Sermon - John 3.1-17

John 3.1-17
• Today’s gospel reading is the famous “born again” passage. I wonder what that phrase conjures up for you… Depending on your background, it could bring either positive or negative memories to mind. “Born again Christian” is a label which many people wear with joy and pride, whereas other people use the same label as a criticism of unhealthy and insensitive religion.

• For me, being born again was a wonderful turning point at the age of 25. It came at the culmination of a time of questioning and anxiety about the many things which were wrong with me, with other people, with all the evil and disease and hopelessness and fear in the world in general.

• At just the right time for me, God revealed to me, through a little second-hand booklet – this one – that the problem was called sin, that the answer was Jesus Christ and that I needed to accept him as my saviour and my Lord and devote the rest of my life to being his follower.

• It really was like a new birth for me and millions of others could tell a similar story. Equally though, for millions of other Christians, maybe including you, they could not put their finger on a specific turning point when they were “born again”, but their experience of living this new life is no less valid or powerful. We can get a bit too obsessed about how or whether or when someone was “born again” when that is far less important than that they are in fact living in a new way! More of that later…

• First I want to go back to the story of Jesus and Nicodemus and ask questions of the text which might help us reach a better understanding of the gospel and of our lives as followers of Christ, “born again” or not.

Context – WHAT was at stake?
• My first question is “what was at stake in this strange conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus?” The context is the angry protest that Jesus had just made in the Temple, turning over the tables of the moneychangers and clearing out the pigeon sellers.

• Look again at OT scriptures like Psalm 84 to appreciate how precious and holy the Temple was to the Jewish people. (Look how important the “wailing wall” still is to Jews today). It was the place where God was present to his people. The central place of their identity as God’s people and the place that they would regularly come – especially for Passover – to seek God’s healing and forgiveness and to recommit themselves to be his people.

• We can understand why people would be disturbed and offended by Jesus’s protest – and yet many recognised the signs that he was a messenger from God, with an important message.

• We read that Jesus was angry that his Father’s house had been turned into a market. In the parallel accounts in the synoptic gospels he also says that his Father’s house was meant to be a house of prayer for all nations. He probably had passages like Isaiah 2.3-4 and 56.6-7 in mind.

• Nicodemus, a high ranking political and religious official recognised the challenge of Jesus and that’s why he came secretly to discuss it with him.

Born Again or Born From Above?
• The conversation begins strangely and Jesus and Nicodemus seem to be talking at cross purposes. This can be explained by the phrase which your Bible will have translated as either “born again” or “born from above”.

• Both are correct – “born from above” is more strictly accurate – and is what Jesus meant – but the phrase had also come to mean “born again” – which is how Nicodemus took it.

• So Nicodemus starts asking how an adult can get back inside his mother’s womb to be born again, but Jesus is actually talking about being born from above, and he is explaining his challenge to the temple system.

• Nicodemus’s implied question is – why did you do that? If you are, as you appear to be, a teacher sent by God, surely you would love the Temple and its ceremonies? How and where else is God present to his people and in his world? How else can we live lives that are pleasing to God and working with God’s purposes?

• Jesus’s answer is “you need to be born from above”. So far you’ve only been born of water (95% of a human body is water!) but you need to be spiritually born as well. And not so you can be part of a new spiritual elite or have a card to get you into heaven when you die, but so you can live a spiritual, God-directed life here and now. So that you can carry God’s life, forgiveness and healing to others.

• The end goal is not just to be born from above but to live from above. So just as God is present to people and to the world in the Son of Man who has come down from heaven, so he will be present in all who are born from above.

How can this be? (verses 9-15)
• Nicodemus may be starting to understand Jesus’s challenge but he still can’t grasp how this birth from above can happen.

• Note in passing how in verse 11 Jesus uses “we” rather than “I”, seemingly speaking as the trinity rather than just the son.

• The answer to the “how” question is to be found at the cross. Already at the Temple protest Jesus had referred to his own body as the Temple when he said “detroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up” (2.19). Now he refers more directly to the kind of death he will die, by reference to a strange OT story (Numbers 21.4-9).

• The Israelites were being bitten by poisonous snakes in the desert, because of their complaining against God. When Moses prayed for their forgiveness and healing, God answered by telling him to make a bronze snake and lift it up on a pole. Whoever looked at the bronze snake would be healed.

• Jesus explains that he, the Son of Man, is to be lifted up in a similar way, so that any who look on him may “have eternal life” (meaning “the life of the coming age”). He is not talking about an everlasting quantity of life, but a new kind of life which belongs to a new age and a new order; life from above!

God’s purpose (John 3.16-17)
• Now, at the climax of the conversation, we come to these verses which are probably quoted more than any others in the Bible as a perfect summary of the gospel.

• Actually 3.16 is usually taken on its own, especially by people who believe the good news consists of the salvation of a minority of people out of the world so they can go to heaven when they die, while everybody else goes to everlasting hell.

• But we should never read 3.16 without 3.17 “Indeed God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

• God’s plan, finally fulfilled in Christ, was always for the salvation of the whole world and all its people, never just a minority. That was the promise to Abraham and the purpose of God’s choice of Israel.

• Whether you believe God will succeed in his plan or not, we need to take 3.17 seriously. Some of the recent critics of Rob Bell (American pastor/writer who has a new book coming out in which he explores the biblical hope that God will succeed in saving everyone) have been too easily dismissive and should think again about verses like this.

• I have been studying this question and will come back to it in future sermons.

Challenge
• The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is important because it answers the question of how God is to be present to people and to the world.
• The answer is not to box God into a stone Temple and shut the world out, it is to be born from above. We need to be born from above so that we can live from above, so that we can overflow God’s saving love into all the world.
• We all need to work out what it means for each of us to “live from above” here and now, in a way which helps fulfil God’s purpose of salvation (John 3.16 AND 17).