You can find 3:16 on water towers, Tim Tebow’s eye black, and tattoos, in a country song by Keith Urban. It is possibly the best known passage in Christian Scripture, this verse from the Gospel traditionally attributed to John, considered by many to summarize the heart of Christian belief, God’s love, and the Son of God’s redemptive work.
It is this very familiarity that can also be a problem, for this story of an interaction between Jesus and a prominent Hebrew religious leader is packed with meaning and complexity, all too often mistranslated and misunderstood.
Take, for example, a bit of word play that makes sense in the Koine Greek in which the gospel was written, but that doesn’t work in English. The same word, various forms of “anothen,” can mean “again” and “from above,” so that while Jesus speaks of being born from above, born of spirit, Nicodemus hears “born again,” a physical impossibility, his misunderstanding. This double meaning and the back and forth between Jesus and the Pharisee would have been obvious to the gospel’s original audience, but not to us, whether we use the King James or the New Revised Standard Version, or any modern day translation for that matter. We hear so much about “born again Christians,” when it seems “born from above Christians” or “born of the Spirit Christians” are both more consistent with what Jesus is actually saying. And, of course, it is unlikely that Jesus was speaking Greek, and we have no record of how this interaction might have played out in Aramaic.
Then there is the use of the word “Son.” The passage is often translated that God sent “his only begotten Son.” Yet, as the scholarly translation we just read reminds us, the passage is about the Son of Man, a figure borrowed from the Book of the Prophet Daniel, not historically understood as an incarnation of God, and the text of John does not use a possessive for Son, but rather the definite article, “the Son,” not “his Son.” It simply doesn’t say the Son of God, though we might still choose to conflate the two, as has been our tradition.
Finally, we have the word that is rendered as eternal, reinforcing the idea that the main purpose of the gospel is life after death, that the entire Jesus enterprise is about going to heaven. But the word used in the Koine does not mean eternal. It means for an age, indeterminate but not indefinite. It is the root that gives us the modern word eon. Some have chosen to better translate the Greek as life in full, fully living into the age. Jesus isn’t preaching a gospel that is about dying. Jesus is preaching a gospel that is about living. John is very different from the Synoptic Gospels, where Jesus speaks a lot about the in-breaking Kingdom of God, but John shares the urgency of the other three. The message of Jesus is about the present moment.
And these are just three glaring examples where translation and tradition muddy the water, never mind the problem of historical context and later bias. The gospels took their final form after the First Jewish War, when the Temple had been destroyed, and the Pharisees, morphing into what is now Rabbinic Judaism, were throwing followers of other Jewish movements out of the synagogues, including those who followed Jesus. Gospel authors would project back onto the Jesus story this clash between Jew and Jesus-follower, which is absurd. Jesus and his inner circle were all Jews, at least in the way the word was used in their lifetimes. The dispute at the time of Jesus was not between Christian and Jew, but rather between various movements within the Hebrew religion, and more widely the Hebrew culture, for religion and culture were one. The Pharisees happened to be one prominent movement among several, and if we are honest, they were the movement most like the Jesus movement.
The clash was also socio-economic, between prophets, who often operated without credentials and targeted the religious and political establishment, and those very establishments, the world of politics and power and business.
Then there is the character of Nicodemus himself, often considered a secret disciple of Jesus. Today’s reading, when he comes by night to learn from Jesus, is the first of three appearances in John’s gospel. He will appear again when Jesus is tried before the Great Sanhedrin, the council that rules Hebrew religious life, where he will insist on what amounted to due process at the time. He reminds his fellow council members that the accused has a right to speak in their own defense. Finally, after Jesus has been executed in the most brutal and public fashion, Nicodemus joins Joseph of Arimathea in tending to the body, providing a fortune in burial spices and balms.
John’s gospel doesn’t tell us how to feel about Nicodemus, whether we are to admire him as a secret disciple or despise him as one, a coward unwilling to go public with his commitment, though he was certainly outed as a sympathizer when he took part in the burial. On balance, he comes across as one of the good guys. He is certainly a reminder that, like the ministry of John the Baptizer before him, the ministry of Jesus attracted the powerful and the rich, as well as the hungry masses on the hillside. He was preaching revolution, sure, but it was a revolution that felt right, for it was a revolution of self-sacrifice and of love, something they would see in him, would see in God.
But I am particularly drawn to the last line of our reading, translated here as “For God sent the Son into the cosmos not that he might pass judgment on the cosmos, but that the cosmos might be saved through him.”
Judgment is at the heart of religion, for religion was the overarching system of belief and behavior that bound together a society. The “lig” in religion is from the same root as ligature, something that ties or binds. For good or for ill, part of any functioning society is boundaries, behavioral, social, an idea of what is in and what is out. We have a social contract, a way reasonable people behave. It might feel like that is coming apart these days, but most of us still know how to stand in line, hold the door, and behave reasonably in the parking lot. Our judgment may be imperfect, for we are imperfect, but it in necessary to maintain an ordered society.
And here is Jesus, who speaks of judgment in other teachings, saying that God’s real desire is that the world be saved, not judged. We see hints of this among the prophets, Hosea, Trito-Isaiah, even the tale of Jonah, the idea that God is loving, sometime portrayed as a lover, sometimes portrayed as a parent, but always portrayed as one who longs for reconciliation, for redemption. One of the most remarkable things about Jesus is that while he maintains this crucial social function of boundaries and judgment, at the heart of his message is this idea that we must forgive, once, seven times, seventy times seven times. The a person might experience rebirth of a sort, be made new, is at the heart of the gospel. That God is love, and that love is powerful, is at the heart of the gospel.
So many Christians are filled with judgment, and I’m not just talking about those who call themselves Christian but hate with a blue-white fire those with whom they disagree, people like feminists and the LGBTQ community they consider sinners. For even among Mainline Christians and progressives, the idea of redemption and the practice of forgiveness is woefully neglected. Too many claim the name Christian while they bear grudges, refuse to forgive, call names, sabotage. They do it because they have unseen wounds. They do it because in their arrogance they believe that only they know what is right, believe that they can see what no one else can.
Where there is no reconciliation, no redemption, there is no Christ. Scripture tells us to “judge not, lest we be judged.”
If this is intensely personal work, this need to rise above rage and resentment, to open our hearts and hands and practice what we say we believe, that God can make all things new, even those who would be our enemies, it is also public work, civic work, for we are approaching a time, I pray, when we will need a national process along the lines of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a way that there can be accountability for the sins and crimes of the age even as there is a path forward that weaves us back together as one nation, under God, indivisible.
But we’re going to have a heck of a time getting there if we cannot learn to be civil, to seek reconciliation, locally, in this room and in every space we occupy. Paul tells us to be reconciled to one another before we come before God seeking mercy and grace, for God will only show to us what we show to one another.
There may be, somewhere in your life, a tight little ball of rage, a wound you have cauterized with hate, a grudge you carry like an oversized club, damaging yourself and others.
And here we are in Lent. Jesus is heading to Jerusalem even though he knows how risky it will be. There are people there who want nothing more than to destroy him, for he is an agent of change in an age when nothing feels stable, where every day feels like a fresh hell. Here we are in Lent, hurtling toward the Cross where he will ask ask God to forgive even those who are destroying him. Here we are in Lent, and Nicodemus, secret disciple, wants to know what he must do. Become new, he is told. Be born of the Spirit.
Come, Holy Spirit. Burn clean the choking tangle of grudges and anger and hubris in our lives. Bring waters of healing, waters of forgiveness, in our lives, and in our nation.
Amen.