The Most Infamous Scandal
John 3:16
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.”
John 3:1-17
In these tribalistic, chaotic times, I’ve turned to one of the most reliable, tried-and-true things in our culture: old James Bond movies. Is it because they’re good, deep films? No. Are they Christian? Also no. But do my wife and I bond over them? Again, no, she doesn’t watch. But don’t tell me you don’t miss the comforts of suave, witty spies sneaking around for the stability of the Western hemisphere in the clean “us” and “them” of the Cold War.
Oddly enough, the most famous passage in the Bible, John 3:16, comes during what is almost like an ancient spy movie scene, with the neither suave nor witty Nicodemus, a Pharisee, sneaking in at the cover of night. What was he doing? Was he trying to get top secret intel on the popular rebel threat to the social order? Was he trying to persuade Jesus that he was wrong about something? Was he trying to better understand? Did Nicodemus even know why he wanted to see Jesus?
We don’t really know why he wanted to see Jesus, but we know Nicodemus did not want to be seen with Jesus. Nicodemus was one of the Pharisees, the so-called “separate ones.” He’s religious, he’s diligent, he’s committed, he’s faithful, he attends synagogue every week, he properly washes before meals, he lives within the limits God has provided. He doesn’t like to intermingle with the other tribes of his neighbors, and he certainly wouldn’t want to try to give an “innocent” explanation to his Pharisee colleagues why he sought counsel with Jesus. But the question for us “good,” God-fearing Christians, is why do we act like the Pharisees are so different from us?
For what parts of the gospel do we have to sneak to talk to Jesus about? If you want to figure out this answer, perhaps we can look at our tribes and look at what we can’t admit to our tribe.
The gospel is scandalous in at least two directions. But the first scandal to our ears is one that was not scandalous to the ancients: God judges everyone. Naturally, we don’t want to believe God judges my tribe, my politics, my self-righteousness. The scandal of God’s judgment is offensive when we are always the good guys in our personal spy movie. It also may be offensive to us who only see God as one-sided in his love, that his love is not complex in holding and dealing with evil, that he is just a chill hippie. But Jesus will say just a few verses after our reading today, “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19)
If this scandalizes us, this was not a scandal to the ancients. The idea of humans being deeply sinful and tribes deserving of mass deathly punishment in contrast to the pure goodness of God was not a controversial part of the Bible. Today, we often find ourselves disturbed by Old Testament texts, often because of our Christianity. More widely in society, our default post-Enlightenment humanism says, “Man, God could have figured out a better way to deal with bad people.”
In the Numbers 21 story that Jesus alludes to with Moses and the bronze serpent, Moses only lifts up the serpent after snakes had been the vehicle of God’s judgment, killing many of his repeatedly rebellious people. Jesus isn’t apologizing for this. After all, he is the One who judges.
Ancient readers did not have to be convinced that God really judged people; no, they had to be convinced that God really saved people. The New Testament authors did not have to justify God’s wrath. Instead, they had to justify and reconcile God’s grace.
This second scandal of the gospel for the ancients is also still the scandal for us: God judges everyone, but God saves everyone. This was the scandal for which Nicodemus had to slink in darkness on padded footsteps. God saves everyone, including our outgroup, “those” people, our enemies, whoever you can’t stand. This offends us when we know that “they” are so clearly deserving of judgment—and when we think that, we aren’t even totally wrong about it.
Into the darkness, then, this piercing light beams into the heart: “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.” God didn’t so love “us” over them, he loved the world, that whoever believes in him is given grace.
This was the scandal that the gospel writers and the epistle authors had to spill their expensive ink on expensive papyrus to share, spread, and explain. We read John 3:16 today like a bumper sticker, but it really functions as an argument in John, an emphasis that God really does love you. Jesus in John 3:16 blasts open our tribalism by saying we all stand condemned, but we all are given a lifeline to light. As this scandal of grace spread in the hearts of Christians, some then started to wonder whether God’s wrath in the Old Testament was necessary, a troubling mystery that is still hard to work out.1
But as we wrestle with why God’s judgment is so violent in the Old Testament, pay closer attention to what Jesus is saying when he says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” (John 3:14) The comparison Jesus is making is that what was once the means by which God judged his people became the means by which he saved them; the bronze serpent lifted up by Moses became a site of pilgrimage and healing.2 Moses would repeatedly pray to God for forgiveness of his people, even to those who wanted Moses killed.
