JOHN 3:1-17

Jottings on John…Trinity Sunday…Revised 2018

+ Michael Curry’s amazingly daring sermon on Love as a Relationship between God & us & each other during that Royal wedding sounds pretty Trinitarian to me. Without being boringly doctrinal. OK, we need doctrine. But ‘Trinity’ isn’t a doctrine; it’s a relationship. In heaven & on earth. ’Nick’, of today’s passage - may I call him Nick for the sake of this exercise? - he isn’t on about doctrine either. He’s on about God, & relationship with God. Nick knows in his spiritual bones he doesn’t have the kind of relationship with God that he discerns Jesus represents. Sound doctrine is important, but without Relationship, it can lead astray!

Nick is a genuine seeker after the Truth of God & a meaningful Relationship with this God of Truth. He discerns that if anyone can help him, Jesus can! As a leading Pharisee, Nick’s obedient to YHWH according to his religious party’s doctrines, but now he discerns sound doctrine, & obedience to it, isn’t enough by itself. He’s been led - by Holy Spirit - to come to a point, where doctrine isn’t enough. He needs a relationship with God he isn’t experiencing. In their ‘deep & meaningful’, Jesus, God the Son, begins a process of moving him on from any darknesses Nick may have as a result of ingrained cultural & religious understandings.

Hildegard of Bingen somewhere says, ‘God stirs everything into quickness’. Today we hear Nicodemus being stirred by God the Spirit into coming to Jesus, God the Son, that night. When the time is ripe God stirs! In Holy Spirit we experience God as a Stirrer by Divine Nature! In Jesus, the Son, we experience God as One of us. A God who knows us from inside out! YHWH God, Father, is the I AM; the Eternal Essence of Being. Who calls us in many & various ways & times, & places. Jesus the Son of Humanity opens us up from our human ‘inside’ of things to that servanthood at the heart of God & discipleship. Holy Spirit, ‘the Love that flows between the Father & the Son’ gathers us up, with the raised Christ, inside God. Opens us up to that love flowing between the Persons of God so we become persons of God, too. Family! No longer outsiders; insiders gathered up by Grace into a unique relationship by All Three.

All God does is done by all of God. No playing favourites, as it were! Nicodemus, well versed in YHWH as ‘Father’, begins to experience the fullness of God when quickened by the Spirit, the Paraclete, the Dis-Comforter. He visits Jesus, the Son, & begins to find the Wholeness of God in a new & quickening way. I can’t see any reason not to take it that Jesus is still exploring & sharing the things of God with Nicodemus when He refers to the ancient episode of serpents in the wilderness. The incident of a bronze snake being lifted up on a pole is always stirring in Jesus’ psyche. Does that connection begin to stir in Nick, too, that night? When, later, Nick sees Jesus lifted up on the cross & then raised from death, does it stir further still? Readying him to burst into life with Pentecostal blaze?

PS: Next week it’s back to St. Mark. (My blog is: marginallymark.blogspot.com.au.)