I was certain that we had been robbed. My friend’s father looked at me. “Our coats, our
bags, everything’s gone.” At first, I thought he was joking. And then, I looked down at
our seats and, sure enough, our coats, our bags, our luggage—everything was gone.
I had made a quick trip to Albany, NY to see my friend Ricky be sworn in as an attorney.
That morning, his family and I grabbed all of our things and headed to the convention
center. With our flights leaving shortly after the ceremony, we left our luggage and coats
in our seats and went to take pictures before the event began.
When we returned, in a crowd of 1,000 other people, we found our seats, but all of our
things were missing.
And so, we looked down. As the minutes ticked by before the chief justice began her
opening remarks, we combed back and forth through the aisles, looking down at the
floor, between the seats, searching for anywhere that our things could have gone.
With only a few minutes to spare, my friend’s father and I had the same brilliant
thought, let’s accuse someone nearby of stealing our things and hope that they will
confess to the crime.
Luckily, before we could make an accusation, my friend’s mother called out to us. She
had found our things. In the next section of seats, one floor up, where we had left them
so quickly before we walked down the stairs to take our photos.
It’s amazing what we miss when we are only looking down. It’s amazing what we miss
when we are so certain of where we’re looking.
In our story today, Nicodemus is pretty certain, as well. He comes to Jesus at night and
starts this dialogue of sorts, although it’s hard to call this a dialogue. It’s really two
people talking past each other. And Nicodemus begins not with a question but with a
statement, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.”
And Jesus responds to this non-question with an answer: No one can see the kindom of
God without being born from above.
And their conversation-of-sorts builds. But Nicodemus still doesn’t understand.
Until, finally, Jesus calls him out for it: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not
understand these things?”
Nicodemus is missing the point. He is so certain, but he doesn’t understand. He keeps
looking down. He is preoccupied with the way things are.
Jesus tells him he must be born again or be born from above. The greek word for above
and again, anóthen, carries both meanings. But Nicodemus is so focused on the way
things are that he can’t see the world as it might be; being born from above doesn’t
make any sense to him, and so in his certainty Nicodemus assumes that Jesus means
being born again.
But Jesus is concerned with being born from above. He wants him see things differently;
to live life differently. Jesus wants him to look up.
There’s lots of up and down language in the Gospel of John. Above and below,
ascending and descending are important distinctions for our writer.
And, here, Jesus wants Nicodemus to focus on what’s being lifted up. He reminds
Nicodemus of another salvation story that didn’t make a lot of sense, either:
When the Israelites were suffering from poisonous snake bites, God told Moses to lift a
poisonous snake on a pole and make the people look at it. And that’s how the people
were healed.
Jesus tells Nicodemus that the Son of Man must also be lifted up for the salvation of the
world. And that’s an uncomfortable image. Looking up at our horrid violence, our
mistreatment of the marginalized, our rejection of God’s incarnation—
and somehow finding God’s salvation there.
Lifting things up means we can all see something. When we hold things up everyone
can notice them. It turns our sharing, our knowledge, our conversation from an
individual thing into a collective one. And maybe that’s how God’s salvation works.
Recently, there have been lots of things held up for our collective consciousness.
I think of the incredible signs held up at the Women’s March last year. Cries for justice,
calls for solidarity all lifted up for others, for our nation, to bear witness to.
There have been plenty of other things lifted up, as well.
We’ve listened as survivors of violence and harassment have lifted up their stories. We
have born witness to their pain as it is brought into collective acknowledgment.
Young immigrants and dreamers have lifted up their courageous voices and stories, too.
People of color have lifted up the racism built into our systems, our socialization, our
federal disaster response.
Yes, just like Nicodemus, we have been a people learning to lift up and look up at the
difficult truths, the hard stories, the hidden pain.
Jesus’ image for being born from above, for all of this up-looking is of a poisonous
snake—and his own future suffering.
Jesus wants us to notice. All too soon He will be lifted up and suffer. God will be lifted
up in solidarity with all those who suffer and all those who are crucified—both then
and today.
The American Baptist theologian Mark Heim writes that God allowed the crucifixion so
that victims of similar acts of violence “would never be invisible—[because] they look
too much like Jesus” (p.224, Saved by What Shouldn’t Happen: The Anti-sacrificial
Meaning of the Cross).
That is the other radical double meaning in this passage. The verb for lifting, hupsoo,
means both to lift and to exalt. There’s something different about the lifting Jesus is
describing. It is a horrible lifting, a painful, awful sight. And yet, it is also an exalting.
An honoring. It changes things through its witness to ugliness and pain.
