Text: Gospel of John 3:1-17
This past
week a 13 year old Kansas boy and his grandmother were hitting the garage sales
when he came across an old Polaroid camera which he picked up for a
dollar. Later that evening he opened the
camera and found a picture of a man and woman.
He showed it to his
grandmother. She stared at it for a
moment in disbelief and then told him the man in the picture was his uncle who
died in a car crash 23 years ago. They
checked back with the seller who said he knew neither the people in the photo
nor where he got the camera. The boy’s
father, the brother of the deceased was a bit taken aback from the whole thing
noting the astronomical odds of this happening.
You can’t explain what brought his son to this camera and its photo. Nevertheless, he found comfort in the fateful
find. He said. “When you have faith, you believe they’re
always with you and when you see signs like this, it kind of reaffirms that.”
I got to
admit that this incident is more than a bit freaky. If it happened to any of us we would be
thinking that it meant something; but what?
The boy’s father goes that way saying that faith and signs are involved;
faith here meaning believing in a spiritual realm that we can’t see but which
does manifest itself by signs and when a sign occurs it is a communication
carrying some sort of esoteric message.
For this man it was confirmation that his deceased brother was nearby in
the spiritual realm. No one can say for
sure whether this incident was anything more than an astronomically rare
coincidence, but I should point out that we need to be a bit careful about
holding out faith and signs as mere belief in and evidence of a spiritual
realm. In the Bible faith pertains to a
relationship with the Trinity – a relationship with the Father through Jesus
Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit; and signs are strictly meant to point us in
that direction.
If you
want to spend some time mulling over faith and signs, John's Gospel is a good
place to go. Faith and signs are a
frequent topic there as is the case in our passage today concerning Jesus’
conversation with Nicodemus. At the very
beginning of the conversation Nicodemus came to Jesus and noted that the Jerusalem
authorities had surmised that Jesus had a God-sanctioned ministry because of
the evidence of the signs he was doing, but they don't yet have belief in
him. In John’s Gospel for belief to
happen God would have to open their eyes to see Jesus for who he is and enable
them to receive him, entrust themselves to him, and worship him. Faith or belief is a gift to us initiated by
God’s revealing his self to us.
So, there
with Nicodemus in the dark Jesus rather bluntly lets him know that he/they are
not going to believe who Jesus is or understand what he has come to do and be a
part of it until he/they see the sign that reveals how God loves the world; the
sign of Jesus the Son of Man/the only-begotten Son of God, the Word of God
become human and dwelling among us, the light of the world, the Lamb of God who
takes away the sins of the world hanging on a cross like the bronze serpent of
Moses’ day; Jesus lifted up (glorified, exalted) to the effect that every
believer in and in association with him has eternal life.
It is safe
to assume that Nicodemus came to Jesus with the agenda of trying to sort out
for himself whether or not Jesus is the Messiah who has come to establish the Kingdom
of God. So, in a bit of a humorous exchange, Jesus
tells him that no one can see or enter the Kingdom
of God without
first having been "sired from above" or rather "conceived
anew" by means of the regenerating indwelling of the Holy Spirit and
Baptism. This means that unless God has
opened our eyes by revealing his very self to us (the loving communion of the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), we are simply unable to see God's reign in this
world through Jesus. Moreover, without
that eye opening plus committed participation in the Spirit-filled communion of
Jesus' disciples, no one can enter into the New Creation reign of God that is
breaking in on us from the future right now, even as we are gathered here in
Jesus name.
I cannot
emphasize enough here that the ability to see and enter the reign of God in
Jesus comes by the means of the personal working of the Holy Spirit at the
Trinity's initiative and doing and not of our own. Jesus makes this very clear with the born
again-anew-from above teaching. The word
we translate as born is better taken as referring to the moment of conception
rather than the moment of breaking forth from the womb. Just as we were conceived and birthed into
this fallen creation as sinners, so must we be conceived anew from above by the
Holy Spirit to live in an embryonic state of New Creation now as faithful
disciples of Jesus and as his co-heirs sharing his relationship with God the
Father in the Holy Spirit until we are birthed into the New Creation at the
Resurrection.
