A Nighttime Visitor Seeks Jesus: John 3: 1-17

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the Gospel reading, from John 3.

Nighttime visits…not always the most pleasant of things, are they? If you’ve ever had a prank knock at midnight, you know what I mean. My Dad used to say nothing good happens after the sun goes down. In John’s Gospel, darkness is a clue: something nefarious is brewing. Nicodemus isn’t the one plotting evil, but satan is definitely trying to confuse his inquiry, trying to turn Nicodemus away from the One who shines light into the darkness.

Nicodemus was a pharisee, one of the major religious groups of the Jews. While we often give the pharisees a great deal of grief for their overly pietistic way of life, they really were seeking to do God’s will – albeit in a misguided sort of way. Nevertheless, I take his conversation with Jesus to be sincere, wanting to understand what it was He was teaching and doing.

Jesus and Nicodemus
Crijin Hendricksz Volmarjin

The pharisees were the Bob the Builders of the time, taking Bob’s approach to their own salvation: Can we do it? Yes, we can! That is why Nicodemus has such a struggle with Jesus’ comments: how can a man be born again? How can a man enter his mother’s womb? How can these things be? Can we do it? Ummmm……Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on good ol’ Nick. After all, how often to we try to Americanize our theology, determined to pull our sinful selves up by our own bootstraps to make ourselves worthy of God’s great mercy and grace. If I do X, then God will do Y; if I don’t do A, God will do B.

So, Jesus turns Nicodemus away from himself and away from the darkness of evil, turning him towards the Light. Consider “born,” for example. A baby has no part in birth except to be the recipient of it. A mother’s body does it all. When it comes to faith and salvation, the sinner has no part in it. It is all done by God’s grace, specifically by the Spirit of God that gives life. Or, for that matter, the wind – it blows by itself, without influence of man and without man’s knowledge.

Nicodemus doesn’t quite get it. Not yet. The understanding, the faith, will come, building slowly like the wind.

As a pharisee, Nicodemus would have been well-schooled in the history, the story, of God’s people. Jesus reference to the serpent being lifted up would have immediately brought that whole story to light. We have the account written in Numbers 21: 4-9 where the people grumbled against Moses and, by extension, God. “You brought us out to the wilderness to die. There isn’t food or water, and the food you are providing, we don’t like.” God is incredibly patient with His people, but this time, His patience tired out. He sent some kind of venomous serpent, a viper of some sort whose bite was like fire, to bite and kill. The people, whose mouths had only recently dripped with the toxic complaints against God, now fill their mouths with pleas for God’s help, mercy, and compassion. “We have sinned,” they confess, and beg Moses to intercede on their behalf to God. God instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent, place it on a pole, and then tell the people that those who are bitten can look up to the serpent and live.

Go back to the Bob the Builder mentality. Can we do it? Yes we can! Imagine you were bitten by one of those snakes, the toxin burning like fire through your body. You are dying, slowly and painfully. How can you save yourself? Can we do it? Impossible. You will die. God strips Israel of their selfishness. All they are, all they have, is by God’s grace. The exodus is God’s grace in action. The daily manna, the evening quail and signs of His grace. Their grumbles are not mere words; they are rejections of His gifts. So, with the snakes, God strips them of their self-merit. Their fear, their need, causes them to return to God and His compassionate acts. “Lord, have mercy on us.”

The bronze serpent, too, is unable to save. After all, it’s just bronze. Bronze doesn’t give life. God gives life. But, when God attaches His promise to the serpent on the pole, and when the people trust that promise and look to the object to which the promise is attached, there is mercy. There is life. The problem was that the bronze serpent was a temporary, temporal savior. It saved Israelites from the toxic bite. It restored life. But the serpent could not save eternally. Something, Someone else would have to do that. The serpent-on-a-pole is, of course, an allusion, a type, of what Jesus will do. He will be suspended on the cross, so that all who look to Him in faith will live and not die.

