"Deeper Truth" (John 3:1-17)

On January 21, 2009, Disciples of Christ General Minister & President Sharon Watkins preached at the National Prayer Service of the Presidential Inauguration for Barack Obama.  Sharon Watkins is the first woman to head a mainline denomination, and the first woman to be invited to preach at a presidential inauguration prayer service.

In her sermon, she shared a story that is often attributed to Cherokee legend.

One evening a grandfather was teaching his young grandson about the internal battle each person faces.  “There are two wolves struggling inside of us,” the old man said.  “One wolf is vengefulness, anger, resentment, self-pity and fear.  The other wolf is compassion, faithfulness, hope, truth, and love.”

The grandson sat, thinking, then asked, “Which wolf wins, grandfather?”

His grandfather replied, “The one you feed.”

The prayer service took place inside the National Cathedral.  There were a lot of people present.  But no one who heard this story asked or wondered how it is possible for two wolves to somehow get inside of us, and live there – not to mention struggle and fight with one another. No one stood up and protested, arguing that there’s no way that wolves could get inside of a person and live inside that person’s body, while the person, apparently, goes on living.  Everyone present understood.  Everyone ‘got it.’  They saw the deeper truth that this story contained.

But maybe, if Nicodemus was there,…

Nicodemus was a Pharisee.  He studied the teachings of scripture thoroughly.  He practiced his faith meticulously.

But there was much he did not understand.

Nicodemus had heard about a man named Jesus, who some said was full of great wisdom.  But many leaders, including many of his fellow Pharisees, were against Jesus because he challenged the status quo, and posed a threat to the Pharisee’s influence and authority.

So Nicodemus went to Jesus by night, seeking wisdom; and in this encounter, Jesus told Nicodemus that no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born from above… except that the Greek word here – anōthen – actually has a double meaning.  It could mean “born from above,” or it could mean “born again.”

Nicodemus, of course, chose the wrong meaning.  He chose what could be described as the more literal meaning.  He chose born again.  And he stopped Jesus right there and protested:

“How could anyone be born again?  What, is someone supposed to enter their mother’s womb a second time and then be born again?  Come on, Jesus!  How can anyone do that?

Nicodemus missed the deeper truth of what Jesus was saying.

This summer, Ginger will be directing a week of Chi-Rho Camp at Loch Leven.  That’s our camp for middle schoolers.  But most of her experience is with younger children.  And she’s told me that one has to be very careful when using metaphors with young children.  If you tell them that Jesus is a rock, they might pick up a pebble, look at it, and start scratching their heads.

Do you think Nicodemus would do the same?

“Hey, Nicodemus!  Jesus is the rock!”

“Really?  Would that be igneous or metamorphic or sedimentary?  Would he be a pebble you can fit in your pocket, or would he be a 340-ton boulder paraded through city streets?”

No, no, no.  To enter the kingdom of God, you must be born from above.  You must be born of the Spirit.

Well, when you say Spirit, do you mean Spirit?  Or do you mean wind?  Because the same word means both Spirit and wind.  And breath! … But I don’t know how one can be born from wind or from breath….”The wind blows where it chooses” – well, yes – but what does it mean to be born of the wind?

And Jesus threw his hands up in the air and shouted, “Oy vey!” And then he said, “Are you really a teacher of Israel?  How do you not understand?”

Because most people got it.  Most people understood the deeper truth.  But not Nicodemus.

Well, since we’re talking about breath and wind and spirit, let’s go all the way back to Genesis 1.  “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

But was it the wind?  Or was it the spirit?  Or was it God’s breath?

In six days God created the earth.  Day 1: light was created.  Day 2: sky and water were separated.  Day 3: land was formed separating the waters.  Day 4: The light was formed into the sun, moon, and stars.  Day 5: birds and fish were created.  Day 6:  Land animals were created, culminating in the creation of humankind, both male and female.

And it was all very good.

I wonder how Nicodemus interpreted all this.  I wonder what meaning he found in the creation story….

Do you think he interpreted it literally?  Do you think he thought that, if it were possible to go back in time, he could hold a stopwatch in his hand and time the days of creation, and see that everything on the first day did in fact take precisely 24 hours, and the same with the second day, and so on?  Do you think he would keep reading, and compute the days and generations, starting with those first humans, and calculate that approximately 5,000 years had passed, and conclude that the earth is therefore right around 5,000 years old?

