Saving the World—Lectionary Reflection for Trinity Sunday (Year B) (John 3)

Sunset over the Great Salt Lake

 John 3:1-17 New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

3 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ² 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.” ³ Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” ⁴ 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?” ⁵ Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶ What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷ Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’  ⁸ 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.” ⁹ Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” ¹⁰ Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

¹¹ “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. ¹² If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? ¹³ No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. ¹⁴ And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵ that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

¹⁶ “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.

¹⁷ “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.

**********

                The world is a mess right now. In truth, it’s always been a mess. According to the biblical story, it could have begun in the Garden with the first couple eating the forbidden fruit. Or maybe it was Cain murdering his brother. In any case, messing up isn’t a recent thing. The good news is that God hasn’t given up on us. The biblical story reminds us that God’s steadfast love endures forever. It is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It’s revealed in the lives of Jesus’ faithful followers (though even the best of us fall short). Now that we’ve celebrated Good Friday and Easter with its message that God’s redeeming love is revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus, followed several weeks later by Pentecost Sunday with its promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit such that the church is born. Now we get to ponder the mystery of God’s nature on Trinity Sunday.

                 Most Christians have assumed that God is Trinity, such that there is one God, but three persons who are of one substance—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The gendering of the Trinity is a challenge, with several options but no clear solution. Defining what this means has been a challenge from the beginning. Thus, there have been numerous attempts at definition. The official definition is the one enshrined in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 CE. Being that I am an ordained minister in a noncreedal church, my tradition rarely gives much attention to the creed or most trinitarian definitions of God. However, there are numerous Trinitarians in my denomination, me included, who make that affirmation [See my book The Triune Nature of God: Conversations Regarding the Trinity by a Disciples of Christ Pastor/Theologian for my take].

                The New Testament does not offer us an explicit Trinitarian theology, but there are intriguing passages that informed the later development of a fuller Trinitarian theology. Our reading from John 3 begins with Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin. Thus, he was a learned man and a leader among his people. According to John, Nicodemus came to Jesus at night so no one would see him. He approaches Jesus and affirms Jesus’ standing as a teacher of the people who is known to do great signs and therefore is aligned with the Creator. After Nicodemus offers his affirmation of Jesus’ identity, Jesus responds by telling him that if he wanted to see the kingdom of God he would need to be born from above (born again). Nicodemus was a learned man, but he had no clue about what Jesus meant by this. Thinking very literally, he asked Jesus how someone could be reborn. How, he asked, might someone reenter their mother’s womb and then be born a second time? This is a reminder that we need to be careful in taking everything in Scripture “literally.” Now, Jesus wasn’t thinking in physical terms, but spiritual ones. Jesus does have in mind a rebirth, but not a physical one.

                Since we read this in the wake of Pentecost Sunday, it is worth pondering what it means to be born of the Spirit. Later in his Gospel, as he prepares his disciples, for his departure, he promises to send the Spirit of Truth, who is the Advocate/Companion (John 15, 16). It is this Spirit who will accompany the people of God, revealing to them the truths of God, so they can bear witness to God’s glory. Here Jesus tells Nicodemus that the Spirit blows like the wind, and thus to be born from above is to enter into a new dimension of life where the future is open, and one must depend on the Spirit to be the guide for this journey. While Nicodemus remains stuck on earthly things, Jesus wants to point him toward spiritual things. He wants Nicodemus to expand his spiritual imagination so he can embrace a more cosmic vision of reality.

                Jesus tells Nicodemus that if he can’t handle earthly things, natural things, then how is he going to handle spiritual things such as being born from above? Yes, Jesus uses an earthly event (birth) to describe something spiritual (rebirth), such that one participates in the life of God.

                This brings us to perhaps the best-known passage of Scripture—John 3:16. It’s so well-known that we can see a sign at a football game with John 3:16 imprinted on it and have a sense of what it means. The word we hear in verse 16 of John 3 is that God loves the world (kosmos). I think we need to stop here for a moment to listen to that word. God loves the kosmos, that which God created God loves and thus desires what is best for it. God doesn’t want to destroy it, as some apocalyptic scenarios suggest. God wants to redeem and reclaim it. Therefore, God sent the Son so that everyone who believed or put their trust in the Son would experience eternal life. That is, they will be born from above and experience the realm of God. Here we have the beginnings of a Trinitarian formula, in that we see that God is the one who sends, while the Son is the one who brings about the salvation of the kosmos. We’ve already seen the Spirit present in bringing about Nicodemus being born from above.

                Not only does God love the Kosmos and therefore sends the Son, so that those who entrust their lives to the Son will receive eternal life (redemption), but we’re told that God didn’t send the Son into the world to condemn it. Rather, the point of all of this is to save the world. Now, John does suggest here that to reject the Son leads to one being condemned, but that’s not the goal here. The challenge here is that the world is experiencing darkness, and if we open our eyes, we can see that darkness all around us. At the moment I write this there is the ongoing war in Ukraine, with Russia making gains once again. The conflict in Gaza is still heartbreaking as thousands of innocents die, and the larger question of finding a peaceful end to a conflict that has been going on for three-quarters of a century. Then there are conflicts going on in places we forget. We can’t forget the increasingly polarized situation in the United States and elsewhere, such that we’re not sure democracy will survive another election.

                It is into the darkness of this world that God desires to shine a light that will reveal the source of evil and offer a path out of that darkness if only we will follow it. It is in this context that we hear this word about God being Trinity. Kathryn Tanner connects the saving work of God as Trinity in the revelation that:

The very life of God itself, consequently, must be directly mixed up with suffering, conflict, death, and disease in the saving action of Christ. The unusual claim, for the time, is that here the highest God has been made immediately accessible to us in the dire straits we find ourselves in. No buffer of intermediary semi-divine or more-than-human principles is necessary for God to be in contact with our suffering and sin. Jesus therefore mediates divinity and humanity because he unites both and not because he is something in between. Divinity can be in direct contact with us without needing to fear its own contamination or loss of honor.  [Christ the Key, p. 157].

                With this reflection on the Trinitarian life of God, we can understand salvation in terms of being born of the Spirit, which is accomplished in and through the Son, who is sent into the world because God loves the world and wants to save it, then we see how God as Trinity is the agent of the salvation of the Kosmos. Therefore, to be born from above in the Spirit results from God lovingly determining to share eternity with us.

                Although it appears here that some might experience condemnation (of their own choice not God’s), a perspective that remains problematic for many (including me), so could it be that due to God’s love of the Kosmos that God will find a way to redeem all of creation?  That needn’t remove the place of judgment, for Scripture speaks of facing judgment. However, might that experience of judgment lead to our salvation, even if we face the refining fire that removes the dross (evil) from our lives so we can fully enjoy the presence of the Holy God? As Jürgen Moltmann writes: “As the coming judge of the victims and perpetrators of sin, the risen Christ will bear the suffering of the one and the burden of the other, so as to bring both out of the rule of darkness into the light of God’s Kingdom” [Sun of Righteousness, Arise!, p. 137].

                It is this act of love on the part of the God who sent the Son, that we hear the invitation given to Nicodemus (and to us) so that we might be born of the Spirit (born from above/born again). With this invitation comes the opportunity to begin living now a transformed life. This is a message worthy of Trinity Sunday, wherein we encounter God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Mother of us all.