I wonder if there would also have been remembrance of what another serpent did – the serpent in the Garden that tempted Eve and Adam into taking the forbidden bite. Would Nicodemus have remembered what that serpent did, that through it’s venomous temptation, death entered the world? Would he have recalled the curse placed against that serpent and also the promise that Eve’s Seed would crush satan’s head? Could Nicodemus have had an inkling that the One whom He visits at night is the One who would destroy sin, and death, and the devil forever? Would he have understood what was all about to be fulfilled in Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection?

I suspect not. Not yet, at least. The Spirit will continue blowing through Nicodemus as he continues to listen and follow Jesus from afar. Faith continues to be incubated, slowly growing.

Jesus speaks the words of John 3:16. For most of us, we can automatically recite those 25 words from the King James Version of the Bible without even having to think about it. I bet I could wake you at 2am and, after you got over the shock of me being in your bedroom at 2am, you could say it without missing a word. That’s part of the issue, isn’t it? John 3:16 is memorized, minimized, commercialized, and economized down to simply “The Gospel in a nutshell.”

I want you to listen as I read that verse again, deliberately and slowly. In fact, look at the back of your bulletin and read along. I do this because we are so used to reading and hearing these well-known words that our brains kind of go on autopilot and fill in the blanks. As a result, we miss the words and their meaning. We do this with the Lord’s Prayer, with the corporate absolution, with the 23^rd Psalm. So, let’s slow down and read it again, more time. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

I remember my Grandma – my Mom’s mom - playing a game with babies. She would hold their hands down low and then lift their arms high while saying, “Sooooooo big!” She would do it over and over again, often to the delight of the kid. I think we sometimes read these words, “For God so loved the world…”, in the same way: God loves us sooooooo much, as if the “so” is a measure of volume. That’s not it at all. A better way to understand “For God so loved the world,” is to exchange “so” for “in this way”: For God loved the world in this way.  Now, I agree that sounds unwieldly and awkward – especially since we are used to hearing it a certain way. But when you do that, it gets the emphasis where it needs to be. Let me show you:

For God loved the world in this way: that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Where does the focus then fall? That God gave His Son as a demonstration of His love. Love, without an object, is only a word. But love, with an object, suddenly becomes an action. God’s love is demonstrated in His gift of Jesus. In other words, it’s not that God’s love is soooooooo big; it’s that God’s love caused Him to sacrifice His Son for you. (For the record, this isn’t mere creative license of a Biblical text. That is quite literally the way the original text is to be understood.)

With this, the fulfillment of the serpent-on-the-pole comes to fruition. As the Israelites looked to the bronze serpent to live, those who believe in the sacrifice of Jesus for their sins will live – not just for another day, or week, or month, or year, but eternally.

Our sins do burn. They burn our conscience as we sin against God and against our neighbor. Just like that burning, venomous bite of the serpent, our sins kill. Had not Christ taken that venom into Himself, we would die eternally. Thanks be to God, He sent Jesus so that all who believe – all who look to Him – will nor perish but have eternal life.

This isn’t just wordplay. These words have an eternal consequence.

On February 10, just a few minutes after 3pm, my Mom died suddenly.  She was a baptized child of God who believed Jesus died for her sins. She trusted those promises of God. She lived that faith; she taught that faith to us, her kids, and to the students in her classrooms. At her inurnment, the pastor read those solemn words from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” ⁵⁵ “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15: 54-55). That morning, at the grave side, we felt that venomous sting in our mother’s death. But, we believe that is not the end because Mom looked to the cross. She looked to Jesus. Because of that, we have the promise and the hope – HOPE! – of a resurrection reunion. Paul agrees:

⁵⁶ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. ⁵⁷ But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This Thursday, March 5, would have been Mom’s 79^th birthday. She missed it by just a few weeks. I thank God for her faithfulness as a mom, as a teacher, as a child of God. The victory is already hers, even as we await a resurrection reunion when Jesus returns.

Nicodemus didn’t understand this “new birth.” Not yet. In some ways, we don’t fully understand or comprehend it either. That’s OK. It’s not about understanding. It’s about believing – and, thanks be to God, He even gives us the faith that clings to His promises! In the resurrection, that will be the greatest new birth of all.