Perhaps.  But I wonder what Nicodemus would do when he got to the second chapter of Genesis, which presents a second creation story.  In this second creation story, humanity is created first, before the animals.  Well, actually, it’s just one male human that is created.  Then God plants a garden for that one male; and then, because God didn’t want that one male to get lonely, God created animals.  But none of those animals were good enough, so then God created a female human.

That’s a very different story than the first creation story, in which all the animals were created first, before the creation of humans.  I wonder how Nicodemus reconciled the two stories.

Maybe, in this case, he would have found the deeper meaning, as most people in those days did.  Maybe he would have understood these creation stories as metaphors; and maybe that’s why Jesus was so surprised that Nicodemus failed to understand his metaphor.

Maybe Nicodemus would have looked at the first creation story, with its six days and its divine blessings and its ordered, repetitive structure, and recognized in it a deeper truth about how the world is ordered, how all of creation belongs to God, and how all of creation is good in the eyes of God.

The difference, of course, is whether this is a literal account of creation, or if it is a story told in order to convey a deeper truth.  If Nicodemus were alive today, and if he insisted on a literal interpretation, then he would probably align himself with conservative Christians, many of whom insist that the universe really was created in six 24-hour periods, that the big bang and evolution are false, that the earth really is just a couple of thousand years old, and that dinosaur fossils and the discovery of rocks in places like the Grand Canyon that are millions of years old are all just bogus claims of science.

On the other hand, if Nicodemus understood the creation stories as pointing to a deeper truth, then maybe he would feel more at home among progressive Christians.  Progressive Christians aren’t afraid of scientific discoveries that may “prove” that Bible stories didn’t really happen the way scripture describes, because whether these stories really happened or not doesn’t affect the deeper truth that they contain.

If a scientist were to examine the Cherokee story of the two wolves and then report his findings, publishing an article in a highly respected scientific journal; and if those findings conclude that there is no possible way that two wolves could live within a person’s body the way the story describes, does that mean that the whole story is false?  Progressive Christians would say no, because the deeper truth remains true; and the story isn’t really about two wolves, anyway.

If a scientist were to say that a given Bible story isn’t true, that all the archaeological and historical evidence indicates that things didn’t really happen the way scripture says they happened, what then?  Someone like Nicodemus might say that, well, they can’t both be true; either science is right, or scripture is right…  and many people, even today, feel that this is a choice they are forced to make, that science and religion are incompatible, and therefore, one must choose: one, or the other.

Of course, modern science has only been around three or four centuries.  Before then – before the enlightenment, before the age of science – people weren’t nearly as concerned with factual or literal truth.  People like Nicodemus were, in fact, a rarity.

In the third chapter of Genesis, there’s a scene where God is walking in the garden.  Martin Luther, the founder of Protestant Christianity, knew how to interpret this passage.  He wrote that obviously God never walked in the garden.  Something else was meant – a deeper truth.

Luther interpreted other stories from scripture in a similar way.

Throughout most of Christian history, it was taken for granted by most Christians that there are deeper levels of meaning in scripture.  In modern times, we’ve moved away from that.  Many people are stuck, like Nicodemus, at a literal level of understanding.  Contemporary Catholic priest Richard Rohr says that if that’s all you believe, then you’re stuck at “the lowest, most narrow level of meaning that is possible.”

Marcus Borg says that “Biblical and Christian language is rich.  It needs to be redeemed from its cultural captivity to literalism.”

Finally, consider this:  Jesus told Nicodemus that one must be born from above – or, born again – and Nicodemus got confused by the double meaning of the word Jesus used, the Greek word anōthen. 

Except Jesus didn’t speak Greek.  John, the author of this gospel, spoke and wrote in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic.  And in Aramaic, there is no word that has a double meaning; there is no word that can mean both “born from above” and “born again.”

Which means that Nicodemus’ confusion arising from a word with a double meaning never actually happened.  It couldn’t have, because that double meaning doesn’t exist in the language that Jesus spoke.

This would present a real problem to one who insists on interpreting scripture literally.  But maybe, in this scripture, there is a deeper meaning, a deeper truth.