Jesus and Nicodemus

One night, a Jewish notable comes to find Christ in secret. Nicodemus is a Pharisee and a member of the council, a respected master of the Law. From this conversation comes one of the summits of the Gospel: one must be born again, of water and the Spirit, to enter the kingdom of God; and the Son, lifted up on the cross, gives eternal life to whoever believes in him.

Coming by night

Nicodemus approaches by night, away from watching eyes. His caution betrays the unease of a man of standing who does not want to compromise himself, but also a heart already touched. He opens with respect: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can perform the signs you do, unless God is with him.” John 3:2 The night he chooses is not only discretion: it pictures the darkness in which he still stands, believing by halves, without having received the full light. It is out of this shadow that the whole conversation will draw him.

Born again

Christ goes straight to the heart of it: “Amen, amen, I say to you: unless a man is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” John 3:3 The Greek word rendered here as “again”, anōthen (ἄνωθεν), means both “again” and “from above”: the birth he announces comes from God. Nicodemus hears it on the level of the flesh and is astonished: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born?” John 3:4 The teacher of the Law conceives only a second birth of the flesh, and there he stumbles.

Of water and the Spirit

Christ then makes plain what this birth is: “unless a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” John 3:5 Water and the Spirit name baptism, where man receives a new life, that of the children of God. There are thus two births, and two lives: “What is born of the flesh is flesh; what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” John 3:6 The first gives existence; the second, to live by the life of God and to enter his Kingdom. In speaking of water and the Spirit, Christ says nothing that Nicodemus, a teacher in Israel, should not have recognised: Ezekiel had promised, for the last days, a cleansing water and a Spirit given, which would make of man a new heart. “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean… I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.” Ezekiel 36:25-26 What the prophet announced from afar, baptism accomplishes: water and the Spirit, united, beget the new man.

The wind blows where it will

This birth is the work of God, free and elusive: “The wind blows where it wills: you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” John 3:8 In Greek, a single word, pneuma (πνεῦμα), means both wind and Spirit: it is the same word in “the wind blows” and in “born of the Spirit”. One perceives its effects without mastering its source: no one gives himself this life, he receives it.

Here the paradox of Nicodemus appears. A master of the Law, versed in the Scriptures, he ought to recognise what Christ speaks of, for the prophets had announced this gift of God: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.” Ezekiel 36:26 Yet he does not understand, and Christ shows it to him: “You are the teacher of Israel, and you do not know these things!” John 3:10 Nicodemus wants to understand how it can happen before believing; but the order is the reverse. One does not wait to have grasped this birth in order to receive it: one welcomes it by faith, and the light comes afterward. What he lacks is not knowledge, but to believe the one who speaks: “If you do not believe when I speak to you of earthly things, how would you believe if I spoke to you of heavenly things?” John 3:12

Lifted up like the serpent

To say how this life will be given, Christ recalls an episode from the desert. Bitten by serpents, the people were saved by looking at a bronze serpent that Moses had set on a pole: “anyone who has been bitten and looks at it will live.” Numbers 21:8 That sign announced his own: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” John 3:14-15 Lifted up on the cross, Christ heals of the venom of death all who raise their eyes to him in faith. The remedy has the shape of the harm: it is the image of the serpent, the cause of the bite, that heals of the serpent. So the Son, lifted on the wood, takes the curse itself upon himself: “by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree” Galatians 3:13. Scripture already warned that the bronze did not save of itself: “whoever turned toward that sign was saved, not by what he looked upon, but by you, the Savior of all” Wisdom 16:7; it is the look of faith that saves, not the metal. The verb “lift up,” in Greek hypsoō (ὑψόω), means at once to raise on high and to exalt, to glorify: in John, the lifting up on the cross is already the glorification of the Son. The one word carries both the wood of the torture and the throne of glory.

God so loved the world

From this comes the verse in which the whole Gospel holds: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not be lost, but may have eternal life.” John 3:16 The gift of the Son does not aim to condemn, but to save: “For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.” John 3:17 The cross, where the Son is lifted up, is the summit of this love.

The conversation ends on light and shadow, where it had begun. Judgement is not a sentence imposed from without: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and men preferred the darkness to the light, because their deeds were evil.” John 3:19 Each one judges himself by coming to the light or fleeing it. Nicodemus, for his part, had come by night; he will appear again in broad day, when he comes to bury Christ, bringing myrrh and aloes, “Nicodemus, the one who at first had come to Jesus by night.” John 19:39. He brings a royal profusion of it, some thirty kilos of spices, the honours due to a king: the man who had come by night now buries his Lord in broad day. The man of darkness has walked toward the light.