An audio version of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (John 3: 7-15) continues the conversation
between Nicodemus and Jesus in the night. They continue to speak of the Spirit
of whom all must be born again, but who, as Jesus tells the Teacher of Israel,
blows where He will. It is necessary for Jesus at this point to underline for
Nicodemus his own ignorance, for despite all his great learning, the Pharisee
cannot yet perceive the depth and the full truth of Jesus’ message. Yet in the
end, as Jesus concludes, it will not be learning that brings salvation but the
sight of, and belief in, the Son of Man, lifted up for all to see.
Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, presumably so as not to
be observed. Yet the night in which he comes is our night also. The night has
this double meaning: for on the one hand, we are blind and stumble about,
unable to piece together the fragments of our understanding and the shards of
our pain, while on the other hand, as the saying goes, the night brings counsel.
The night brings the vision that the busyness and noise of the day obscure.
And still, that vision must come through a surrender to the
Spirit who blows where He will. In the beginning the Spirit hovered over the still
waters. But while He now hovers over the turbulent waters of our hearts, we
cannot quite know His coming and His going, from where He blows and wither He
is headed. What is this image for Jesus but a sign to Nicodemus that all His
learning cannot contain God or indeed restrain Him? This is not an indication
that God is arbitrary, a divinity that makes and breaks the rules of His own
reality; God cannot make light darkness or darkness light. God does not call
sin good or goodness evil. At the same time, as C. S. Lewis says of the lion
Aslan, He is not a tame lion. We cannot relate to Him as to a mathematical formula
that is lifeless; He is, as John Donne calls Him, a three-personed God. Donne’s
poem, moreover, captures the difficulty of relating to Him, to Them, which
comes not only from their not being a tame God of formulaic predictability but
also from our own unsteady and unreliable hearts:
Batter my heart,
three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe,
shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand,
o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow,
burn, and make me new.
The blowing of the Spirit does
not contradict our understanding of doctrine or dogma, but the words of the
latter refer to mysteries whose depth and vitality are as yet unclear to us,
and this to such an extent that the greatest mind of Christendom, St Thomas Aquinas,
having had a vision of God, said in his dying hours that all he had written was
as straw when compared to the reality of God. He might simply have said in that
moment that the Spirit blows where He wills, and often what He wills is way
beyond our ken.
How do we then listen for that Spirit,
for His truth and for His call to us? How divine His movements? How consult Him
in His unfathomable mystery? While we must allow Him not to be a tame Spirit,
yet we have a compass point of sorts, some form of orientation even in this
night. And we can find its rallying point where the beams of the cross
intersect and hold up for all to see the Son of Man.
There, at the end of this gospel
passage, Jesus evokes an event that is still hidden from Nicodemus, even though
its truth – the truth of the healing power of one who is apparently the source of
poison – was foreshadowed by Moses when he made the serpent of brass that healed
the Israelites in the desert. For wherever the Spirit blows, He necessarily
blows through the upright beam and spreading arms of the cross on which the Son
hangs, like the wind blowing through the great arms of a windmill. Perhaps this
is why Jesus says:
We speak of whom we know and
bear witness to what we have seen.
Yet it is the Father whom They
know, and to whom they bear witness. The Son, who will be raised up, and the
Spirit, who blows where He wills, thus collaborate through the sending of the
Son and the communication of the Spirit, to bring the life of the entire
Blessed Trinity to those who are, like Nicodemus, lost in the night.