Don’t Overthink. Simply Believe. John 3:1-17

A text – John 3:1-17

3:1 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.
3:2 He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”
3:3 Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
3:4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
3:5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.
3:6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.
3:7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’
3:8 The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
3:9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”
3:10 Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
3:11 “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony.
3:12 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?
3:13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.
3:14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
3:15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
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.

A reflection:

Many of us have read it or heard this story before. Nicodemus is a good man, of high rank among the Jewish leaders, a highly respected teacher and scholar of Jewish law. And he has seen what Jesus is doing, healing the sick, casting out demons. He knows that only someone holy can do these things. But his fellow scholars and leaders are against Jesus, either because he represents magic and false prophesy, or because he might have the power to end the entire system they have become a part of through sheer hard work and determination to get everything right.

So Nicodemus, the believer who wants to learn more, comes by night to meet and talk with Jesus. From the start, Nicodemus dissects everything Jesus tells him in order to try to understand. That’s what experts were really good at. They took apart a case, looking at the minute details to see which law applied to it and how they could solve the problem. But while Nicodemus asks questions about the very specific, Jesus goes even bigger and gets less specific, more metaphoric. Nicodemus cannot understand Jesus using the ways he is used to using. Jesus is trying to teach Nicodemus that in order to understand God and “get” Jesus’s mission, Nicodemus will have to imagine things in a new way: bigger, wider, more expansively.

Eventually Jesus uses a reference he knows Nicodemus will recognize: an ancient story of God’s saving God’s people from a plague of snakes God had sent to bother them. When a bronze snake was lifted up so the people could look upon it, if they simply believed, not figured it all out themselves, but simply believed, they would be saved from fatal snakebite. Jesus is trying to get Nicodemus to simply believe he is the Messiah, without parsing everything into tiny pieces to try to cognitively understand. Jesus wants him to just believe that God loves humans so much that God is going to save humans from the permanence of death. That saving depends solely on the person simply believing Jesus is the Son of God who saves us. This Son of God does not come to earth to judge and condemn humans. He comes just to do the work that will save us all.

Poor Nicodemus. Everything he had been doing his whole career couldn’t prepare him to simply believe.

But ok, spoiler alert: Nicodemus eventually does.

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for coming to give us eternal life. We don’t have to figure it out. Just simply believe it. Help us to believe.      Amen.