If only the world knew of you! If only the world knew what got you up this morning and brought you here!
Could you tell the world of your desire to be governed by love rather than fear? Could you speak of your desire to hear something deeply and profoundly liberating in the Scriptures?
Could you speak of your desire to give your heart over to The One who truly “likes” you and is “for” you and everyone else?
Could you, could I, speak of our desire to step out of the darkness of getting our security and good feelings about ourselves at the expense of others? Could we confess our deep longing to step out of the darkness of cheap togetherness purchased with the humiliation, demonization, torture, and murder of other human beings?
Well, I think these desires, or desires like these, were some of the same ones that drove Nicodemus, a high-ranking priest of Jerusalem to visit Jesus under the cover of night. It is this nocturnal encounter that immediately precedes today's gospel. It sets up John’s expanded discourse on how Jesus will make explicit once and for all what God’s intentions for the Hebrew people—and indeed for the whole world—had been along: to love us out of our propensity to become very dangerous to each other when our desire for mammon becomes greater than our desire to love God and others.
In 2006, John and I heard North Carolina Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry say that he believed that Nicodemus was the first Episcopalian. He said he was absolutely convinced of that because—and I know you Lutherans will love this—because “only Episcopalians would try to come to Jesus, quietly, at night, when nobody was looking.”[1] (That’s the truth, isn’t it?)
Anyway, in the Fourth Gospel, Nicodemus appears only three times. And I like to think these three slender appearances provide a clue to the Fourth Evangelists’ own spiritual journey because they are slight yet potent, and just a little off-stage. Just the thing a biographer might slip in to disclose his own witness.
Nicodemus’s story (which could be the beloved disciple’s story, or even your story or my story) is the story of being gradually enabled to step out of the darkness and into the light. Out of the darkness of using power over someone else to cover one’s insecurities. And into the light with those who are powerless because they are excluded, suspected, maltreated, oppressed, and reviled.[2]
Nicodemus already knows a lot about such things. He’s a member of an authoritative group of priests and Pharisees to whom the temple police report. Yet he has been impressed by the signs Jesus does, and he tells Jesus he sees the presence of God in them. Now isn’t that interesting?
So sensing Nicodemus’ desire to be closer to God, which means that he would prefer to be in God’s kingdom sooner rather than later, Jesus tells him he must be born of the Spirit.
Then Nicodemus seems to disappear off the page as the Fourth Evangelist begins the long discourse we heard this morning. If you remember, it begins with a peculiar story about one way of dealing with the human tendency to start looking for a scapegoat when the going gets rough, like it did when the Israelites ran out of food and water.
Imagine what life was like for Moses! He had to organize over a half million people over several decades to move from one place to another in order to forge their identity as the people of God. Of course there was grumbling, in-fighting, jealousies, pettiness, violence, and lots of murmuring. And this story, which we heard earlier, is the fifth and final such “murmuring” story in the Book of Numbers.
Really, it is amazing that Moses lived as long as he did! Because it is human vindictiveness and spitefulness that is so colorfully and aptly represented by the biting, fiery serpents. Human vindictiveness and spitefulness that ends up coalescing to blame Moses, and for the first time, God.
A major distraction is needed, so God gives Moses instructions to wave a staff with a bronze serpent “to cure” them of the bites they have in reality inflicted upon each other and have begun to inflict on Moses.
They are magically distracted—perhaps because the coiled bronze serpent reminds them of the cobra on Pharoah’s headgear. Fearful fascination can be a powerful diversion for a little while, but clearly by the time King Hezekiah throws it out of the 1st Temple[3], it is no longer working.
So what the Fourth Evangelist is telling us with this reference is that something more real than a bronze serpent will be lifted up in order to show the world that its fake unity and peace is always bought with the blood of innocent victims.
The “Something Real” that will be lifted up will be an innocent man. An innocent man at a particular moment of apocalyptic crisis in first-century Judea who will show his love for the world by yielding in compassion, non-retaliation, and non-violence to the brutal reality of a Roman execution on a cross, brought on by the fear and guilt of the temple priesthood and supported by the mob rule of a ginned-up resentful, occupied people.
You see, it is terrifically difficult for we human beings to realize our complicity in purchasing our power, goodness, and security at the expense of others until someone who is completely free to love us and be for us freely steps into the vortex of our wrath.
At no point will this innocent man ask God to avenge him and even more unexpectedly in a moment of radiant transcendence, he forgives everyone in his last breaths. In such a moment of transcendent forgiveness and compassion even the cruelest of persecutors can learn to humble herself and renounce her vengeful passion. Such love could only come from God and indeed, this innocent victim will be recognized as God himself.
But let us return to our friend Nicodemus, who after the speech we heard today is not even granted an exit. We meet him next in chapter 7 when the temple police are reporting back to the chief priests and Pharisees about not having arrested Jesus as ordered. They declare in their defense that never has anyone spoken like Jesus. Curious…
Nicodemus, a member of this group, offers this: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” Small, sure, truthful, edging into the light. Though we don’t know for sure, this may be his first public witness to the truth of what is unfolding in Jerusalem and what is simultaneously unfolding in his heart.
The last time we meet Nicodemus, he is with Joseph of Arimathea at the burial of Jesus.
Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews.
So simple. So relaxed. So non-hurried. Nicodemus, in the daylight, living out in full view the truth of his conversion to trusting and believing with his whole heart in the power of the love that brought him back to a life in the light. He oils and wraps the body of the man who drank the cup of our wrath to its dregs. He oils and wraps the body of the man whose powerlessness and weakness eventually challenged all history.
We don’t know how Nicodemus’ story continues but what we do know of it—his first movement toward Love under the cover of night, his clear, first witness at the ruling council, and his generous, loving care of Jesus’ body—these three events might be enough to persuade us, as with Nicodemus, that Love only comes into the world case by case, individual by individual.
Like Nicodemus, we are enabled to learn that Love is not a system of beliefs dividing true believers from non-believers, nor is Love a system of goodness that excludes those whom we agree are not good. For neither of these systems were ever enfleshed by Jesus. And by definition, the Kingdom of God is not populated with their adherents.
That is the judgment—which is simply another way of saying that moment to moment, encounter by encounter, it is our choice, by virtue of grace, whether or not to live in the darkness of self-justification by ethnicity, country, religion, political party, skin color or sexual orientation in order to secure our identity at the expense of others.
Or, alternatively, moment by moment, encounter by encounter, it is our choice by grace to live as if we really trusted that Love’s eternal life is going on right now, this side of our physical deaths.
Is this the Love that brought you here this morning? I hope so. Because if it is, the world should know about you ... and you ... and you ...and you!
AMEN.[4]
[1] http://religiousleft.bmgbiz.net/u2charist.html Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon at General Convention, U2Charist, June 13, 2006, Columbus, Ohio.
[2]See Bonhoefferr, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 17, “the view from below” (New York: Touchstone, 1997)
[3] 2 Kings 18.4
[4] The preacher wishes to acknowledge the following authors and their publications for inspiring and shaping this sermon: James Alison (2009: “What sorts of difference does René Girard make to how we read the Bible?” http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng56.html, and 2006: “Sacrifice, Law, and the Catholic Faith: Is secularity really the enemy?” http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng36.html ); Anthony Bartlett (Cross Purposes, 2001, Trinity Press); J. Martin C. Scott (“John” in Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, 2003). Thank you!
1 comment:
Wow! I wish I had heard this instead of reading it. Lee is so good at stunningly, passionately, perceptively and with great erudition expressing what I can feel but rarely express. Thanks Lee.
Post a Comment