John 3:1-17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Nicodemus was a Pharisee. Devout, educated, serious. Not, a bad guy. He was the meticulously crafted product of a system designed to raise up faithful, serious, men and equip them to think and talk about God in a particular, tried and true way. But there in that dark room, Jesus painted for Nicodemus a surrealist picture with his words about “being born from above” and NOTHING Nicodemus had ever been taught… nothing Nicodemus knew… could help him make any sense of it.
Nicodemus was… as the idiom goes… like a turtle on a fence post. Like a turtle on a fence post, he didn’t get there by himself. He doesn’t belong there. Doesn't know what to do, now that he finds himself there, and you and I… seeing him there... are simply left to wonder… what was it that left ol’ Nicodemus so very, very stuck? Like a turtle on a fence post?
Nicodemus had seen that Jesus had a unique connection with the Divine. It was the sort of connection he himself longed for but could not manage to grasp. He was stuck. His body high-centered and his little legs slowly flailing. What was it that left him so very, very stuck? CERTAINTY. Certainty had put him there. Systematically taught… diligently learned… theologically dogmatic... CERTAINTY. Nicodemus had faithfully taken in ALL the certainty that the traditional, patriarchal, religious educational system had taught him and honestly, it had served him very well for his entire lifetime…
Until now.
Now. In that room. In the dark. He was stuck with only the dimly lit, frustrated face of Jesus chiding him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” Nicodemus had been taught for a lifetime how to wrap God up in a nice, neat, manageable package of certainty. He had brought that nice, neat, manageable package of certainty with him that night to see Jesus, only to have Jesus unwrap it right before his eyes and show him… God wasn’t there! As another Southern saying goes, “If you can wrap your mind around it… it ain’t God.” It was what Nicodemus KNEW FOR CERTAIN that had stranded him on that fence post.
Unlike Nicodemus, our next Lenten saint was not burdened with fence-post-stranding certainty. Hildegard of Bingen had an extraordinarily brilliant mind. She was a musician, a composer, a medical doctor and herbalist, the head of two abbeys which she herself founded, a prolific author, and a consultant to bishops and kings. AND… most importantly for us today… she was a mystic. What she was NOT, because she was a woman, was formally trained in the certainty of the religious, educational system of the Middle Ages.
Denying her a formal education ended up, however, being a backhanded gift which left her free to use her mystic vision to interpret the words of Jesus as they had been written in John’s mystic Gospel. Unlike Nicodemus, she didn’t need to un-learn a lifetime of indoctrinated theological certainty. Unlike Nicodemus, she didn’t have to claw out of deeply ingrained dogmas. Hildegard was able to read John’s mystical Gospel with a mystic’s eyes, guided, as she described, like “a feather on the breath of God.”
Without learned certainty getting in her way, Hildegard was
able to understand from Jesus’ words, what Nicodemus simply could not, that “The mystery of God hugs us, in its all-encompassing arms.” Without having been taught “the right way” to wrap God up in a nice, neat, theological bundle, Hildegard could see that God sending Jesus into the world was not just some Divine afterthought. It was not something God did in order to fix a world that had gone unexpectedly wrong and it was not some sort of pass/fail test with eternal consequences. Without the cement galoshes of learned certainty, she could see that the mystical language in John’s Gospel which talks about Jesus as the “Light that shines in the Darkness”… and the “Word made Flesh” was meant to present Jesus to all of Creation as the culmination of God’s intention from before time began...
God’s intention to SAVE the world… and not condemn it.
Jesus coming into the world was the way God had always meant to help us understand, as Hildegard said, that “Every creature is a glistening, glittering mirror of divinity, for we are the image of God” and “if we wish to see God we need look no further than our souls and bodies, ourselves and our neighbors.”
Nicodemus struggled with Jesus’ mystical words because he tried to hear them with ears trained in theological, dogmatic certainty. Throughout the ages, all who have come to those last two, well known verses in today’s Gospel with dogmatic certainty like Nicodemus did, all end up stuck… like a turtle on a fence post. Placed in that helpless spot they either wander off confused, as Nicodemus did, or they take a wrench and twist those two verses completely backwards into a perverse test of who is "saved" and who is not.
Reading those two verses not through dogmas or certainties, but with a mystic’s eye, we can see them as they were intended to be seen. As an assurance of unconditional, Divine love sent to ALL of creation. The take home from John's mystic Gospel is an invitation for us to let go of our dogmatic certainties and see Scripture, our neighbors, and all of Creation through a mystic's eye. SEE, as Hildegard did that, “God, Who is Love, is with you, within you, and around you.” Amen.
