Born Again
“How can anyone be born after having grown old?”
—John 3:1–17
One of my colleagues has a cartoon from the New Yorker taped to his door. It shows a distinguished-looking person in cap and gown about to deliver a commencement address. With a self-congratulatory nod, he says, “I hardly know where to begin. I know so much.” This may be Nicodemus’s problem. It’s not that he can’t conceive of being transformed by a new idea. It’s just that it’s been so long since he’s heard a genuinely new idea that he’s forgotten how to get carried away. He is trying to reposition himself spiritually, hoping to figure things out, trying to find himself, which is a bit awkward for him because he is a grown-up. He’s supposed to have found himself a long time ago. Besides, he is “a teacher of Israel,” and academics do not change their minds abruptly.
I suspect that’s why he comes by night to interview Jesus. When you’re young, you can say to anyone who will listen, “Oh, man, I’m lost. I don’t get it. I am nowhere.” When you are older and successful, that’s not what people want to hear. The famous ballplayer-evangelist Billy Sunday was said to have walked out of a Chicago bar one day and said to his teammates, “I’m through. I am going to Jesus Christ.” That almost never happens in a seminar.
When you are a man or woman of the world, you don’t fall at the feet of Jesus and cling to the hem of his garment. You confer with Jesus. You don’t accost him in the quad or a public place, but you interview him in a bar at midnight where the music is loud and no one will hear your dumb questions. And when you finally get up your courage to speak to him, you will talk about God as if God were a theory rather than your heavenly Father. I’m explaining this to the younger people in the audience, so you will know how to keep your guard up when Jesus interviews you.
The beautiful thing about Jesus is that he will play this game for a long time. He will meet you in the shadows whenever you’re ready. Any time, your place or his. He will listen patiently to the strangest questions. But eventually the game ends.
For whoever comes to Jesus always leaves with more than he or she bargained for. Nicodemus doesn’t ask how to get into the kingdom of God. As far is he is concerned, he’s already a good candidate for the kingdom. He wouldn’t be here if he and his fellow rabbi, Jesus, weren’t already members. He just wants a civilized discussion. Instead, Jesus tells him how to get saved.
Jesus says you must be born again. And here it gets a little complicated. (This is where you need a divinity professor at the helm.) The Greek word for “again” can also be translated “from above.” You must be born from above. In the context of John’s Gospel, it makes more sense to translate the phrase “from above,” for in this gospel Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness.
It is precisely because Jesus is from above that people like us who live below are constantly misunderstanding him. It’s one of the trademarks of the Gospel of John: everybody misunderstands Jesus. My favorite example is the Samaritan woman at the well who, when Jesus says, “I will give the living waters of eternal life,” replies, “Wait, let me get my bucket.” Not that we don’t make the same mistake. Jesus says, “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly,” and we immediately refer to our bank accounts or portfolios. Anyway, Jesus says, “born from above,” and Nicodemus hears “born again” and asks, “You mean I must reenter my mother’s womb and pass through the birth canal a second time?” Mercifully, the Gospel does not record Jesus’s facial expression in this conversation.
Before we are too critical of Nicodemus, however, let’s admit he’s onto something. In a classically influenced culture like his (or in a spiritual atmosphere like ours), anyone can be born from above. Anyone can “get in touch” with the source of light or espouse higher principles. It’s relatively painless. But to be born again, well, that will require more pain and a miracle of the Holy Spirit.
So it is that Nicodemus becomes one of the biggest and most reluctant newborns on record. His stature, age, and religious accomplishments are such that for him another birth will be a terrible trauma, an event mixed with pain and blinding new perceptions. He will do what most babies do, which is to squint against the light and weep with nostalgia for the womb, the old country, the former life.
Soon Nicodemus will disappear from the conversation. It may be that he is too big, too old, and too much in control of his own affairs to subject himself to that trauma. As he slips into the shadows, his last words are a question: “How can this be?”
Today, we have no shortage of books attempting to answer Nicodemus’s question. How to Be Born Again and similar titles appear on religious best-seller lists, but they sound to me like Lessons on How to Enjoy the Beach. Get it? It’s a joke. There are no lessons on how to enjoy the beach—you simply inhale the sea air, listen to the rhythm of the waves breaking on the shore, and let the wind kiss your face. It’s not a technique one can master. If you could master it, it wouldn’t be the wind and the beach. Nor the Spirit.
Like all creatures, we have no choice but to submit to the wind. Who is to say whether this chance encounter or that tumorous growth, this melody in a café or that crushing defeat are merely the winds of chance that blow through everyone’s life, or the signs of the Spirit’s presence? What language shall we borrow with which to interpret our lives? For some it will be the formulas of spiritual certainty formatted as “laws,” for others the evocation of mystery. But for both, a new birth.
Jesus’s dialogue with Nicodemus preserves a space for mystery, a sacred vestibule to experience, decision, and language. The two rabbis speak under the cloak of darkness, and Jesus says that whatever happens to Nicodemus will resemble the breezes on a warm Judean evening. That’s the way the Holy Spirit stirs in us too, even before we have words to name the stirring.
It will be a mystery, like the unpremeditated move from walking to dancing.
As Nicodemus fades from the scene, Jesus takes over the conversation. He says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Here you don’t need a “teacher of Israel” (or a divinity professor) to tell you what that means, only two ears and an open heart. God loved and God gave. The greatest pain of rebirth belongs to the Mother, to God. As the nurse said to my wife during her first delivery, “It must hurt.” At the very heart of the universe is a Creator who is willing to hurt for all created beings in order to make them whole. God creates salvation by the mysterious instrument of God’s own suffering.
Jesus calls it eternal life. Those who receive it cannot pretend to master their own spiritual health. God gives it to children in the waters of baptism, as well as to others who do not or cannot understand the magnitude of the gift. It’s given to those who look at the stars and are moved to call upon him, and to sinners like us who look in the mirror and don’t like what we see.
In Jesus’s day it was the social outcasts who had no other option than to ask him for a new life and a new start. Today, it’s the young people who haven’t perfected the self-protective measures their mothers and fathers have mastered, who haven’t learned to keep their guard up, who aren’t embarrassed to admit that they are looking for something better. It almost sounds as if the one category of human being Jesus can’t touch is people like me. People who can endlessly balance one idea against another, who are clever enough to defer the claims of truth indefinitely.
I would like to ask Nicodemus about this myself. I would like to interview him.
Of course, we would meet after hours in some leather-lined alcove on campus or maybe in a friend’s law office—professional to professional, professor to professor— and I would ask, “Nicodemus, how is it with your soul, man? Did it ever happen for you? Did you find that eternal life you were looking for?” But Nicodemus isn’t talking. He is giving no more interviews.
I can only tell you this about him: When Jesus was crucified, a man named Joseph of Arimathea claimed his body. When he came for it, he brought a friend with him, a man named Nicodemus, identified only as “the one who had come to him by night.” Nicodemus brought with him one hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes and sweet-smelling ointments. Together, the two men laid him to restin a garden tomb.
Once again, Nicodemus is meeting Jesus in the shadows as night is falling. This time with a change of strategy: not to quiz him but to anoint him. The two men perform the burial ritual in silence, which is another form of worship. So, I put it to you: Was Nicodemus too old, too smart, too successful to catch the wind of the Holy Spirit? Was he born again? We’re never told.
You can draw your own conclusions.