Her startup had great potential, but when the recession came it took her business down with it.
He had studied long and hard, but when his grade was posted it had been all for naught.
They had promised to love and cherish one another forever, but a dozen years and hundreds of arguments later a judge declared they were no longer husband and wife.
Failure. We’ve all known it. It’s part of being human. Who among us doesn’t cringe at the memory of a failed friendship, plan, or project? And while our failures may not have been as devastating as the entrepreneur’s, student’s, or married couple’s, they still stung.
The Bible is full of people who failed. In fact, it starts with the failure of Adam and Eve and continues from one generation to the next. And failure didn’t stop with the coming of Jesus. Many of those around him failed, and over the next six weeks we’re going to look at how and why so we can learn from their mistakes.
Today we begin with Nicodemus.
Nicodemus was a Pharisee. Pharisees were teachers and rulers of the Jewish people. For the most part, they were hostile toward Jesus, but Nicodemus was different. He was among a small group of those in Jerusalem who’d seen Jesus’ signs—his miracles, healings, and exorcisms—and were intrigued. In fact, Nicodemus was so impressed that one night he came to where Jesus was staying.
Now a lot has been made of the fact that he went “by night.” Some speculate he didn’t want others to see him, particularly his fellow Pharisees. There may be some truth to that, but in John’s Gospel light and dark are spiritual categories. Jesus, he tells us, is the light that shines in the darkness. So for Nicodemus to come by night suggests he is moving from moral and spiritual darkness toward the light of Christ. He doesn’t believes in Jesus, but he at least wants to know more.
And Jesus is more than willing to provide. “Truly, truly,” Jesus says, “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Now that statement makes absolutely no sense to Nicodemus. “Born again? How can an old man like me be born again? It’s not like you can go back into your mother’s womb and come out a second time. That’s ridiculous.”
Of course, he’s right, but biology is not the issue. In Greek, the word for “again” is “anothen.” And “anothen” can also mean “from above.” That’s the way Jesus meant it. He was thinking in spiritual and spatial terms, of being born of God above. But Nicodemus is stuck on the temporal and earthly definition, so of course he couldn’t understand.
But Jesus persists, taking another tack to explain this new birth required for the kingdom. “Unless one is born of water and the spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God,” he says. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.”
In the Jewish tradition, the spirit is equated with life. In creation, the spirit hovered over the chaos. When Adam was born, so to speak, God breathed his spirit into him and Adam became a living being. When the people escaping Egypt reached the Red Sea, the wind or spirit divided the waters, and Israel was born. In Ezekiel, Israel is portrayed as dry bones strewn on a valley floor but then the nation is reborn when God “puts breath in” them.
One would think a Bible scholar like Nicodemus would know all this and get the point. To be born “again” or “from above” is to be born of God by the Spirit. But, Nicodemus doesn’t get it. He so obtuse that Jesus chides him: “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you don’t understand these things?”
Still, Jesus doesn’t give up. “We speak of what we know,” he says, “and bear witness to what we have seen.” What Jesus knows and what he has seen, he goes on to say, are “heavenly things,” the things of God. He knows them because he is the Son of Man who has “descended from heaven.” And he has done so to be “lifted up,” that is, both crucified and exalted, so that those who believe in him might be saved.
In effect, he’s saying to Nicodemus: “To be born of God, to enter the kingdom of heaven, is to believe in me, to trust me, to follow me.”
Unfortunately, that’s where this encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus ends. And while the text doesn’t say so, I can’t help but imagine Nicodemus trudging home in the dark, scratching his head, still baffled by what he’d heard.
The question for us to contemplate is this: Why didn’t Nicodemus understand? Of all people you’d think he would. He’s a biblical scholar. He’s a leader of God’s people. He’s supposed to be attuned to God. And yet he doesn’t understand who Jesus is and what he’s doing? Why?
I would suggest it is because he suffers from a failure of imagination. Nicodemus is so entrenched in a particular view of God and how God work that he can’t imagine anything different. He is so committed to what he just knows to be true that he fails to see God doing something new in Jesus.
We see this failure of imagination in his view of Jesus. When Nicodemus comes to Jesus he is very complimentary. “Rabbi,” he says, “we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”
First, Nicodemus recognizes Jesus as a rabbinical colleague, a fellow teacher of the faith. But, second, he realizes that Jesus is something more. He says he’s “a teacher come from God” and one whose powerful works suggests “God is with him.” Those statements are interesting because they are a case in which Nicodemus speaks the truth without realizing it. Having read chapter one of John, you and I know Jesus did indeed come from God. He is “the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us.” But Nicodemus doesn’t know that. For him, to “come from God” is simply a superlative used to describe any great Israelite. For example, Moses or David could be described as having “come from God.” And the phrase “God is with him?” We know that Jesus is “the Word that was with God, and the word was God” but Nicodemus doesn’t. For him, anyone who did the kind of miracles Jesus did was considered empowered by God. And even when, in verse 13, Jesus identifies himself as the Son of Man who has descended from heaven, who has come from God unlike anyone else in history, Nicodemus still can’t grasp who Jesus is. He can’t imagine Jesus being anything more than a great teacher and miracle worker.