I think Jesus is teaching Nicodemus to recognize. He’s getting Nicodemus ready to
notice the crucified ones who look too much like Jesus.
Learning to look up, to see as one sees from above, means recognizing those crucified
and marginalized today alongside the Crucified and Marginalized Christ whom we
follow.
The things that we are lifting up today—other’s suffering, our silence, our racism, our
inaction, our complicity—are just as painful and difficult to bear witness to and yet the
promise that Jesus makes to Nicodemus is still God’s promise to us.
As we lift up, acknowledge, bear witness to these horrible, unspeakable things, God
brings about God’s salvation. God is present in the truth telling; God is present in the
lifting up; and, somehow, God is still making a way, even now—offering us
reconciliation, healing, and hope.
Jesus invites Nicodemus to be born again, to be born from above. But we misread this
text when that rebirth is not connected to looking up and lifting up. It’s a joint image:
we are born again by looking up. And in the same way, our looking up births us from
above and brings us everlasting life—life that matters, life that is full of God’s presence,
lives of purpose that nothing can take away, not even the empire or a cross.
Jesus shares this radical vision of healing and truth telling. And Nicodemus responds
with simple and powerfully honest words: how can these things be?
I remember the feeling of walking to the women’s march last year. Coming up over the
hill toward the mall, and looking up at the sheer number of signs. Looking up and
realizing that we weren’t alone. We were here, together.
The looking up stirred me to action. It inspired me to go canvass. To volunteer with
People of Faith for Equality Virginia. To donate to local candidates whom I believed in.
In a similar way, the stories of suffering this year, that have been so courageously lifted
up, have pulled me out of my dour hopelessness. The collective sharing has pulled so
many of us out of our inaction.
And that’s the good news of Nicodemus’ story, too. He learns to look up, he lives into
the full life Jesus offers, eventually.
I like to think that Nicodemus follows along, at a distance, throughout the rest of John’s
Gospel, after this midnight conversation with Jesus. I would like to think that he
witnesses Jesus feeding the crowds and speaking with the woman at the well. I want to
think that he learns what Jesus was talking about—about a different kind of life and
living, about a different kind of looking and seeing.
We see Nichodemus two more times after this first evening meeting in John’s Gospel.
John tells us of Nichodemus bravely speaking up when Jesus was threatened by the
authorities. And John tells us of Nichodemus’ presence after Jesus’ crucifixion; coming
out with Joseph of Arimithea, another closeted follower of Jesus, to bury his body.
I think Nicodemus gets it, eventually. And the good news for us is that God offers us
that same saving shift in perception, that same quality of life that calls us to live fully for
God and the world God so deeply loves.
The annual Transgender Day of Remembrance service is always a beautiful and tragic
service. Last year, it seemed especially difficult. More names than the year before were
read. More beautiful trans and gender non-conforming lives had been taken from us. A
cultural climate of hatred and violence seemed to be reaping its logical harvest of
violence and pain for the most marginalized among us.
After a candle for each person who was killed last year had been extinguished, we sat in
a dark sanctuary. And all I wanted to do was look down, to take a breath, and try to
contemplate this deep pain I couldn’t comprehend. How can these things be?
But I noticed that the young trans teen who had sat with me was looking up, at the
front, toward the extinguished candles. Toward the painful truth from which I was
averting my eyes.
And this year, after all of the names had been lifted up, the candles extinguished, the
grief acknowledged, a group of about twenty trans women slowly began relighting each
candle one by one as the two most beautiful voices sang “there’s a place for us, some
where a place for us. Peace and quiet and open air wait for us somewhere.”
In that moment, those of us in attendance were learning to look up. To support them. To
acknowledge their great pain.
We were learning to respond through listening and ally ship. Through honoring the
humanity lost with our patient witness. Together, we were learning to look toward the
pain, we were learning to look up.
Jesus is inviting us to look up again today. He’s getting us ready. Christ who is in
solidarity with all the oppressed will prevent the marginalized from being invisible
because his solidarity can’t be broken even by the world’s violence. Our hurting siblings
can’t be forgotten—they look too much like Jesus.
And, like Nicodemus, we have a choice. As survivors share their stories and dreamers
tell us of their hopes, as Christ is lifted up again today, we can choose to be born from
above, to become up-people: looking up and bearing witness to the snakes on poles and
the systems of this world all around us.
We can choose to be born from above and bear witness to God’s ongoing and saving
mystery. That’s what brings life that never ends, life that matters, life that is full of
God’s presence. That’s the life Jesus was offering Nicodemus; and that’s the life that
Jesus offers us.
Thanks be to God.
May it be so. May it be so. Amen and amen.