Lectionary Reflection — 27 May 2018, Trinity Sunday
1-2 There was a man of the Pharisee sect, Nicodemus, a prominent leader among the Jews. Late one night he visited Jesus and said, “Rabbi, we all know you’re a teacher straight from God. No one could do all the God-pointing, God-revealing acts you do if God weren’t in on it.”
3 Jesus said, “You’re absolutely right. Take it from me: Unless a person is born from above, it’s not possible to see what I’m pointing to — to God’s Realm.”
4 “How can anyone,” said Nicodemus, “be born who’s already been born and grown up? You can’t re-enter your mother’s womb and be born again. What are you saying with this ‘born-from-above’ talk?”
5-6 Jesus said, “You’re not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation — the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life — it’s not possible to enter God’s Realm. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch — the Spirit — and becomes a living spirit.
7-8 “So don’t be so surprised when I tell you that you have to be ‘born from above’ — out of this world, so to speak. You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s headed next. That’s the way it is with everyone ‘born from above’ by the wind of God, the Spirit of God.”
9 Nicodemus asked, “What do you mean by this? How does this happen?”
10-12 Jesus said, “You’re a respected teacher of Israel and you don’t know these basics? Listen carefully. I’m speaking sober truth to you. I speak only of what I know by experience; I give witness only to what I’ve seen with my own eyes. There’s nothing secondhand here, no hearsay. Yet instead of facing the evidence and accepting it, you procrastinate with questions. If I tell you things that are plain as the hand before your face and you don’t believe me, what use is there in telling you of things you can’t see, the things of God?
13-15 “No one has ever gone up into the presence of God except the One who came down from that Presence, the Son of Man. In the same way that Moses lifted the serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it’s necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up — and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, the Life of the Age.
16-18 “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life right now. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.
Other readings:
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I remember way back when I first started studying the Bible, I’d be sitting at a table with two or three different translations, a Strong’s Concordance, and a notepad with various pens and highlighters or colored pencils. Now that’s all been replaced with online services like Biblegateway.com, Lumina.bible.org, and others. With these online tools I can do much more in-depth studies and not clutter up the table!
As many of you know, I started using The Message in honor of my Mother. Although I prefer more traditional translations,2 I’ve really been enjoying reading from The Message. While I use it for my main text, I continue to use other translations for reference.
But with today’s Lesson, I really like the way The Message has some of the often-read and, therefore, unheard passages.3 When Nicodemus asks Jesus what he means by all of this “‘born-from-above’ talk,” Jesus replies: “Unless a person submits to this original creation — the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life — it’s not possible to enter God’s Realm.”
Contrary to Western theology for at least the last 500 years,4 Jesus is saying humanity is not so damaged that the image of God has been removed. He tells Nicodemus that humanity must return to its “original creation” to be in God’s Realm; not swap out their supposed spiritually dead nature for some other, foreign nature. Just as we see in the original creation account from Genesis 1-2, the Holy Spirit broods as a Wild Goose over the birthing waters of God to bring forth all creation, including humanity. It’s a return to that creation Jesus is meaning.
And that’s an important step. When most Christians, particularly in the West, talk about humanity, they generally start by something something like, “God created people; people sinned; now everyone born is dead in their sin and an enemy of God.” While those words and phrases do appear in the Bible, they’re woefully taken out of context to support an ideology that the Church didn’t adopt for a very long time (and some branches of the Christian faith have never embraced). To put it simply, most people start with Genesis 3 when they talk about humanity — the “fall” of Adam and Eve. However, Genesis 1 tells quite a different story. It tells us that people — both women and men — were made in God’s image. Certainly, there is darkness within humanity (Genesis 3), but deeper than darkness is the Light and image of God (Genesis 1).
This is something the Celtic Christians understood, too. In Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality, Celtic teacher, poet, and scholar John Philip Newell wrote, “Deeper than any wrong in us is the light of God, the light that no darkness has been able to overcome, as St. John had written.”5 When I first read that, I had to look up what Newell meant by his reference to St. John. He was referring to John 1.1-5:
1-2 The Word was first,
the Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
in readiness for God from day one.
3-5 Everything was created through him;
nothing—not one thing!—
came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn’t put it out.
In his book, The Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality, Newell stated, “Sin has buried the beauty of God’s image but not erased it. The gospel is given to uncover the hidden wealth of God that has been planted in the depths of our human nature.”6 Finally, while writing about John Scotus Eriugena, Newell explained —
[The spirituality of Eriugena] led him not to look away from life but further within; he believed that when we look within ourselves, and within all that exists, we will find darkness and evil but, deeper still, [we’ll find] the goodness of God. He regarded grace not as opposed to nature but as cooperating with it, restoring it or releasing its essential goodness. … The grace of Christ restores us to our original simplicity. Everything that is divided is reunited.7
It is to this very image of humanity being restored to its original simplicity that Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus about above. I realize for a lot of my readers this way of seeing people may be a shift in their theological understanding. Furthermore, I understand that such a shift can be quite difficult. But it’s not impossible. And it’s an important step to a more biblical understanding of humanity.8
As this is Trinity Sunday, let me see if I can help a bit with this view of humanity by using an example from the Trinity.9 As we can see from the Lesson above, an understanding of God is found Holy Trinity — three “persons” (hypostases) who share one “essence” (ousia).10
Likewise, humanity (because we’ve been made in God’s image) is made up of three parts — spirit, soul, and body. To say that people are “spiritually dead” because of the Fall, would be saying something like Jesus was “spiritually dead” because he became the sin offering for the world.11
To say that people are blind or marred or sick or incapable of understanding the things of God or even dead — all of these things are metaphors, poetic images to help us see that humanity was imprisoned by sin and death and needed to be rescued. Too often, people take poetic images and turn them into realities.12
What Jesus means in our Lesson today is that humanity is not too far gone to be rescued. That, like the Celtic Christian understanding, buried underneath layer upon layer of sin, the Light of Creation, the Image of God, still remains. For humanity to enter into God’s Realm, it must return to this “original creation.”
But they can’t do it alone. It must come from a fresh work of new creation — a “baptism into new life.” It takes the “invisible moving the visible” for this to happen. And that invisible movement comes from the Spirit of God. For humanity to return to God, Christ must be “lifted up” on the cross (i.e., die to rescue all). The Holy Spirit must “hover over the waters” of the human soul, moving it to God the Father.
This manifold movement of humanity (and all creation) back to the beginning and on into New Creation can only come by the revelation and action of God in Holy Trinity.
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In the Love of the Three in One,
Br. Jack+, LC
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1. Scripture quotations marked (MSG) taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
4. See here and here for more a detailed explanation between the way the East and West view “original sin.”
5. Newell, J. P., (1997). Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality, pg. 14.
6. — (1999). The Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality, pg. XVII. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.
7. — (1997), pp. 36-37. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.
8. For those who may be interested, I wrote a series on titled, The Goodness of Humanity, where I explore this idea more fully.
9. See here. For a good study on the Holy Trinity, I recommend this series from the Orthodox Church in America.
11. According to the Hebrew scriptures, after the sacrifice was accepted on Yom Kippur , the high priest would lay hands on the scapegoat transferring all the sin of Israel to it before it was released into the wilderness (see Leviticus 16). In Christian theology, Jesus was both the sacrifice (Hebrews 10) and the scapegoat (2 Corinthians 5.21).
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