nicodemus

John 3:1-17

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, the only Christian holy day that celebrates a doctrine. Most of our holy days have a good story attached to them. At Christmas, we have the baby and no room at the inn; at Easter, we have the Last Supper, the arrest and crucifixion, and the empty tomb. Last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost, with the rush of wind, tongues of fire, and the apostles able to be understood in many languages. Even our non-biblical holy days have stories: Reformation Sunday has Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church. Whether it’s true or not, it’s a good story.

A good story gets a point across in a way that captures our imaginations and speaks to our hearts. That’s why Jesus used stories. The story the lectionary gives us for Trinity Sunday is the story of the Pharisee Nicodemus and his late-night visit to Jesus, but don’t look for that story to solve the puzzle of the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus talks to Nicodemus about God and Spirit, and so all three members of the Trinity appear in the passage. But while Nicodemus asks concrete questions, Jesus answers with imagery and metaphor, helplessly confusing poor Nicodemus

But maybe that’s the lesson. There have always been ideas, thoughts, and experiences that are hard to put into words. That’s when people turn to poetry. By poetry, I don’t mean verse or rhyme; I mean language that uses vivid imagery, that relies on metaphor, that contains a meaning and a message beyond the words themselves; words that stir the imagination, that have a quality of spontaneity and grace.

The Trinity is poetry. Whenever we speak about God, we are limited to metaphors and analogies. Most of us carry around a picture of God in our imaginations, and that probably helps us have a more personal relationship with God. Jesus called God “Abba,” which is like papa or daddy; many people are still very attached to the metaphor of father in their language about God. I heard an indigenous lay pastor speak this past weekend; he prefers to speak of God as a wise grandmother. But we can never claim that any one image of God captures the fullness of the Divine. We can never claim any of the words we use to describe God are literal. God is ultimately unknowable, a mystery. We trust our experiences of God and the biblical witness of God, but part of what they show us is that God is more than we can know.

The Trinity is the poetry hammered out by the Church long ago to describe God in a way that is faithful to scripture and to the experience of Christians over the centuries. The Trinity gives words to our very personal encounter with God the Creator, the One who is mindful of each one of us and by whom we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139). Scripture declares we are made in God’s image; therefore, we who are made in the image of God are called to be mindful of one another, to love one another, as God loves us. We describe the power to do that as the power of the Holy Spirit. This is a power we feel and know, the power to keep on keeping on when we’re pretty sure we don’t have it in us to keep on keeping on.

At the heart of our Christian faith is a more radical, even scandalous trust that God also suffers with us. The cross planted at the center of our faith declares that God descends with us to the depths of life: “There is no pain that you can bear that I have not embraced,” God tells us from the cross, “there is no darkness that can overtake you that I have not seen; there is no fear that might grip you that I have not known. I have passed through it, and when you pass through it, I am with you.”

But why bother? Why try to explain the Trinity, or even to accept the Trinity as a mystery beyond understanding? The answer is that the way we talk about God and envision God profoundly influences everything else that we say about Christian life and faith. As my theology professor used to say, “Theology matters.”

It matters how we imagine God. One meaning and message in the poetry of the Trinity is that the glory of the triune God consists in sharing life with others. The Trinity describes God’s power not as coercive but as creative, sacrificial, and empowering love. Within the Trinity, the eternal life of God is life in relationship. God exists in community.

Our creating, saving, and empowering God created us for community that saves and empowers. In Wendell Berry’s novel, The Wild Birds, one of the characters quotes the apostle Paul in an argument with his friend. “The way we are,” he says, “we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”

John 3:14-21

Some of us are old enough to remember the man known as “Rainbow Man,” who held up signs that said, “John 3:16” at sporting events during the 1970’s and ‘80’s. You can find the verse on bumper stickers and neckties, and there’s even a John 3:16 Nascar, a bright yellow racing car emblazoned with “John 3:16” on the doors and the phrase “Victory in Jesus” on the hood. Obviously, John 3:16 is a big deal. But what does it mean? There is a traditional interpretation of this verse that most people believe is a literal interpretation: if you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and our Savior, you will go to heaven and not to hell when you die. This is a source of great comfort to many people, but a source of anguish to many others.

