Sunday’s Readings: 2nd Sunday of Lent

Genesis 12.1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4.1-5, 13-17; John 3.1-17

JOHN the Evangelist doesn’t do homely chit-chat. I cannot imagine him (or the opposite evangelists) reporting a conversation between Jesus and his followers in regards to the weather, or what they fancied for dinner. This Gospel records a conversation, but it surely is a conversation about everlasting truths, not quotidian trivia.

A number of weeks ago (Faith, 16 January), I highlighted John’s deal with the pre-existence of Christ. This week, the Gospel reveals further facets of his divine identity in a series of statements. The revelation comes in the middle of a typical Johannine conversation, between Jesus and Nicodemus. At their first meeting, Nicodemus had proved himself worthy of further conversation with the teacher by making his first affirmation: “Rabbi, you’re the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (1.53). On this affirmation, Jesus’s further disclosures would depend.

That Gospel moment of human recognition of Jesus’s divinity sets the pattern for his or her next encounter. When Nicodemus first declared Jesus’s identity, and when he reaffirms it here — “you’re a teacher who has come from God” (3.2) — his words have the identical quality of revealed truth about them as Peter’s acclamation at Caesarea Philippi, recorded in Matthew (16.16), Mark (8.29), and Luke (9.20).

Back in chapter one, Jesus made Nicodemus two guarantees: first, “You will see greater things than these”; then, “You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Now he goes on to further momentous statements, each of which cries out for deeper investigation. But space is restricted, so I have to select the weather which mix most clearly to speak Jesus’s message.

Three of Jesus’s statements are forged in a negative form. Two of those are warnings for his followers: “No one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above” (3.3); “Unless someone is born of water and Spirit, they can’t enter the Kingdom of God” (3.5; my translation).

Nicodemus is desperate to make sense of those statements, each of which were, for him, mysterious, though to us they cry, “Baptism!” He had already abandoned his sceptical, even cynical, pose (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” 1.46). That change of attitude from scepticism to trust is definitely what prompts Jesus to talk more directly, one to at least one, about himself.

His words, though still mysterious to Nicodemus, make sense to John’s readers. And, when he makes his third statement in negative form, they know the historical events to which the “ascent” and “descent” of the Son of Man are referring: “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man”. “No-one” now not refers to human individuals being called to faith. It has now turn out to be a reference to the individuality of the Messiah. No-one but Jesus, the Word, the “Son of Man”, has descended from heaven and (in Nicodemus’s future, and our past) ascended back to the appropriate hand of the Father.

So, the “negative” statements show us first what we’ve got to turn out to be for God, after which what Jesus must turn out to be for us. After them come two positive statements on this reading for Lent 2. Both are types of “blessed assurance” before they’re anything: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everybody who believes in him may not perish but could have everlasting life” (3.16); “God didn’t send the Son into the world to sentence the world, but so that the world is likely to be saved through him” (3.17).

We are used to the way in which that scriptures, just like the Psalms, drive home a message by saying the identical thing in barely other ways (consider Psalm 119). But we may not perceive quite so clearly how John does something similar. One commentator says that “The whole purpose of three.13 in John is to emphasize the heavenly origin of the Son of Man.” But so is the aim of three.2, 3.16, and three.17. From different angles, the identical message is urged upon us. For many, 3.16 captures the entire gospel message. For me, 3.17 speaks most encouragingly, since it sets salvation before condemnation.

Nicodemus — that sceptic-turned-believer — reveals what an encounter with the living Christ can do: transform the jaded attitude of 1 who thinks there may be nothing latest to find out about God into hope, which is “latest every morning”.