THE INCARNATION ACCORDING TO JOHN
Text: John 3:1-10

This season I have focused on the four portraits of Jesus by the four Gospel writers, how each saw the mystery of the Incarnation.

John’s Gospel has been called “the spiritual Gospel” or “the mystical Gospel.” Its symbol is the eagle. This Gospel soars. Sometimes it flies near an almost blinding light.

Some of John seems the model of simplicity; other parts seem terribly complex. In its waters “a child can wade and an elephant can swim.” It is given out at Billy Graham crusades to new Christians. Yet when Origen, the most brilliant theologian of the third century, began his commentary on John, he wrote 32 books of notes on the first 13 chapters of John alone. Some of its verses are among the most memorized of all verses; for example John 3:16. Yet theologians and literary scholars are still confounded by its depths.

The sayings of Jesus in the Gospels are of three kinds:
1) accurate history memory of Jesus’ actual words passed along in oral transmission, then translated into Greek;
2) a capturing of the ideas of Jesus’ words in paraphrased form;
3) words the early church heard the Living Christ speaking to them through the Spirit, which adapted and extended the meaning of Jesus’ words to the church living 40-70 years after his death and resurrection.

John’s Gospel has more of category 3 than 2, and more of 2 than 1. It is what Jesus himself in John said would happen:

I still have many things to say to you,
but you cannot bear them now. When
the Spirit of truth comes, he will
guide you into all the truth.
John 16:12

This is pretty astonishing. The Spirit will teach us what Jesus could not, did not. The Spirit is still alive, still guiding and teaching. If that makes you nervous, it has made the church nervous for two thousand years. We conservative and liberal alike want a Jesus we can proof text and pin down. Jesus says: Listen to the Spirit.

John’s Gospel is strikingly different from the other three: Matthew, Mark and Luke. These we call the “synoptic Gospels”; they see with “one eye.” John sees with another.

John’s Gospel is different in chronology; there is, for example, an early Judean ministry, and the cleansing of Temple occurs early. In John we have the astounding I AM sayings:

I AM the light of the world.
I AM the door.
I AM the way, the truth and the life.
I AM the good shepherd.
I AM the bread of life.
I AM the vine.
I AM the resurrection and the life.

In John, instead of Jesus’ short sayings and parables we have long, highly symbolic discourses.
If what we experience in Jesus is both “genuine humanity” and “genuine divine presence,” John’s Gospel emphasizes the divine presence. Jesus is human, allright, in John: He weeps, gets thirsty, gets angry and tired. But the author of John stands stunned by the divine light he saw in Jesus.
Who wrote John we cannot know. But the author says that his main authenticating eyewitness source was the figure described as, ...the disciple whom Jesus loved... who had lain close to his
breast at the supper. John 21:20, 24

Who was this disciple? The question tantalizes us, but neither Dan Brown nor Leonardo DaVinci knows.

John’s Gospel appears to have been written in the last decade of the first century, the last of the four Gospels to be written. And it appears to have been written in stages. One of those stages reveals an anguished and bitter conflict between the church and the synagogue, an intrafamily quarrel which resulted in Christian Jews being cast out of the synagogues. Some of the language of John reflects this devastating conflict, and some of it has been tragically used to fuel anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism. Scriptures are a divine/human creation. It does us no good to ignore the humanity of the Bible; to ignore it can lead to inhumane uses of the Bible.

Now that’s an overlong but necessary introduction to this remarkable and complex Gospel. Now let’s move to the one-minute outline of the Gospel.

II

The Gospel begins with a prologue, an elegantly written hymn or theological poem. To appreciate it best, we should put it to music, sing it, chant it - - much like we have done today in the fourth-century hymn based on John’s prologue: Of the Father’s Love Begotten.

The prologue is John’s answer to the question: When did the story of Jesus begin? His answer? All the way back at the dawn of creation. Mark began Jesus’ story at his baptism. Matthew traced Jesus’ family tree to Abraham. Luke’s genealogy began with Adam. John goes to creation itself.

In the beginning was the word [logos in the Greek],
and the word was with God
and the word was God.
John 1:1

In one poetic stroke John unites Hebrew thought and Greek philosophy: The Hebrew belief in the creative word of God that brought the world into being; the Greek belief in the logos as the ordering principle of the universe. Add the Hebrew personification of “wisdom” as the daughter of God. Now, the word of God that made the world; the logos, the ordering principle of the universe; wisdom, the daughter of God, has become flesh and dwelt among us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh.

Could there be a more astonishing notion? The poem ends:

No one has ever seen God.
The son, the one close to the Father’s breast,
he has made him known.
John 1:18

III

With the prologue finished, John’s Gospel is divided into two parts: The Book of Signs and the Book of Glory.

In John, miracles are called “signs,” which I like because that is what miracles do: Point beyond themselves to God.

A miracle is not an interruption of reality. It is a revealing of reality at its deepest and best - - life as God would want it all the time.

In John the first miracle is unique to John’s Gospel: Turning the water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana. What a way to begin a career! I love this miracle for what it says about God and about Jesus and about the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is joy, like the joy of a wedding feast. If there’s no element of joy in your kingdom of God, it is not the kingdom of God, only something you are trying to make.