In that regard, isn’t Nicodemus a very modern?
Some years ago, a colleague wrote a little handbook for folk in our tradition. In a section on “Who is Jesus?” he approached the identity of Jesus quite differently than did Alexander Campbell, the founder and theological brains behind the Restoration Movement. Campbell had a very high view of Jesus. In his book “The Christian System,” he refers to Jesus as “the supreme deity and…the author and perfecter of the Christian system [or faith].” He says “Jesus is the one Lord in all the divine fullness of sovereign, supreme, and universal authority.”[i] In other words, Jesus is by nature divine, with all the authority that entails.
But my colleague wasn’t comfortable with such a high view of Jesus. Instead, he described him as a human being in which we find “the most complete, the most sublime, the most thoroughly moral personality the world has ever known” and that “we see God…in the mercy, the love, the compassion, the honesty, the will of Jesus Christ.”[ii]
Do you hear the difference? For Campbell, Jesus was a divine being, come from God. He was “the Word made flesh,” God incarnate. But for my colleague, Jesus was a great human being with divine attributes or a godlike character. For Campbell, Jesus was God; for my colleague, we could “see God” in him but he wasn’t necessarily God.
Now my colleague wasn’t being particularly radical. His approach is a popular one because of the way people have been trained to think about God. For example, we have been told that God, if there is a god, wound up the world and let it run, refusing to engage in it. If that is the case, then Jesus can’t be God.
Or we have been told that the idea of God coming to earth is archaic, the stuff of fairy tales and Greek legends. To suggest Jesus was God incarnate is, were told, a remnant of less sophisticated times and less sophisticated people.
Or we’ve been told that the divine and human are so incompatible as to make it impossible for Jesus to be God. The divine is eternal, infinite, infallible, and immortal; humans are temporal, finite, fallible, and mortal. It is illogical, we are told, to think the two can be one.
Like Nicodemus, people don’t get Jesus because they can’t conceive of him being anything more than a very godly person, a wise teacher, and a powerful wonder worker. They suffer from a failure of imagination because they don’t, can’t or won’t imagine a God big enough to work outside of the little boxes we create.
Consider another failure of imagination. As our Men’s Bible Study learned, one argument against the resurrection of Jesus is that no one else has been raised from the dead. The thinking goes: Since we don’t know of anyone else that has been raised, Jesus couldn’t have been raised. That, they say, is the way the world works. Unfortunately, they can’t imagine that Jesus’ resurrection might be unique because his purpose is unique. They can’t imagine God working outside the box of their assumptions.
One other example. A clergy friend told me he never prays for people’s healing. Why? Because he associates it with the miraculous healings in Scripture, and he doesn’t think God works that way anymore. Now I get it. I am a big believer in modern medicine. I don’t expect God to miraculously heal a broken leg. Yet what my friend was confessing was a failure of imagination. He couldn’t imagine that God could work outside the 21st century box he’d put him in.
More than 60 years ago, J.B. Phillips wrote a little book entitled Your God is Too Small. In it he addressed this failure of imagination. Oh, he didn’t use those terms, but he suggested that too often our image of God limits our ability to understand him. For example, he said, if we see God as a moral policemen, we will be blind to his graciousness. Or if we see God as an Old Man on a Throne, we will not grasp the way he continues to work in the world. In essence, we put God in a box. We define what God can and cannot do.
But that God is too small. The God we worship is a powerful and surprising God, one that creates, restores, transforms. The God we worship comes as a child, dies on a cross, and rises from the tomb. The God we worship gives birth to his children, loves them, guides them, corrects them, and welcomes them home. The God we worship is larger than any box in which we try to put him, and to see our God, to appreciate what he’s done, to understand what he can do requires us to look beyond the limits we would impose on him and to imagine what he can do for those who love him.
That night in Jerusalem, Nicodemus couldn’t do that. But somewhere between that night and the cross, he did. For on the day Christ died Nicodemus was there, not as an accusing Pharisee nor as a curious inquirer, but rather as a man who had come to love Jesus so much that he joined Joseph of Arimathea in removing Christ’s body from the cross and placing it in the tomb. And while the text doesn’t say so, I can’t help but imagine Nicodemus walking home that night, recalling the light that Jesus had shined into the darkness of his life, and thinking that just maybe the story wasn’t quite yet over, that God had something bigger and more surprising planned.
[i] Alexander Campbell, The Christian System, Gospel Advocate, Nashville, TN, 2001 pp. 9-10.
[ii] D. Duane Cummins, Handbook for Today’s Disciples, 3rd edition, Chalice Press, St. Louis, MO, 2003 pp 18-21.