
Why the new being? Why born
anew? Why indeed?
Only God knows.
And what he says is:
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whosoever
believeth in Him should not perish, but should have everlasting life.
For God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that
the world might be saved through Him."
That's it.
From Adam to Abraham to Nicodemus neither the sons of Adam nor the
daughters of Eve have understood, but only through the grace of God.
Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
Truly I say to you, unless one is born anew of water and the spirit he
cannot enter the kingdom of God. God
so loved the world. Say it again:
Born anew. God so loved the world.
Amen.
JLY
- 02.27.96 … 02.20.02 … rev. 02.14.05
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