The problem with a so-called literal translation of these verses is that it really can’t be done. What does “condemned” mean? Condemned to what? By whom? What does “perish” mean? What does “eternal life” mean? Is it something that happens now, or after we die? Does “eternal” refer to time or quality? What does “believe” mean? Is it intellectual assent, or is it more like “trust” or “follow”? You can’t read this passage without answering these and many other questions and as soon as you attempt to answer them you’ve quit being literal and started to interpret. You’ve started to put a spin on it. The typical spin answers all these questions as though Jesus is referring to life after death, as though “believing” means what you think about something, and as though Jesus is intending by his words to create a small circle of insiders who are “saved” while the rest of the world can go to hell, literally. That interpretation works only if you define those crucial words in a way that plays fast and loose with the original Greek, the context of these verses, and much of what we know about Jesus and God from the rest of Scripture.

The context is a conversation between Jesus and the Pharisee Nicodemus. Nicodemus visits Jesus in the middle of the night, plagued with questions about who Jesus is. Nicodemus is so concrete that he’s confused by Jesus’ metaphors. When Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be “born again,” Nicodemus says, “Can one enter a second time the mother’s womb?” And so Jesus pushes him gently: This is about newness, Nicodemus. This is about letting go of old truths, old definitions, old traditions, old theological certainties, and allowing God to lead you into a new and open-ended, hope-filled future.

And then Jesus says the most remarkable thing. John 3:16: “For God so loved the world…”. The single most important thing to notice about this verse is that God loved the world. God deeply loved the world that God created, and God longs for this creation to live; this whole world, this whole creation. And this is the way God loved the world: God loved by giving the son that the world might be saved. God wants to save the world; not individuals, not souls, this entire world.

All of John’s gospel has an urgency that often comes across in either/or terms. John draws sharp divisions between believers and non-believers, saved and condemned, those who do evil and those who do good. This either/or approach made sense for John’s minority community, which was trying to define itself not only against non-Christians but against other Christians. It doesn’t make sense for us today, when Christianity has been the dominant religion in the Western world for centuries, and we have the power to marginalize, exclude, and persecute. If we ignore this part of the context, then, in our hands, the gospel of John, and John 3:16 in particular, could do serious harm. And they have.

We don’t throw out this passage, however, because life can feel black and white at times. You take that drink or not, put the needle in your arm or not, walk out on the abuse or not, despair or hope, lie or speak the truth. No shades of gray. Some people come to faith because of a crisis, and John 3:16 feels like a lifeline. I once was lost. Now I’m found. I was blind. Now I see.

We also don’t throw out this passage because even those who have never felt driven to their knees before God are included in the rescue God intends for the whole world. What we know is that “God so loved the world . . .” The whole world. These familiar words are at odds with any interpretation of this verse that would exclude, demean, or minimize any part of the world, or any person in it, regardless of what they believe.

Frederick Buechner wrote, “The greatest miracle that Christianity has to proclaim is that the love that suffered agonies on that hill outside the city walls was the love of God himself, the love of God for his creation, which is a love that has no limit, not even the limit of death.”

The love of God for God’s world has no limits. No limits. How else are we to respond, but to cherish the world and every creature in it? And to live that love by throwing out a lifeline, to rescue, in very real, literal ways, whatever and whomever God so loves – which is everyone, and everything?

Resources:
John Stendahl, “The Beginner’s Gospel,” in The Christian Century, March 19, 2009, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2009-03/beginners-gospel.
Marilyn Salmon, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=3/18/2012

Solvitur Ambulando

Putting one foot in front of the other on the path of faith

Why I Bother with the Trinity

The Whole World