With that
in mind let's take a poke at John 3:16 and what it is to be a believer in
Jesus, the Son of Man lifted up since salvation seems to hinge on
that. Jesus is working with the analogy
of Moses lifting up the bronze serpent in the wilderness so that the Israelites
could look at it and be healed rather than die due to bites from poisonous
snakes that the LORD plagued them with for wanting to return to Egypt and
Egypt's gods. A very literal translation
of John 3:16
would read: Indeed, in this manner God loved the world; he gave his only
begotten Son with the effect that every believer in and in association with him
absolutely does not perish but certainly does have eternal life.
John 3:16 is not a conditional
statement saying we must believe in Jesus so that we may have eternal
life. It is a statement concerning the
way things are for those who find themselves presently believing in and in
association with Jesus. These believers
absolutely are not perishing in this world even though the situations of their
lives may beg to differ. Rather, they
are certainly having eternal life. Umm,
eternal life? In John's Gospel eternal
life means the same as what salvation means in the rest of the New Testament;
that Jesus has brought us into the Kingdom
of God which at
its heart is a living, personal and communal relationship with God the Father
through Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit.
In John 17:3 Jesus says this fairly clearly: "And this is eternal
life, that they (his disciples) know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ
whom you have sent." Eternal life
is knowing the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit. Eternal life is being in relationship with
the Trinity, the relationship in which God conceives us anew and enables us to
live for the New Creation now. This
relationship, eternal life, is a certainty for all believers in and in
association with Jesus.
So then,
what is it to believe? Well, believing
begins with knowing and acknowledging that Jesus is the One whom God has sent
in his own name to save the world, the Son of Man the prophets foretold come
from heaven to defeat and destroy everything that stands between God and his
creation, that he is the very Word of God by which God created everything come
into the world to create it anew, that he is the Lamb of God who takes away the
sin of the world. As I have been saying,
the ability to know and acknowledge who Jesus is comes to us by the eye-opening
work of the Holy Spirit. Due to our
utter blindness because of sin we are unable to perceive who Jesus is.
Knowing
and acknowledging who Jesus is must progress to receiving him, to showing him
hospitality in our lives through prayer and Bible Study and Christian
fellowship and just plain trying to walk the walk, just simply letting the Holy
Spirit do his healing and transforming work on us. It is sitting at the table with and in the
communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit enjoying eternal life in the
midst of this world's death. This is the
personal devotion side of believing.
Next, knowing
and acknowledging and receiving Jesus for who he is must then become entrusting
our lives to him and obeying him, living according to his way, truth, and life
in this world, taking up our crosses and following him, and laying down our lives
for one another rather than living in accordance with the fallen powers,
standards, and values of this world. Faith necessitates faithfulness.
Finally,
believing in and in association with Jesus culminates in worship. In Chapter 9 of John's Gospel Jesus heals a
man born blind who consequently gets thrown out of the synagogue because of
it. Jesus afterwards comes to him and
asks him if he believes in the Son of Man.
The man responds, “Show me who he is that I might believe.” Jesus says “I am he.” The man explodes forth, “Lord, I believe” and
worships him. The way God has loved this
world, giving his only-begotten Son for us making us to believe and have
fellowship with the Trinity in his very self inexplicably fills us with awe and
adoration and drops us to our knees screaming “Yes! Amen!” from the deepest part of ourselves. It is one thing to consider the astronomical
odds of a fateful find at a garage sale as a sign from God and evidence of
something unseen. But, it is entirely
another for Jesus and the Holy Spirit to break forth on us with the love of the
Father causing us to be lost in wonder, love, and praise. It is my prayer that the Trinity awakens
belief in all of you. Amen.
