A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent
Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Today, we catch Jesus mid-sentence. He’s responding to a Pharisee, “a leader of the Jews,” who has sought him out, deep in the night, for questioning. We’re accustomed to regarding Pharisees as supervillains, of course. But John singles out this particular Pharisee, Nicodemus, requiring us to see his face and to hear his voice. And as we listen to his exchange with Jesus, an exchange which is at times painfully awkward, it becomes harder and harder to deny that his disbelief and misunderstanding makes more sense to us than Jesus’ dark wisdom does. Nicodemus seems earnest and goodhearted, if also out of his depth; square, but not in the least sanctimonious or hypocritical. Prejudices die hard, however. So, when we’re told he that he came to “by night” (Jn 3:2), but not why, we’re quick to conclude the worst. Augustine says Nicodemus “wished to be enlightened and feared to be known.” Calvin suggests, rather harshly, that “his timidity was excessive; for his eyes were dazzled, as it were, by the splendor of his own greatness and reputation.” But we need not assume Nicodemus was fainthearted or self-important. Perhaps he came at night in order to protect Jesus? Or perhaps he came at night on the spur of the moment, suddenly, because he was exhausted with holding in his admiration for Jesus? Or perhaps it was not so much admiration as dread that drove him to Jesus? Regardless, he came. He made his confession. He asked his questions. He listened to Jesus’ response. And in this way, more or less in spite of himself, Nicodemus, the Pharisee of Pharisees, models for us the way of faith—a way that is always stranger than we would’ve wanted or could’ve imagined.

Nicodemus first comes to Jesus with a confession: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God” (Jn 3:2). He moves toward God with what he knows. He soon discovers, however—almost immediately, in fact—that there is much he does not know, and that he understands little, if anything, about what he does know. Yes, Jesus is a teacher; and, yes, he is from God. Nicodemus’ words are true, technically. But they are true in ways Nicodemus cannot grasp and would not want even to touch or be touched by, at least not at first. This is why Jesus answers his questions as he does, forcing a necessary confusion. As with him, so with us: “discipleship” names a process of continual unlearning. Thus, Nicodemus’ perplexity serves as a warning to us, reminding us that no matter who we are or what we’ve accomplished, the truth in its fullness is too much for us. Grace cannot save us without first losing us, which means grace always makes things awkward.

Lent is a good time to remind ourselves that Jesus was anything but a simple teacher. In the Gospels, his teachings are met always either with incredulity and confusion or fury and fear. His hearers are left astonished or incensed. In fact, in John’s Gospel, everyone misunderstands everything Jesus says and does. Nicodemus’ astonishment, then, is anything but unusual.

In the opening of Luke’s Gospel, the angel Gabriel appears out of the blue to the priest Zechariah, declaring a longed-for word of promise: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth” (Lk 1:13-14). Zechariah responds with a faithless, and weirdly philosophical, question: “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years?” Gabriel’s judgment is quick: “Because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur” (Lk 1:20). Afterward, Gabriel appears to Mary, bearing and delivering another promise: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus” (Lk. 1:30-31). She responds with a faithful question: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” (Lk. 1:24). As Paul Griffiths has said, Zechariah’s question is skeptical and individualistic—“How can I know this is true?”—while Mary’s question is trusting and personal: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Griffiths finds in these two questions a rubric that lays out for us the essential difference between faithless and faithful questions.

In John’s Gospel, “the Jews’” question, “You think you can raise up this temple in three days?” (Jn 2:20), belongs with Zechariah’s. But Nicodemus asks two questions; the first one, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (Jn 3:4), seems sheerly incredulous—not dismissive, necessarily, but certainly skeptical, as Zechariah’s was. His second question, however, is the same as Mary’s: “How can these things be? (Jn 3:9). Perhaps John means for us see that Nicodemus’s doubts are shifting, opening him up, ever so slightly, to the truth? Certainly, not all questions are faithless. And sometimes, in fact, the only faithful response to truth is confusion. Lent is a season of transfiguration in part because it makes room for us to be confused, allowing us not only to admit our ignorance, but also to appreciate it as a movement toward understanding, or at least toward the kind of misunderstanding that God can use to our good.

It’s hard to talk about doubt without slipping into cliché. Some of us, God knows why, talk glibly about it—as if doubt were sexy. Others of us, even less sensibly, talk as if doubt were foreign to the truly Christian life. If we’re honest, however, we’ll have to admit that much of what passes for doubt in our circles is nothing but honest hesitation, the inevitable upshot of generations of insultingly bad teaching, which trades only in the flattest simplicities and cheapest certainties, eschewing pain at all costs, leaving us to feel that our salvation depends not on the mystery of faith, sustained by God’s devotion to us, but on our own grasp of our own beliefs or on the intensity of our desire for religious experiences. Slowly but surely, we’ve become less and less patient with the truth, more and more afraid of whatever we do not already understand, and all too easily angered by anything that demands serious attention or care. Consequently, we can now hardly deal with the challenge of honest questions, much less the anguish and turmoil that come in authentic “dark night” experiences of doubt and crises of faith. Nicodemus, then, seems like a fool, not a saint. And we laugh at his questions without bothering to listen to them.

In his Night of the Confessor, Tomáš Halík argues that “simple faith” cannot endure the harshness of reality for long. Sooner or later, we’re thrown into crisis because the “the multivalence of life” and “the profound ambivalence of reality” eventually, unavoidably shatters the insipid, fatuous systems of control we’ve made for ourselves and others in the name of God, including humanist or anti-humanist fundamentalisms and fanaticisms, which are made and kept by violence, which debases us and defaces creation.

