BORN AGAIN OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT

Today is Trinity Sunday, the beginning of that long period of Sundays which ends with Advent at the start of the next liturgical year. There can be up to 26 Sundays of Trinity and I once heard a priest describe the period as long and boring.

One thing I know about Christianity is that it is never boring. To begin with, it is a religion founded by the Son of God, incarnated to live among us for reasons which are anything but boring, unless you can consider salvation to be boring.

“Conceived by the Holy Ghost” seems to me to be a very interesting concept. I don’t know of anyone but Jesus who can claim such origins. Born into the most humble of earthly families, with a mother who was barely herself out of childhood. That was also a little unusual, and if it had happened today, or if the attitudes to such pregnancies had been the same as today, the young Mary would have come under enormous pressure to have her baby terminated. And then where would we be.

Then, after 30 years of living in obscurity, this God-made-man suddenly begins a career as an itinerant preacher, teacher and healer. It lasts for just 3 years, but during that time countless numbers of people turn out to hear him. They witness his miracles; they bring him their sick to be cured; they are enthralled by the message of this uneducated, illiterate, poorly clothed and ill shod, homeless man. They found him anything but boring and many became devoted to him.

But the leaders of his community decided that he was somehow a danger to them; that his message was wrong; that he was irrelevant. So, they persuaded one of his closest followers to betray him; they tortured him and they slew him in the most horrible way.

He rose from the dead and was later taken up into heaven where he lives and from where he pours out his love for us. He loves us with all the passion he showed in going to his terrible death for our sakes. By his death he overcame death and opened up the Kingdom of Heaven for all of us. From there, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit among us to lead those of us who respond to him to that place where Jesus reigns in glory.

Can anything be less boring than that? Can anything be more exciting than that? Never!

Yet today, so many people, like the leaders of Jesus’ time on earth, want to dismiss him as irrelevant. They want him to be boring; they want Christianity to be boring; they want the church to be boring, because then it becomes all too easy for them to push their own agendas of evil.

Some see Nicodemus as such a man, a man looking for things to turn against Jesus; things with which to discredit him. But consider Nicodemus carefully. Nicodemus came to Our Lord at night because he wanted so badly to talk to him, but on the other hand, wanted no one to see him go there. To my mind that allows us to give him the benefit of the doubt and consider him to be a genuine seeker. It is, in fact, amazing that he came at all.

Nicodemus wanted answers. He was a rich man, one of the privileged class of Pharisees and yet he was troubled. Perhaps, like so many people, he felt that emptiness inside him, which only God can fill and he was smart enough to believe that Jesus could help him. There is a beautiful symbolism in the fact that he came by night, hoping to receive light from the one source from which he could obtain such light, Jesus Christ, the Light of the World. Rabbi, he says, we know that thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these signs that thou doest, except God be with him.

Jesus, who often gave very obscure answers in order to make men think through a matter for themselves, gave Nicodemus such a response. Except a man be born again, Jesus said, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. It is not the signs and wonders which lead us to God’s Kingdom, it is baptism and the Holy Spirit.

The signs and wonders are not important, it is the change in a persons heart which matters. A change which must be so fundamental, so radical, that it amounts to nothing less than re-birth.

Nicodemus, recognizing that Jesus is teaching him the truth cries out, almost in desperation, How can these things be? This basically good man knows that the change Jesus talks about is necessary, but in his experience it is impossible. The Pharisees measured goodness by obedience to a huge set of rules, not by the characteristics of a man’s heart. They were so focused on the external, their rule book, that they ignored the internal, the heart recreated and joined to God in obedience and love.

Nicodemus has the problem we all have. Even if we want to change, we cannot do so ourselves. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, Jesus says. In other words, as long as we hang on to our human desires, our lusts and earthly ambitions, we will not rise out of the mire of this earthly life. We have no power to do so, because we are limited by the power of being human, which is no power at all.

But Jesus goes on to say, That which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. It is through the Spirit, sent from God, that we can be changed. We have to want to be changed, to be born again. If we can not want that with all our heart, we have to want to want it. And if we cannot want to want it, we have at least to know that we should want it and pray that our merciful God will do the rest.

The Spirit, which is God, has the power to change us, to give us that rebirth; to change our relationship to God to one of sonship. Such change begins when we love Jesus, welcome him into our hearts and keep his commandments. Then we are led into the Kingdom of God right here on earth and in the life beyond.

For, as Jesus said, …whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. Born again of water and the Spirit and living every minute in the glorious light of Christ, to the glory of God the Father.

Peter Jardine+

Trinity Sunday, 2006