The wind blows on Nicodemus – 14.03.2014, Lent II

Nicodemus.  This story is one of the Gospel options for this Sunday, Lent II.  It is in John’s Gospel, so we need, more than ever, wonder and imagination.  We must make a humble space in which the story can begin to speak to us anew, however well we may think we know it from the past. 

Nicodemus was a teacher of Israel.  That is what Jesus called him.  It was respectful.  Nicodemus was moreover a Pharisee.  And yet he came to Jesus by night, after dark, and called him Rabbi, which means teacher.  Two teachers, offering each other total attention.  Nicodemus brings serious questions, and it’s important to note that these questions are not traps or anything clever.  He is asking the most basic things.  Jesus teaches him two things. 

First, that we must expect and be available to be born anew – the Greek ανωθεν can mean either born anew, or born from above.  Of course Nicodemus struggles to understand.  For him it is an entirely new concept.  Born anew of water and Spirit, says Jesus.  So Jesus explains.  There is life in the flesh and there is life in the Spirit.  They are not the same.  Baptism, water, signifies the entrance into a new life of the Spirit, and the Spirit, God, continually forms and energises this new life. 

One of the commitments of Benedictine life is what we call conversatio morum – it is receiving this new life each day, each morning, each time of prayer, each encounter with God’s world.  Being born anew does not happen just once, but constantly, steadily, gradually, gently for the most part, like a metamorphosis, an emergence, perhaps through many trials along the way, but getting there, as we say.

Secondly, says Jesus to Nicodemus, there is the wind.  In Greek, πνευμα means both wind and Spirit.  As Jesus says, and as we well know, the wind blows where and when it chooses, as hard or as gently as it likes, it can blow hot or cold – neither do we know where it is going.  That’s what it is like, teaches Jesus.  Life in the Spirit is not for those who require safety or predictability or security first.  So life in the Spirit entails having come to terms with our own frailty, vulnerability, fallibility and mortality.  It flows directly from love for God and for all God has made.  It is intimately linked to freedom.  To be born of God is to rise free from convention and addiction. 

We can say that to sit, as we do, here, in silence and stillness, with only our mantra, is to sit out in the wind.  It may be a gale at times.  Or it may be a gentle zephyr or nothing much at all.  Our task is to be present.  To consent to what the Spirit does.  And still, whatever, as they say, to be still…