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” [John 3:1–2].
The Gospel reading for the Second Sunday in Lent (John 3:1–17) may be one of the most familiar passages in all of Scripture — and therein lies the problem. We know this text. We know it so well that John 3:16 has become perhaps the most quoted verse in the Bible, reduced to bumper stickers and signs held up at sporting events: “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.”
We come to this passage confident in our understanding. In that respect, we are not so different from Nicodemus.
Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night — a detail John surely intends us to notice. He is “a leader of the Jews,” a Pharisee, a teacher of Israel. He is a man of learning, religious authority, and theological sophistication. And he comes to Jesus with what sounds like a compliment but is really a claim of recognition: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.”
We know who you are, Jesus. We recognize divine credentials when we see them. Nicodemus positions himself as a peer — one teacher acknowledging another. He approaches Jesus seeking conversation, perhaps clarification, perhaps confirmation of what he already believes he understands.
Jesus’ response is immediate and unsettling: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (3:3).
You think you know? You cannot even see what is happening here. What you need, Nicodemus — what all of us need — is not refinement, not theological enhancement, but transformation so radical that it can only be described as birth.
Nicodemus, predictably, takes Jesus literally. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (3:4). He is still working within his existing categories, still assuming he can understand this on his own terms. Jesus presses further: “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” (3:5–6).
There is an edge in Jesus’ voice: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” (3:10). You have spent your life studying Scripture, teaching others, leading the community of faith — and yet you cannot grasp what stands before you.
Then the conversation widens. Jesus speaks of heavenly things, of descent and ascent, and finally of love: “For God so loved the world….”
But read against the backdrop of Nicodemus’ nighttime visit, John 3:16 becomes something more demanding than a comforting promise. It is the culmination of Jesus’ confrontation.
In John’s Gospel, “the world” is not merely God’s good creation. It is a sphere characterized by darkness, falsehood, hostility, and death. Nicodemus arrives “by night” because he lives within that sphere — even as a respected teacher. Opposed to this lower story is heaven — the realm of life, light, truth, freedom, and abundance. The two are not merely different; they are at odds.
By all logic, God should condemn such a world.
Yet God loves the world.
This is not sentimentality. It is costly action. God loves what opposes God. God acts for the good of what lives in darkness. God gives the Son — not only in crucifixion, but in descent. The Son enters the world’s night so that those within it may experience life from above.
Here is the tension: God’s love is cosmic. The rebirth Jesus demands is personal.
Jesus does not tell Nicodemus to reform the Sanhedrin or restructure religious institutions. He does not outline a program for repairing the culture. He tells Nicodemus that he must be born from above. He cannot see the kingdom as he is. He must receive what only God can give.
The focus is relentless. Not “How do we fix the world?” but “Are you willing to die and be reborn?”
C.S. Lewis captured the violence of this demand with characteristic clarity:
Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work. I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there; I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked — the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours” [Mere Christianity, emphasis added].
This is what Nicodemus cannot grasp that night. He wants conversation, perhaps refinement. Jesus speaks of death and birth. Not improvement. Replacement. Not trimming branches. The whole tree down.
Those who are born from above do not thereby transform the world into heaven. They remain within the world’s darkness and conflicts. But they participate in another reality. They begin to live with light where others see only night. They become, in the language of the early church, resident aliens — citizens of another realm who nevertheless dwell here.
The world remains the world. But individuals within it may be reborn into something else entirely.
John’s Gospel shows Nicodemus again later — at the cross, standing with Joseph of Arimathea, bringing myrrh and aloes to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. The man who came by night now appears in the daylight at the most dangerous moment. Whether this is the birth from above Jesus demanded, John does not say. Perhaps the journey from night to cross was itself a kind of dying. Perhaps not.
The text does not resolve Nicodemus for us. It leaves us where he began: in the dark, hearing the same words.
You must be born from above.
Not improved. Not educated. Not given better arguments or clearer theological frameworks. Born. Which means first you must die.
We come to this passage thinking we know it. We come to Jesus with our frameworks, our convictions, our sense of what needs fixing — in the church, in society, in the world. And Jesus keeps saying: I want you. Not your analysis. Not your strategy. Not your carefully constructed understanding. You.
The scandal of John 3:16 is not merely that God offers eternal life. It is that God loves the world that lives in darkness and death — and that this cosmic love confronts each of us with a personal demand.
God so loved the world.
The question left for us is whether we will allow ourselves to be loved enough to die and live again.
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