February 20, 2005 Numbers 21:4-9, John 3:1-17
Born Again: A Lesson in Wordplay for the Literal-Minded
“A Pharisee named Nicodemus, a Judean leader, came to Jesus during the night and said, ‘Rabbi, we know that you’ve come as a teacher of God; after all, nobody performs the miracles you do unless God is with him.” (John 3:1)
Jesus ignores the reference to miracles and counters with the puzzling statement: “No one can experience the kingdom of God without being born anothen.”(v. 3)
I have transliterated the Greek term because it has a double meaning. Anothen means both “again” and “from above.” Nicodemus should have understood this simple wordplay, but he responds as though he were exceptionally dense by asking how it is possible to enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born.
Jesus explains: “Everyone must be born of both water and spirit.” (3:5) Born of water means a human birth from the mother’s womb; born of the pneuma means born of the spirit. And the spirit comes from above, metaphorically speaking; born of the pneuma also means to be reborn, to enter a whole new life.
Now Nicodemus again certainly knows that pneuma means both spirit and air, wind or breath. A pneumatic drill is an air hammer; we have all had the wind knocked out of us, that is, the pneuma. And we translate the holy pneuma as the holy spirit. But Nicodemus seems unable to grasp the simplest word play. He appears to be metaphorically handicapped, like many Catholics and Protestants today.
The divine spirit that animates human beings was identified in the ancient world with the breath. At the end of the Gospel of John (20:22), Jesus says goodbye to the disciples and ‘breathes on them,’ which is his way of bequeathing the spirit of God to them. They are now animated by a special form of breath.
There are many puzzling features of this dialogue with Nicodemus and the long monologue that follows. I must confine myself to the one basic metaphor comes early in the discussion: to be born again.
To be born again means to experience the divine domain, to enter that domain.
It is especially important because it is poorly understood in common parlance today. When used by televangelists and evangelicals it tends to mean that one has had an overwhelming emotional experience that leads one to make the good confession. The good confession is to declare that Jesus Christ is one’s personal savior. Many make that confession without the slightest hint of what it really means.
Actually, having a conversion experience is nothing much. Most of us have had mountain top experiences that seemed overwhelming and life altering at the time we had them. Falling in love for the first time belongs to this same category. We are converted and fall in love the first time when we are very young. The issue for both conversions and a marriage that ensues is not the intensity of the original experience, but whether or not we can find a social context in which the commitment made at that defining moment becomes plausible and capable of maintenance over the long haul. It is difficult in marriage and it is even more demanding in religion. In marriage we have to make adjustments only for our spouses; in religion we have to make adjustments for the whole world.
Being born again as a follower of Jesus entails exchanging one reality sense for another. It means abandoning the standards and norms of conduct and conviction that characterize normal daily life and adopting new norms that contravene the old. It does not mean assenting to the dogmas summarized in the creed.
Let me try to give a few hints of what experiencing the divine domain means in Jesus’ terms.
We know that human beings live perpetually out of one reality sense into another. We are constantly modifying our social context and understanding ourselves anew. These changes take place slowly and often imperceptibly, we don’t notice.
Being born again as Jesus understood it means quitting the old, everyday world and adopting a radical alternative reality as our basic frame of reference.
The kingdom of God, or the divine domain as I prefer to translate it, is Jesus’ vision of an alternative reality.
Jesus uses the phrase ‘kingdom of God’ ironically: it is not a kingdom, since it has no king, and its subjects are ‘nobodies,’ that is, poor and destitute, lame and blind.
In that domain Jesus himself functioned with a trust ethic. He regarded anxiety about food and clothing as a lack of trust. So he embarked on a life of itinerancy and lived off of hospitality. That was the first test for those who responded to his invitation to come and follow him.
He was scornful of kinship codes. He advised his would be followers to forsake fathers and mothers but to love their tribal enemies. Forsaking family meant breaking up the patriarchal system that dominated families, especially women, while loving enemies meant transcending the tribal boundaries that defined most relationships. He believed what people had in common was more important than what separated them ethnically and religiously.
He advertised this view of social boundaries by eating openly with toll collectors and prostitutes and by associating with lepers and the marginalized in defiance of purity codes.
He advocated and practiced and unbrokered relationship with God: for him temple and priests were redundant.
He reportedly saw Satan fall from heaven and he is said to have commanded demonic spirits to leave. He evidently believed the heavens were being cleared of the gods and goddesses, a view far in advance of his time.
The ‘values’ Jesus advocates are counterintuitive. In one of his most radical aphorisms, he recommends letting the spiritually dead perform the funeral rites for their own dead to free them for the new adventure into this reality. He declares that the first are last and the last first, in a fundamental reversal of expectations.
In summarizing Jesus’ view of the divine domain, I have said nothing of the parables, which invite us to re-imagine the world. He does so in the Prodigal, in the Leaven, in Vineyard workers, in the Great Banquet.
Above all, his paradoxes invoke his followers to let go of life:
Those who cling to life will forfeit life;
Those who release life will find life. (Luke 17:33)
Only by giving life away can we find real life. Any other kind of life is a false life.
And that it appears is the significance of the symbol of the cross. Just as Moses created a bronze serpent and raised it up on a pole to save people from fatal snake bits, so Jesus is lifted up on a cross to free people from themselves.
This is the ultimate paradox that Nicodemus is struggling to understand.
In the body of lore that originated with Jesus, he asked nothing for himself and he advised his disciples to ask nothing for themselves, except bread for one day at a time. In seems Jesus went to the cross because he was unwilling to compromise his vision of the divine domain to save his life. He was a victim of his own vision. The cross for Jesus and the hemlock for Socrates are symbols of absolute integrity.
Very few of us can truly be said to be born again. His original followers understood his vision very well: they quit their jobs and became wanderers with him. Many of them died as martyrs. The more difficult response is to adopt and maintain the divine domain as something real and palpable. That takes steady, relentless commitment.
