Wrestling

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Episcopal Church

March 12, 2017

2 Lent A

The course “Philosophy of Religion” was one of the greatest challenges of my academic career.  The course was taught by a professor in the philosophy department, which should have been my first clue that I was in over my head.  But I had always worked hard and done well in school.  I figured if I read the material, went to class, paid attention, and did the assignments, I would be fine.  I was oh, so very wrong.  Looking through the books for the course, there were sentences that rambled on for entire paragraphs, words that I could not pronounce, much less decipher, and chapter titles that boggled my mind.  But, I kept telling myself, the class could not be that bad.

My naivete was short lived.  The syllabus was pretty much the only thing about the class that I understood.  Neither the readings nor the explanations of the readings made sense.  The comments of my fellow students did not make sense.  The answers never seemed to match the questions.  I felt like I was on a different planet and everyone else spoke a language I did not understand.  I thought about dropping the class.  In the end, I wrestled and struggled my way through the writing of a paper on some subject I do not remember, turned the paper in, and to my great surprise, got full credit for having wrestled diligently with whatever the subject of the paper was.  For the first time in my life, I had taken a class where the point was not to accomplish a certain number of tasks to gain mastery of a subject, but to surrender myself to wrestling with something beyond my comprehension. 

Nicodemus finds himself in a similarly perplexing and frustrating situation this morning.  Nicodemus knows that Jesus turned an enormous amount of water into an equal amount of wine at the wedding in Cana.  Nicodemus also knows that Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple with an impressive display of passion, if not fury.  Now Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, comes to Jesus in the dark of the night and says “Rabbi, 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.”  Perhaps Nicodemus is just curious.  Or maybe he would like to be able to do such signs and be a more effective leader.  Or perhaps he is looking for a deeper relationship with God.  Whatever Nicodemus’ motive, I doubt he expected Jesus to reply: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without first being born from above.”  What is that supposed to mean?  Is Nicodemus to enter his mother’s womb and be born again?  While a concrete explanation of what Jesus meant would be nice, Jesus makes matters worse by continuing with “No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.  What is born of the flesh is flesh, what is born of the Spirit is spirit.”  How is that supposed to help Nicodemus understand?  Nicodemus and Jesus might as well have been speaking different languages, and the answers certainly do not seem to fit the questions.  Nicodemus came to Jesus to find out about the signs, which he understood to be miracles, and Jesus is talking about being born of the Spirit.  Nicodemus must be thinking that he should have just stayed home that night.

When Jesus sees that Nicodemus is truly perplexed, Jesus reminds Nicodemus of a story that Nicodemus certainly knows.  In the book of Numbers, the Hebrew people got tired of wandering in the wilderness and they begin to grumble against God and against Moses.  They said “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?  For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable manna.”  God is fed up with all the complaining, so God sent poisonous serpents among the people.  The serpents bit the people and they died.  When the people realize that they had sinned against the Lord, God said to Moses “Make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole; everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”  Moses did as God asked, and from then on, anyone bitten by a poisonous serpent could look at the bronze serpent on the pole and live.  Whatever we might think about a story in which God inflicts poisonous serpents on God’s people, Jesus has finally said something Nicodemus can understand.  Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so the people could live, so Jesus will be lifted up so that whoever believes in him will have eternal life.  We will next see Nicodemus when he arrives at the cross with Joseph of Arimathea to remove the dead body of Jesus and place it in the tomb.

The gospel ends with what Martin Luther called the “Gospel in miniature.”  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”  Nicodemus came to Jesus to understand the signs.  What he got in return was a description of a relationship so intimate it can only be described using the language of childbirth.  Nicodemus wanted to gain mastery of a subject that he knew came from God.  Jesus wanted him to wrestle with a relationship that cannot be captured any more than the wind can be captured.  When Nicodemus needed something more concrete, Jesus reminded him of a story in which God’s gift of life is exactly that...a gift, certainly nothing the people earned or even understood.  When Jesus offers the “Gospel in miniature” to Nicodemus, and to us, Jesus is not finally giving up and offering us a sound-bite that makes sense and fits well on a billboard.  Jesus offers us the gospel about the God who is beyond our comprehension, who loves us in a way that is beyond our understanding, and has given us eternal life as a gift, nothing we can earn and beyond anything we can imagine.  Jesus has given us the gospel, not as a subject to be mastered, but as a gift and a mystery to wrestle with.

Amen.