Lent 2
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 17th February, 2008
I don´t know if any of you have read Jeanette Winterson´s novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit ? There is a very funny but also alarming scene in it when a group of born-again Christians go on a day out to the beach. At one point one of the ladies is seen far out at sea and it appears she is frantically waving for help. The bus driver jumps in, swims to her and rescues her but as they come out of the water the woman is shouting at him and is very unhappy. It turns out that she was wasn´t waving for help, she was waving goodbye. She was trying to drown herself so that she could be with Jesus eternally. It is a clever subverting of the poet Stevie Smith´s interpretation of her own own life when she wrote: I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning. But this Christian woman´s faith has made her drown and wave goodbye!
Two problems I have with some interpretations of Christianity are faced here. The first is that being “born again” is something that we take charge of somehow and that then makes us distinctly OK in comparison to all the others who are not born again like we are. Of course, all Christians should be living a life that is new and built on different foundations, a spiritual “regime change” in us. I am not doubting that at all. I am questioning some use of the phrase “born again” for an excuse to be self-righteous, know it all or bullying. The second problem raised in this story is that eternal life is often interpreted as just being life after death. We shall see that John did not mean just this.
The reason I have problems with these interpretations is that I don´t think they do justice to this story of Nicodemus in which Jesus says we need to be born from above, over again, from the top. The way he says it in the original Greek is that the birth is passive, as births always are (we didn´t get much choice in the matter after all!). Our being born from above is something that is brought about from outside ourselves in other words. We can never claim the credit. We can become self righteous about this birth for it is not the self that is doing it. And then the expression of eternal life, a phrase found in John´s gospel a lot and always in the present tense not the future. It is something that believers enjoy now, it is to live life defined by God and not by any other criteria. Eternal describes life as lived in the unending presence of God, it describes the newness, freshness, that touches life now and then carries us through into the future. As Christian Aid´s slogan has it, we believe in life before death.
Now, being born the first time is not easy – never mind the hard business of giving birth (which many of you know more about than me!) – but being born is a shock: moving from safety to vulnerability, from protection to risk, from quiet to noise, from union to separation, from darkness to light. The process is filled with fragility and fear and often pain. We cry when we are born – and then we get slapped!
No wonder this respectable, educated religious leader was confused when Jesus said that now he had to be born anew, a process of spiritual change that would be as shocking as birth itself. Its almost that he doesn´t want to understand and so interprets Jesus´s words literally. He comes to Jesus at night, comes to the light in darkness. He is a seeker and in many ways I feel he is a good patron of us all because we need to be a church of seekers, people who ask questions, people who are willing to listen and change. I remember seeing a sign in a church once that said it took God a week to make the earth, sky and sea but he´s still working on me. Many of us are like Nicodemus, uncertain what this Jesus stuff is really about, afraid to leave our old familiar ways, unsure if we want to get too involved in the church, struggling to cope with sickness and unemployment, family conflicts, low self-esteem, illness and deaths, and to hold on to a faith or find a faith that will keep us going. What is so difficult is to believe what Jesus was trying to get through to Nicodemus, that it is God who makes the move, who holds us, who stays with us, who is travelling all this alongside us and that seeing this brings a birth into your life, an eternal freshness, life itself not the breathing hanging aroundness that we often refer to when we uset hat word, but life, full and free, if only we can believe it and change our lives around it.
What happened to Nicodemus? Did that new birth happen in him? We don´t know. But what we often forget is that he comes back into John´s gospel again a couple of times. First, when Jesus has stirred up controversy and the authorities say he should be arrested, Nicodemus speaks up in his defence and says he should have a fair hearing. He is still on the boundaries by the look of it, by the establishment still and not on the road of the disciples, but he comes to Jesus´s defense and prevents his arrest. And then we meet him again towards the end of the gospel when he comes with Joseph of Arimithaea to bury Jesus´s body. Think of the courage he needed to do that – a respectable man like him putting himself out with a common criminal´s corpse. What happened then? We don´t know….Did he learn about resurrection, did he get baptised? Whatever happened, as a seeker with one foot in his old life and one foot about to take a closer step hesitantly nearer a richness of life with God, as a seeker who was confused but somehow drawn to Christ (even at night) there is room for him in the gospel. And there is room for us too. God is still working on us….
