An Unusual Confrontation...

Regardless of whether or not you buy the whole Bible, Jesus, or church thing; regardless of how often you have attended church in the past; regardless of the fact that you may feel like you do not know and do not feel that you can ever know about whether or not the Bible or church is real or relevant; regardless of all the bad experiences that you may have had with Christians and churches, we all have seen a cross attached to a building or around someone’s neck. We are all at least somewhat familiar with the Easter story. We are at least somewhat familiar with a garden, a courtyard, a hill with three crosses, a tomb guarded by soldiers, an empty tomb found by women.

And, if you have gone to more than two Easter services in your life, you usually expect to hear that same old and somewhat familiar story told once again. You know, the story about an earthquake, angels, and an empty tomb. Or maybe you expected to look at a familiar passage that defends the truth of the resurrection by the Apostle Paul. This Easter, however, as a church we spent our time together meeting two individuals that we usually do not talk about on Easter Sunday. Yet, it is these two individuals that actually make it possible to tell the Easter story. As a matter of fact, in many ways these two characters from the Easter story actually saved Easter.

These two characters and the role that they played in the Easter story, allow us to be able to stand here some 2,000 years later and confidently say that Easter is about an event that happened in history that radically and forever changed how human beings would relate to God. So let’s meet these two characters and the role that they played in the Easter story, in an account of Jesus life that is recorded for us in the Bible called the gospel of John, in John 3:1:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; this man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him."

John, the writer of this account of Jesus life, introduces us to Nicodemus, who he tells us was a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews. The Pharisees were a leading group of Jewish religious leaders during Jesus life on earth. Nicodemus was also a part of the Sanhedrin, which was the Senate and Supreme court of the Jewish nation. John tells us that Nicodemus came as a representative of the Jewish religious leaders one evening in order to have a conversation with Jesus.

At this point in Jesus life, Jesus was approaching rock star status. Jesus had begun to perform miracles; He had recently turned water into wine at a wedding reception. Jesus had also recently entered the Temple courtyards with a whip, turning over tables and driving out those who were financially exploiting people who came to worship God. And when asked about why He had drove out and destroyed all the kiosks where they were making money; when asked who He thought He was that He would even think to do such a thing, Jesus replied by saying that if they destroyed the Temple, that He would raise a new one in three days.

You see, for the Jewish religious leaders, Jesus was doing and saying things that were hard to understand and explain. They were having a hard time figuring Him out. And, worse yet, from their perspective, people were connecting with Him and His message. Jesus was becoming very popular. Large crowds were gathering around Him wherever He went. These religious leaders had questions that needed asking and answered. So these, leaders got together and decided that someone would need to confront Jesus and get answers to their questions. These leaders wanted to know who Jesus was and selected Nicodemus to go on their behalf to find out.

Nicodemus, wanting uninterrupted time with Jesus and privacy for fear of embarrassment by Jesus, approaches Jesus at night in order to get the answers to their questions. Nicodemus carefully approaches Jesus with a very respectful greeting. This greeting, if communicated in the language we use in our culture today, would have sounded something like this: Jesus, it is a well known and generally accepted that you are a teacher that God has sent to us, because the miracles that you are doing could only be done by the power of God. We recognize that you have come as God’s messenger with a message from God”.

However, before Nicodemus could even ask what that message from God was, Jesus takes control of the conversation with a statement that John records for us in verse 3:

Jesus answered and said to him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God."

When Jesus uses the phrase kingdom of God, He is referring to God’s royal reign. You see, the Jewish people were looking for a Messiah; a rescuer that God had promised would someday come to rescue and deliver the Jewish people back to God and back to prominence in the world. Jesus tells Nicodemus that, in order to be a part of this kingdom with the Messiah, one must be born again. This little phase, born again, in the language that this letter was originally written in, literally means to be born from above. We see John record Nicodemus response in verse 4:

Nicodemus said to Him, "How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he?"

At this point, Nicodemus is totally caught off guard. Nicodemus had a list of questions that he was supposed to ask Jesus, but Jesus has just blown up that list of questions and replaced them with a whole new set of questions. And while Nicodemus asks a question about the improbability of a physical rebirth, Jesus responds by blowing up some more of Nicodemus theological categories in verse 5:

Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. "Do not be amazed that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."

At this point Nicodemus is probably thinking to himself, “Why does He always have to talk that way? Why does He always say things like that?” Jesus statement, if communicated in the language we use today would have sounded something like this: “No Nicodemus, you cannot enter into the womb again, you cannot be born from above because of something you do. To be born from above is something that the Spirit of God does to you. In the same way that you have been brought into the world physically in a way that resulted in you entering into a relationship with your earthly parents, you also have to be brought into a relationship with God by the Spirit of God. Nicodemus, you should not be surprised at what I am telling you. It’s like the wind. The wind moves throughout the world every day. And no one has any control over the wind. The wind does whatever it desires. The wind starts when it wants to start; the wind goes where it wants to go; the wind ends when it wants to end. Just as no one can control the wind, no one can control the activity of the Holy Spirit and what He does in bringing people to the place where they are brought into a relationship with God.

Tomorrow, we will look at how Nicodemus responded to this unusual conversation with Jesus...