I’ve had the wonderful honor and joy this year, once again, to be teaching Confirmation classes here at St. Mark’s. This year again, for several weeks a whole group of us have been meeting up in the parish library on Sunday afternoons to explore the faith: the creeds, the scriptures, the sacraments, our traditions and histories, the life of prayer, ethics. Maybe that’s why I’m so struck this Sunday by a word that Nicodemus uses when he begins his conversation with Jesus in this morning’s gospel. I’m struck by the word “we.”
“Rabbi,” says Nicodemus, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” I don’t know to whom Nicodemus could be referring. It doesn’t seem that he is referring to his fellow members of the Sanhedrin, the leadership council. Presumably, if he were speaking for his fellow religious leaders he would not have had to come to Jesus in the dark of night to share his questions secretly. Surely they haven’t delegated him to go to Jesus as their representative.
It’s possible that Nicodemus is making up a community in order to protect himself from having to make a personal statement. You know how this works, right? “Rabbi, a lot of people are saying that you are a teacher from God.” In this formulation, invoking some unspecified group is a way to duck out of making a commitment. I don’t have to own the statement because I’m just part of some group, some imagined “we or they,” that knows what it knows. A lot of people are saying it, so I’m not risking too much if I kind of say it too.
There are more benign forms of this group identification, though. We Christians use one of them every time we say the Nicene Creed, and this is where Confirmation class comes in. “We believe in one God,” we say, and when we study the creeds in class we spend some time on the meaning of that “we.” That “we,” we say, is a way of keeping company with other believers. We kind of hold hands and jump in together, into that statement of belief that’s so hard to own, so hard to understand, so hard to say out loud. One God, three Persons, the Resurrection of the Dead. The forgiveness of sins. One holy catholic and apostolic church. It’s hard to own those, hard to take responsibility for them in this world. Saying “we” instead of “I” is not a dodge in this case, not a way of distancing ourselves from the need to make a personal statement, but it is an admission of weakness. It’s a call for support. It’s a way of reminding ourselves that we are all in this together, helping one another with our unbelief and our hesitation as well as our firm faith and our glorious certainty. Together we can believe, and together we can say it out loud.
But what was Nicodemus saying? Where was his support? To whom could he be referring when he tells Jesus that “we” know he is a teacher from God?
Is it possible, I wonder, that when Nicodemus says “we” he is telling the truth about his fellow religious leaders without fully realizing it? Is he saying what everyone knows—what everyone must know if they have seen the signs that Jesus performs—is he saying what everyone knows but no one will admit? “We know it,” he tells Jesus. “We know something about who you are, but we can’t accept what we know and we can’t speak of it to one another.”
If that’s where Nicodemus is coming from, I want to suggest that he is paying Jesus a very great tribute. It’s one thing to be sure, to be confident, to say what you know, but it’s another thing altogether to say what you and your whole community can barely acknowledge, barely formulate. Perhaps the creeds would move us more deeply if we said them with this kind of consciousness. This is what we know, this faith, but it’s also the thing we are half-afraid to say.
Famously, Jesus responds to Nicodemus with what feels like a bit of a non-sequitur. “You must be born from above to see the reign of God,” he tells this grown man. Now it’s true that the rest of the conversation doesn’t go all that well. Nicodemus is awkwardly literal about this birth in the Spirit, and Jesus ends up reprimanding him, I guess gently. “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” he asks.
It’s true, too, that Jesus makes Nicodemus face the sharp divisions that separate them: “We speak about what we know,” he says, “and you do not receive our testimony.” If there were time this morning we could have a long conversation about this statement. I think there is a lot there for us. Briefly, it’s not clear whether these words should be understood as coming directly from Jesus, or whether they are written by a later community that is passing this gospel forward in a particularly divisive context.
But I want to back up just a bit, to what Jesus says about being born in the Spirit. Because I think it’s possible that he is giving Nicodemus a tiny, precious opening.
It’s the subtle way the conversations shifts when Jesus talks about being born from above that seems so telling to me. Jesus delivers a teaching on the mysterious ways of the Spirit, a teaching that would seem to underscore how far Nicodemus is from understanding. “The wind blows where it chooses,” says Jesus, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus is far from understanding the workings of the Spirit, but it turns out that some level of incomprehension may be essential for everyone who is born of the Spirit. They don’t know where the Spirit is going—and perhaps their own journeys are mysterious to them and to others. What interests me here is the way Jesus has shifted the “we” that Nicodemus brought him.
Nicodemus described a possibly imaginary community of people who know something about Jesus but can barely name it. Again, it’s not clear whether the “we” in Nicodemus’s opening line refers to a group to which he actually belongs, or an assumption about the people he’s afraid of. In either case, Jesus seems to be shifting that fragile “we” as he speaks. It turns out that there is another group that Nicodemus may already be joining, even as he demonstrates his spiritual isolation from his peers. It’s just possible that Jesus has begun to speak of him as one who is born of the Spirit, or as one who is in the midst of that difficult dark process. In Jesus’s description of that group, those who are born of the Spirit may be misunderstood and they may themselves lack understanding. They just know that they hear the sound of the holy wind.
So Nicodemus comes to Jesus as a fugitive, barely knowing for whom he speaks, and he leaves with what might be the start of a new, mysterious kinship in the Spirit. His own journey with God leads him where it will—it has certainly brought him somewhere strange this dark night—but Jesus teaches him that the still-distant sound of the wind is enough: “You hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” He leaves without a great sense of comprehension, I imagine, but if he listens closely he may hear that he is being born into a new community, a community blown about mysteriously by the power of God.
I can’t speak for the members of the Confirmation class this year or any other, but I suspect that the deepening power of the Spirit in their lives remains hauntingly incomplete. I guess it has to be that way, if we are to be driven on through this world as followers of our Lord. That’s how it is for me, at least. To belong, to identify, to say “we believe” or “we know,” is a risk. It turns out to be an essential risk, a risk that Jesus himself is taking in us and with us and for us.
In the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, after Jesus has been crucified, Nicodemus appears with myrrh and aloes to prepare the body of Jesus for burial. The one who had told him to be born of the Spirit is now tended to in the flesh. Uncertain still, perhaps, of the great spiritual truth Jesus has embodied, Nicodemus now testifies silently to the power of the body of Christ. He stays by something, and someone, he cannot fully understand. The wind blows where it will, and Nicodemus, nearly alone among the followers of Jesus, is willing to hear that dreadful sound.
I say nearly alone. Mysteriously, Nicodemus now has company in his vigil over the flesh. Joseph of Arimathea, secretly also a disciple, is by his side as they lay the body in the tomb. I don’t know what they know. I don’t know how they came together. I know that their witness offers us courage and strength and hope.
Do you know what it means to be a follower of Jesus in these days, or any others? Do you follow with what feels at times like a half-imagined sense of belonging to the body of Christ? Is it hard for you to speak in the light what you hear in the dark?
Take heart. So it is with all those who are born of the Spirit.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
8 March 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
