FINDINGS VI By Harry T. Cook
 
Lent IV: March 15, 2015 

John 3: 1-21        

  

 

  

Harry T. Cook
By Harry T. Cook
3/9/15
 

 

If anyone requires evidence that the fourth gospel is in a class by itself, he or she need only to read ch. 3, vv. 1-19 of John to find that out. Those verses compass what is generally called a "discourse" with Nicodemus, a character mentioned nowhere in the bible save in this gospel, and that but five times -- three within 3:1-19, one each in 7:50 and 19:39. The first of the latter is Nicodemus' cautious defense of Jesus in pleading for at least a fair hearing on the question of whether or not the Galilean was a real prophet or a pretender. The second mentions him assisting Joseph of Arimathea in the removal of Jesus' body.

 

Νικόδημος, a common male given name among Jews and Greeks at the time, means "vanquisher of the people." John calls him "the" teacher or "that" teacher, meaning that Nicodemus was, as we might say, a full professor with tenure and probably dean of the faculty.

 

John says Nicodemus came to Jesus "by night" -- νύξ is the word. It occurs at another crucial place in the Johannine text (13:30) at which it is said that when Judas left the table ήν δε νύξ -- not telling us what time it was but a suggestion of sinister activity. Nicodemus' fellow Pharisees would have considered Nicodemus' seeking out Jesus on the sly a sinister act. One wonders if his name -- vanquisher of the people -- was a Johannine joke. He does not seem to have had a lot of backbone.

 

Nicodemus came with a question that he stated to Jesus in the form of a declarative sentence: "We know you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." Any Jesus might well have asked, "Who's 'we'?" Did John mean to convey the idea that Nicodemus was a one-man deputation, even a leader among the academicians of Pharisaism? As we have observed, later in the passage Jesus refers to Nicodemus as "that teacher of Israel," suggesting perhaps that Nicodemus was considered a principal authority on all things Jewish. That being so, Jesus wants to know, why then does Nicodemus not "understand these things?" What things?

 

Jesus has said that to be embraced in the domain of God one must be born γεννηθη ανωθεν -- born that is, from the beginning, as from the source of all things or "heaven." Because άνώθεν can mean "again," that's how Nicodemus is depicted as hearing it. That constitutes the "things" John's Jesus is made to say that Nicodemus does not understand (γινώσκεις from γινώσκω -- perceive or know deeply). In our idiom, it might be, "Don't you get it, Nicodemus?" Well, no he doesn't.

 

Then comes a scolding about accepting earthly knowledge with the consequent inability to comprehend "heavenly things." A brief allusion to ascension is made with reference to Numbers 21:9 which depicts the nailing of a poisonous serpent to a pole that those who have been bitten by it or others of its ilk might gaze upon the dead serpent and thus be healed. As the serpent is lifted up, Jesus said, so The One Like Us (Son of Man) will be lifted up, and all one will need to do is believe in him and thereby attain eternal life (ξωήν αίώνιον), meaning less a never-ending existence but, rather, one that is of the highest and deepest satisfaction.

 

John's Jesus makes midrash on that difficult passage by giving a later English-speaking world a saying for bumper stickers, banners at Super Bowl games and a memory verse for eager-to-please Sunday school pupils: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him (looks up at the crucified and risen Jesus as at the impaled serpent of Numbers 21) may not perish (άποληται from άπολλυμι, meaning "to lose or be lost utterly, completely alienated, robbed of being, no longer existent) but may have ξωήν αίώνιον."

 

Belief in most civilized cultures is an individual prerogative and not a matter of coercion. But if one follows the arc of John's prose in vv. 18-21, it is pretty clear that in his system one believes the content of v. 16 or stands condemned. The Greek translated "condemned" is from the root κρίνω which means "to separate" based on some kind of judgment. An entity can be separated or an entity can separate itself. One can be separated as the weak and the aged were separated from the able bodied at trackside in Auschwitz and sent immediately to the gas and the oven. Or one can be separated from the ruck of B- students and initiated into Phi Beta Kappa. Several lexicons suggest that κρίνω does not have to be translated as "condemned." It may be as simple as someone saying, "I can't believe such-and-such," and because of that is considered by those who do believe as being separate or even separated from him.

 

The separation lands one in either of two of John's favorite conditions -- that of φώς or σκότος, the classic terms for light and darkness, respectively -- the former revealing the truth, the latter masking evil. The truth, John says, is the revelation of God's love for the world (κόσμος, the natural order or arrangement of things). If people do not believe as prescribed, they abide in the darkness and, in fact, like it there because whatever they do in the darkness (where things are not so orderly or in proper arrangement) would be seen as evil if they did it in the light.

 

If not to believe is to choose darkness, there are many of us who have thus chosen. We pursue the truth about things inductively, one datum at a time until with sufficient data we can say such and such a thing seems to be true, e.g. the sun appears to rise in the east because Earth is rotating on its axis progressively exposing its surface to the sun. It appears to set in the west because Earth is "rolls onward into light," as John Ellerton wrote, "as o'er each continent and island the dawn leads on another day."*

 

The rational human being attains light by seeking it a ray at a time. He or she does not find it shining all effulgent one fine day. Darkness is where one starts - in the womb, and from the instant one is out of the womb until one's eyes close in death, more light reveals more truth but almost always to those who use the light to seek the truth. Darkness abides all the while, and sometimes we are, literally, in the dark. But it is out of the darkness that through our own striving we emerge bit by bit into the light we at last behold what we have for so long sought.

 

* * * * * 

 

Ignorance about the Bible is the general state of things in these times, so I suppose it must be counted a virtue for someone even to misquote it. But it is no virtue to lift any verse of it out of context, which is what so many amateur would-be interpreters have done with John 3:16.

 

Salvation -- whatever that word may mean - does not come by screwing one's face up in concentration and saying, "I believe in Jesus." That does not forestall death when death is upon us, and it certainly guarantees nothing beyond it. It does not succor a dying AIDs victim. It does not put a spoonful of rice into a starving child's mouth. It stays neither the hand of an assassin nor the brutal offense of an army. It may make the believer feel good, but in the same way that a hefty intake of whiskey can make one temporarily forget reality.

 

A rational interpretation of ξωήν αίώνιον must refer to life here and now, and must mean a life that follows the sound advice of Psalm 90:12 about numbering days. Following that counsel entails not an idle checking off of dates from a calendar page, but a focus on what one can be and do to contribute positively to the world for the sake of one's neighbors now and for heirs and assigns in years to come.

 

 

*The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended. #24. The Hymnal 1982. The Church Hymnal Corp.

   


Copyright 2015 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

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