So, we have to be saved from “simple faith.” But not so that we might have “great faith.” As Halík knows, that, too, always proves false. We need, instead, “the faith of God,” which is what is left of our faith after it has been purged by the Spirit:  

The faith that undergoes the fire of the cross without retreating probably loses much of what it tended to be identified with or what it was itself accustomed to, even though it was merely superficial. Much will be scorched away. However, its new maturity will be chiefly evident from the fact that it will no longer appear “in armor”: instead it will be a bit like that “naked faith” that the mystics speak of. It will not be aggressive or arrogant, let alone impatient in its relationship with others. Yes, compared to “great” and “firm” faith it may appear small and insignificant—it will be like nothing, like a mustard seed.

So, Halík concludes, we should pray continually to be delivered from childish simplicities and illusions of greatness into the childlike seriousness and unaffectedness of our all-too-human God. The cry for that purification is at the heart of all Lenten spirituality.

Today’s Gospel, as I said, catches Jesus mid-sentence. The first thing we hear him say is this: “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” (Jn 3:14-15). Gregory Nazianzen, in one of his Easter sermons, argues that the serpent was a type not of Christ but of death, which Christ destroyed. “That brazen was hung up as a remedy for the biting serpents, not as a type of him who suffered for us, but as a contrast; and it saved those who looked upon it, not because they believed it to live, but because it was killed, and killed with it the powers that were subject to it, being destroyed as it deserved.” Augustine, in a homily on the passage, tracks a similar line:

What are the biting serpents? Sins, from the mortality of the flesh. What is the serpent lifted up? The Lord's death on the cross. For as death came by the serpent, it was figured by the image of a serpent. The serpent’s bite was deadly, the Lord’s death is life-giving. A serpent is gazed on that the serpent may have no power. What is this? A death is gazed on, that death may have no power. But whose death? The death of life: if it may be said, the death of life; ay, for it may be said, but said wonderfully. But should it not be spoken, seeing it was a thing to be done? Shall I hesitate to utter that which the Lord has deigned to do for me? Is not Christ the life? And yet Christ hung on the cross. Is not Christ life? And yet Christ was dead. But in Christ’s death, death died. Life dead slew death; the fullness of life swallowed up death; death was absorbed in the body of Christ.

But Jesus is not only like the brazen serpent, lifted up in death so that death might be brought low. He is also like the biting serpents, striking us so we come alive, wounding us for healing. Not, of course, that he does evil. Jesus never harms us in any way. But like a good physician, parent, or friend, he does trouble us toward the change we need to make. He is, after all, the Word of the God who Scripture says curses and blesses, hurts and heals, kills and makes alive (Deut. 32:39). And not for no reason the saints, including Augustine and Theresa, speak of the wounding arrows of love. So, we should not be surprised that there is a bite in Jesus’ question to Nicodemus: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” (Jn 3:10). And a bite in his answer to Nicodemus’ questions: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (Jn 3:6). Nicodemus, remember, came to Jesus with a confession: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God” (Jn 3:2). He leaves with nothing but the awareness that he knows nothing.

That awareness, however, was everything he needed for the time being. God wounds, to be sure. But God’s wounds heal. Moltmann was right to say the crucified God is dangerous. But only to what endangers us. He is the destroyer of all that destroys, the death of death, the negation of all that keeps us from ourselves and one another. This is why Fr. de Caussade could say to a postulant who wrote to him about the darkness of her doubts: “your state, although, in truth, very crucifying, is nevertheless, and indeed on that account, very safe, very purifying and very sanctifying. You need fear no danger, as long as you hold by Fénélon’s great rule: despair entirely of yourself, and put not an atom of confidence in anything but God alone, who, from the very stones can raise up children to Abraham.” Our doubts, when all is said and done, turn out to be nothing—the nothing from which God creates our good.

The Gospel does not tell us how Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus ends, or what Nicodemus made of it. The Pharisee is simply dropped from the story. He does, however, appear later in the Gospel; he raises another question, this time in Jesus’ defense: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” (Jn 7:51). Other Pharisees rebuke him for his trouble: “Surely you’re not also from Galilee, are you? (Jn 7:52). Finally, he appears at Jesus’ tomb (Jn 19:38-40):

After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body. Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews.

Tradition holds that Nicodemus later became a believer, expelled from the Sanhedrin and exiled from Jerusalem. But he obviously did not come to believe the night of his encounter. And later, when he comes to anoint the dead body of Jesus, he is not named a believer—not even a secret one (as Joseph of Arimathea is). Still, the Evangelist wants us to see Nicodemus, and to remember how he came to be here, kneeling in tears beside this dead body. In this way, John’s Gospel maps for us the way into the truth that is the life of God, which God means for us. Confession leads to questions; questions lead to doubt, and doubt, at last, long last, leads to silence—the silence made possible by the death of God. And in that silence, we find that we can see, as only a “little” faith can see, the truth our confession had kept first for us and then from us.

In today’s epistle, we hear that we are saved by grace through faith, not by anything we’ve done but as the sheer gift of God. “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:9-10). If we are what he makes us, who was Nicodemus? What works had been made for him to do? A teacher not only from Israel, but of Israel. Jesus’ biting question, “Are you a teacher of Israel?,” proves to be the very word that creates Nicodemus’ calling, and empowers him to fulfill it. Struggling with Jesus at night, as Jacob, his father, had done, Nicodemus teaches us how to be an Israel: one who has striven with God and Man, and prevailed, not in strength but in weakness; not through knowledge, but through learned ignorance; not by certainty, but by doubt.