So here, Jesus is saying that he, the Son of Man, the One who judges the world (a world that wants him killed), who is, in fact, the only one capable of judging the world, is not the tribalistic warlord we often prefer. What does the Judge do? He chooses to sacrifice himself. The Judge becomes the vehicle of our salvation. He will be lifted up and subject himself to undeserved judgment to blow open the darkness that we lust for. And this was who he really was all along; however we may judge the actions of “Old Testament God,” his name and his place was always primarily in mercy. After all, the utmost dwelling place of God in the Ark of the Covenant was called “the mercy seat.” He was faithful and loyal again and again when his people were faithless, his judgment slow, his steadfast love enduring, offering a chance for his people over and over to be in a relationship with him.
So what does Jesus tell Nicodemus he must do? “You must be born from above.” Receive the Spirit, Nicodemus, so that the presence of God dwells not in the mercy seat of the wooden Ark, but let God’s mercy seat live in your heart and carry it to all you meet. Live as if you know this world is not all that is, and thank God, for it so often loves darkness, and you are going to a place of light. Receive the Spirit, Nicodemus, so you learn and practice how to sacrifice, love your enemies, and forgive. Now let those with ears hear: this is something that this preacher is constantly trying and failing to do well. I still sneak to Jesus at night, not being able to admit to friends all I question about their tribes. I am still way too sneaky, not like James Bond, but like Nicodemus. I know God judges me for this and many other things. But in him, I still choose to believe.
Why is belief the path that Jesus says in John 3:16? The New Testament tries in different ways to explain why it is faith and belief that saves, and not law.3 Paul passionately argues and explains it. But it is still a mystery to me; I must also choose to believe in “belief.”
Perhaps it is because there is a gap between God and us that is utterly immaterial. If it were just a physical difference between us and God, we could bridge it with physics. If it was just an intelligence gap, we could bridge it with AI (and we’re trying!). If the difference between me and God was morality, then I could be God by just being a moral person. But the difference between us and God is not the difference between us and the highest mountains the Psalmist sings of in Psalm 121. No, the gap between us and God is a gap that is ultimately a gap of the true, pure presence of Spirit. Perhaps that is why it takes faith to be an utterly immaterial and often irrational bridge to the Spirit, a bridge reaching out to us in the hands of Jesus.4
Even if we cannot bring ourselves to fully believe today, whether we’re in church or not, there is always hope for us. There was hope for that hapless religious guy Nicodemus, who, like us, may be “so close yet so far” from Jesus when he first encounters him. But by the end of John’s gospel, we see Nicodemus after the crucifixion tending to Christ’s body. He stopped sneaking around. Maybe it was only because it was safe now that Jesus was dead, when the threat to the social order was removed. But nevertheless, there he was, following him.
The challenge and invitation in John’s gospel is asking, which side of Nicodemus are we? Are we sneaking confused in the dark, or are we ready to live life from above while we’re still here below? Are we going to take the risks of love that we are called to take? Will we keep sneaking to avoid scandal by our tribe, or will we try to love the world in the way that God so loved all of us—giving his life for the sake of another?
We can do this if we believe that we don’t only live once. In Christ, as one Bond movie is so named, “you only live twice”: once in our flesh, but then once again in the Spirit. That one is the one for good. Everybody needs it. And everyone is offered it. May we believe in this wonderful, most infamous scandal. Amen.
Paul does offer an explanation in 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
(Until it eventually became an idol, a sermon for another day)
The lectionary offers up Romans 4:1-5, 13-17 to this point today
H/t to my friend and new podcast co-host Nathan Dufour Oglesby for inspiring this