JOHN 3:1-17

Jottings on John…Lent 2…Revised 2020

Nicodemus knows in his spiritual bones he doesn’t have the kind of relationship with God he discerns in Jesus. How do we see our own relationship with God? Have we yet reached N’s point of discerning that if anyone can help us, Jesus can?  As a leading Pharisee, N 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 yet experiencing. Have we reached that point yet?

There are so many possible approaches to preaching this passage, but I’ll highlight just a couple of possibilities I see. Firstly, the incident of a bronze snake being lifted up on a pole is always stirring in Jesus’ psyche. It ‘burns’ there, & becomes more & more central to His understanding of His Messiahship; to His being a ‘greater than Moses’ & to His own eventual being ‘lifted up’ on the cross. How can we make that same understanding central to our own discipleship? Focussing neither on N, nor on Moses, but on Jesus? Bringing it into today, not leaving it back in the 1st C.? 

Is N’s approaching by night & being enlightened by Jesus, symbolic of one of JN’s great themes; the contrast between Light & Darkness? If so, & I believe it is, where do we see ourselves along the spectrum? If we’re only part way along, we haven’t reached the Light yet, have we? 

If N were to remain where he reaches on that first tentative visit by night, he won’t have reached the Light, either, will he? Yet we know from later in the Gospel, after Jesus has literally been lifted up, N champions His cause. He uses his position in society to go so far as approaching Pilate to seek Jesus’ body &, that being granted, helps inter Him. N is now ‘living in the Light’ & passing that Christ-Light to others. 

If we’re to live in the Christ Light, doesn’t it follow that we, too, will be passing that Light on to those around us living in darkness of all kinds?  

Brian 

Afterthought: Hildegard of Bingen somewhere says, ‘God stirs everything into quickness’. Today we hear Nicodemus being stirred by Holy Spirit into the ‘quick-ness’ of coming to Jesus, God the Son, that night. When the time is ripe God stirs! Have you & I yet reached the point of being so stirred that we come to the Light thrown on everything & everybody by Jesus?