You’ve made your point before. Won’t let it go, will you? Repetition will kill your efforts. People get bored and move on with this kind of thing. Why can’t you just let it die?

Now, be fair. Yes, generally speaking, we’ve been around this block. You know what though? Each time there’s something new to see, to find, to bring into consideration. That means it’s rich, layered, deep. So take another dive.

Late Night Conversation

It is extremely late. Nicodemus sneaks in. He shouldn’t be there. He’s from the other side, the side that just saw how dangerous this troublemaker can be.   But our Nick questions. His questions get slammed with answers that may have later made him think this guy is nuts, yeah, dangerous is right. But that talk Jesus had with him still have people thinking. It’ll keep you up late even now. Nicodemus has lots of company.

24 Words

Let’s get the big message out of the way. You must be born again. Everyone has a physical birth, of course, but there’s another way of looking at it. There’s another way of being alive only accomplished by making the choice to enter into God’s Love through accepting, knowing, and being known by God’s Son.

The 16th verse is direct, bluntly succinct. God loves and God gives. God gives God’s self in a human form who lived and died and lived again, reversing trouble by reversing where trouble ends into what God and every created person wants, not death but life that fulfills Love.

So what if you don’t? If I refuse to get on board, what you going to do to me? Send me to that hot spot? That’s not so much like the “luuuve” you talk about. No wonder you people are such experts at being hypocrites. Look who you follow.

Love and Its Lover

Not sure what kind of love you think there is out there. Love as in, “whatever you want, honey”? Love as in “if you really loved me, you’d….”? Love as in, “love me just the way I am, warts and all,” and don’t have any hope that I can be more than that? Those are low standards, really self-centered, just steps away from manipulation and abuse. God wants better than that. That’s why the standard is so high.

But one can’t know Love without knowing its Lover. That’s the choice.

The Body in Three

Still, there’s more. In this passage, Jesus fleshes out what God in all God’s fullness is like. He talks about being born of “water and the Spirit” and how “the Holy Spirit gives new life from heaven.” Life in its fullness has to be both a physical birth from a mother’s womb and a spiritual birth, each completed in a washing, pouring out of waters that have nurtured and cleansed one’s being. Like a wind that blows, the Spirit is felt as it swirls, pushes, drives without being controlled, explained, understood. As new-born babes must first fill their lungs with air to live, the Spirit-Wind is the breath of God filling the re-born with new life, eternal life not delayed until there is no more breath, but fully lived in the here and now.

God is active as well. Centered in God’s expression of Love, that of Creator-Father, God’s actions had been reported and will be known again by actions that raise up the created to new ways of seeing that Love. Jesus referenced the ancient Israelites needing to lift their gaze toward God by that of a serpent on a pole for healing. (Numbers 21:1-9) By making one’s focus on what is above, by turning to God beyond what one can do for oneself, God brings that healing hope.

Likewise, Jesus would be lifted up on a pole for that eternal life healing to be possible, his pole which would be a cross that saves. To save means to rescue, heal, restore. To only live for existence in a material, physical reality means an incompleteness in being. Rebirth completes and connects with the spiritual self, this reality connected again by the Spirit.

A Braided Knot

In all, though Nicodemus was getting more than he asked, Jesus reveals the God who sent him and how the God who is Spirit is the God of creation designed for relationship. This relational, loving God moves as linked circles, interconnected, tangled, braided, knotted together in active commitment to lift the created world to more than it can be otherwise. As God is not complete without these three facets of God, so God is not nearly sensed, approached, made real without this understanding, strange and difficult as it may seem on secret visit in the darkness of night and soul.

John 3:1-17

The Trouble with Jesus: Considerations Before You Walk Away

by Constance Hastings

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