Dostoevsky caught the spirit in The Brothers Karamazov : “Ah, that sweet miracle!... He worked his first miracle to help men’s gladness.... He who loves men, loves their joy.”1

Part One of John, The Book of Signs, has seven great signs or miracles. It also has a set of extraordinary theological conversations: With Nicodemus, with the Samaritan woman by the well, with the blind man at the pool, with Mary and Martha when brother Lazarus dies.

IV

I want to focus for the last part of the sermon on the conversation with Nicodemus. We miss the meaning of this conversation if we do not recognize that Nicodemus stands for the best and brightest of religious traditions, then and now. He’s the religious professional who’s spent his life trying to follow the way of God. He’s the seminary professor with his books of theology; the youth minister teaching the discipleship class; he’s the long-time deacon and church leader.

Nicodemus comes with a theological system in his mind; Jesus comes with a mystery to proclaim, the mystery of new birth. “You must be born anew, again, from above.”

We sometimes shy away from this passage with its talk about being “born again,” or born anew, or born from above - - the Greek can mean all of these things. It is intentionally ambiguous, mysterious. We shy away because some self-proclaimed “born again” Christians have made it a badge of spiritual pride, something which makes them real Christians and others quasi-Christians or pseudo-Christians. Christians do the same thing with other adjectives: Pentecostal Christian, baptised-in-the-Holy-Spirit Christian, evangelical Christian, orthodox Christian. All the adjectives are used to invalidate others. What’s wrong with just plain “Christian”?

Let’s ponder for a few minutes the mystery of new birth Jesus is talking about with Nicodemus.
Nicodemus says to Jesus: “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

Jesus goes straight to the heart of the matter:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless
one is born anew, again, from
above, he or she cannot see the
kingdom of God.

Nicodemus trips over the ambiguity: “How can a person be born when old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?”

Jesus answers in the language of mystery:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one
is born of water and the
Spirit, he cannot enter the
kingdom of God.... Do not
marvel that I have said to you,
“You must be born anew.” The
wind blows where it will and
you can hear the sound of it,
but you do not know where
it comes from or where it goes.
So it is with anyone born of
the Spirit.

This new birth is not like a syllogism, not like a theorem; it is like the wind! Not a theological system or creed, political ideology. It is like flight.

How variously, how wondrously we are born into the kingdom of God: some so dramatically that life completely changes in one day; others so slowly, so imperceptibly they cannot say when the moment was they were not a Christian and now are. Some enter the kingdom by life-reversing conversion; others by growth, day by day, year by year, season of life by season of life.

The wind blows as it wills. Horace Bushnell formerly said in the nineteenth century, that if the church does its job right in “Christian nurture,” ...That the child is to grow up a Christian and never know himself as being otherwise.

That is true for some of you. But that’s not how it always is, even if Christian parents and churches do their best.

Jesus says everyone must undergo a spiritual transformation as they discover themselves not just a material being made up of flesh and blood, atoms and molecules, but a child of God, a spiritual being with a spiritual destiny. It is about a conscious growing life with God.

There is no one way this happens. But it must happen, if we are to be who God made us to be.
Baptism, which is what our eighth graders are considering this year, is about affirming who you are as a child of God and determining to follow Jesus’ path of spirituality in the world. It is reflecting on the tradition of faith handed down to you by your parents and church and claiming faith for yourself. Standing on your own two feet. Then deciding to follow Jesus’ feet.

People sometimes use the phrase “born again” as if it’s a one-time, once-and-for-all thing: Are you “born again”? When did it happen?

I think I would say for myself: I can’t remember when it first happened. I remember my baptism and how important it was to say clearly and publicly, “I’m a follower of Jesus.” But I think this being born anew is still happening to me, in some way almost every day.

It’s a daily dying to what is false and wrong, and a daily rising to what is good and beautiful and true. I like how Marcus Borg puts it:

...spirituality is about the process
of being born again (and again and
again).2

Being “born again,” he says, is about the “personal transformation at the center of the Christian life.”3 It’s also about the transformation of the world, what Paul called the “new creation” and what Jesus called the “kingdom of God.” But it starts here at the level of the person, and with being born again and again and again.

A number of years back, Life magazine had photographs of two people’s blood vessels highly magnified. One was of a new-born baby; the other was of a man in his 50's. The baby’s blood vessels looked like clean clear glass tubes. The man’s looked like a corroded steel pipe, all gunky and clogged. Too many ham biscuits and cigarettes.

The photographs point to the attraction of new birth. Being able to start all over again! Clean, fresh, new.

But new birth has its fears attached to it: What will I have to give up, to change? I’ve got a lot invested in my way of thinking and living, believing. Who wants to start all over?

Jesus says, “Do not be afraid. Let the Spirit take care of that. It’s all the Spirit’s work anyway.”
All God needs is the courage of your consent, and the grace of letting go.

Then let’s see all you and God can do.

1 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. C. Garnett (New York: Heritage, 1949), p.277.
2 Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p.120.
3 Ibid., p.107.