freedom from the world is the decision, the choice, the selection, the predilection, the preferential option to love.
These things are spoken that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
This week you can choose to grow in faith, and so find a fuller part of your second identity. This week you can choose to grow in love, and so open a fuller part of the world’s imagination.
Faith is personal commitment to an unverifiable truth. It involves a leap.
Faith is an objective uncertainty grasped with subjective certainty. It involves a leap.
Faith is the way to salvation, a real identity and a rich imagination. But it does involve a leap. Now is the time to jump.
Love is faith’s freedom in the world.
Love is faith’s freedom from the world.
Love is faith’s freedom to transform the world
All of us are better when we are loved.
Notes from Raymond Brown’s Lectures on John
Union Theological Seminary
Spring 1978
March 14, 1978: Nicodemus
This brings us to the problem of inadequate Christians, or “crypto-Christians.” These are probably also baptized, confessing Christians whose faith John still does not trust. In the midst of this question of adequate faith, Nicodemus will arrive on the scene. For John, Nicodemus’ faith is not wrong, it is just not adequate. In John’s mind, Jesus is the only one ever to have come from God. The Nicodemus dialogue may be a description of the form of Christianity which John opposes.
Jesus was certainly a teacher, but that is just not enough. These titles are wrong if you stop there. Jesus was more than a teacher. Ignatius always worries about those within Jewish Christianity who think of Jesus as a great teacher, but not as the Word spoken from God’s Silence. But there is hope left for Nicodemus, who is “coming out of the night and into the light.”
How do we enter the Kingdom of Heaven? You must become like a little child? Those who are more dependent are more open. Those who are independent are less open. Utter dependence: you must be begotten by God. Here baptism, as with Paul, is an imitation of Christ. To born again or to be born from above is radical! But our questions were not in the author’s mind. The sacraments are visible things which serve to represent invisible things. Eternal life is God’s own life given to human beings, and you cannot be a “child” without that gift. It is a divine begetting. For Augustine “unless” meant there was no exception. His logical conclusion was therefore that “all must be baptized” and therefore little children unbaptized are in “limbo.” Now, did John ever think of such a problem? Probably not. One principle involves human life from a human parent. God’s life comes from God. But this is not universal. American Protestant individualism therefore reads this individualistically, “God is my personal savior.” But a first century Jewish author would never have thought in any other way than thinking about the “salvation of a whole people.” The real issue is: how do you become a part of a saved people? Answer: by being born from above.
There is a parallel in Luke 18:18. A member of the Sanhedrin asks about eternal life. Matthew 25 is another example. Born Again: this refers to a divine engendering. Male or female? Nicodemus however misunderstands both words. The Greek word anothen: from above or again? Nicodemus thinks “again” but John means “from above” (though early Christians did themselves speak so). One enters by divine action. This is the main point. Why God’s people? Because God has chosen his people. The sense and meaning of grace has changed. The divine begetting creates people of God and children of God.
Here the Gnostic background is possible. True life in John’s sense does go in a Gnostic direction. “By nature divine”—this is Gnostic. But is John saying that? No. Rather, we become children of God through God’s graciousness. Now the immortal soul was later deemed naturally immortal. This is immortality from creation. Not in John. Natural birth is “of the flesh.” This is not pejorative, but in itself it cannot reach to God.
1. Begetting. 2. Breathing upon. Spirit. Breath. Wind. God is breathing again. The ancients would have been likely to take this far more literally than do we. John has no such sense of a giant sacramental system working through the chapters of the Gospel. Baptism is your eternal birth. Water from within is what brings the baptism, making present a particular action of God. You feed things through the Eucharist. How does this fit into John’s conception of Jesus? Jesus is the source of God’s life. The life giver, in and through all the sacraments, is Jesus. In the Nicodemus story, John is talking to both insiders and outsiders.
The play on words, spirit and wind is central. There is different lighting at different points in this scene. “We testify to what we know.” John 3:13: Elijah and Elisha are being attacked (along with Enoch and Moses) here. Or are they? Elijah went up to heaven. What about the horses and chariots? Can anyone go into God’s presence? Some say yes, some say no. Proverbs 30:3 comes to mind. Only Jesus has seen God. Jesus came from God in the first place. (The order of this works against a later Gnostic tradition.) We have to recognize the unpredictability of Johannine symbols. The serpent images may be from the Old Testament or from Targums (Aramaic translations). Hebrew is to Aramaic as Spanish is to Italian.
The transcendence of God is very important for John. Memra: Word. The word of God is present. A bronze serpent was kept in the temple in Jerusalem. Such a symbol leaves itself open to folk lore. John uses that symbol for Jesus on the cross. There is the presence of God in both. The “lifting up of the Son of Man” is a central image for John. There are three forms of “lifting up” passages in John, and another in Mark 8 and 9. Is there not then some relation between these two?
Community and Spirit are both given at the foot of the cross. Jesus brings eternal life.
3:17 Realized eschatology. Three messiahs? As in Trinitarian discussion? Judgment in John is not a matter of sheep and goats. Rather Jesus’ very presence brings judgment. The coming of the Son of Man brings a crisis. People judge themselves.
7 / Two Biographies
John 4
“These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20: 31).
In old Castile, northwest of Madrid, out on the arid, brown central Spanish highland, you may look toward the mountain range once toured by Robert Jordan and his muñequita, before his fictitious but nonetheless atoning, salvific, Christlike death, at the hands of Franco’s soldiers. The mountain range, high and in its own way majestic, looks very much like a woman asleep, so the Segovianos call her or it or the mountain “la mujer muerta.” As I and Robert Jordan and perhaps you also have found, it is a day’s long hard hike up into the Castillian mountains.
The Gospel of John is such a mountain range, high and lifted up. It challenges our endurance. It tests our orienteering. It measures our preparation and execution. There is an exacting and perfecting quality to this Gospel, similar to the exacting and perfecting character of fellowship at this church. With every cut-back trail, at every rest point, atop every lookout, with every majestic view, this spiritual gospel will address you in the midst of two crucial battles, those of dislocation and disappointment, with the good news of grace and freedom, with the ongoing need to choose, and—in choosing—to find the life of belonging and meaning, personal identity and global imagination.
