Jesus said to Nicodemus: "You must be born from above.' The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." Nicodemus answered, and said to him, "How can this happen?" Jesus answered and said to him, "You are the teacher of Israel and you do not understand this? Amen, amen, I say to you, we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen, but you people do not accept our testimony. If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone that believes in him may have eternal life."
The Gospel of the Lord.
Brothers and Sisters in Christ. These readings of Eastertide tell of the risen Christ and of the Holy Spirit. The word "Hebrew" derives from the Hebrew word "aspiru" which was the word for the Hebrew people and meant, people of the desert, of the wastes, and of the wind, so that the desert people, the Hebrews, were people of the wind. And they were people of the Holy Spirit. Thus, this Gospel passage from John, tells of the Hebrew people being born from above, being born of the wind, being born of the Holy Spirit. That is our baptism.
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent so that the people might be saved, so Jesus must be lifted up on the cross, must die, and then rise again so that all who believe in him might have eternal life.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but may have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. " Besides providing the most comprehensive summary of the Gospel, these two verses also offer the proper perspective on salvation history.
Alan Watts once remarked that “a certain type of mind is frightened by the mutability, the elusiveness, and the mystery of life, and thinks of salvation as a state of everlasting fixity and certainty from which the disconcerting elements of spontaneity, surprise and mystery are largely removed.” We call ‘fundamentalist’ those people who fix their faith in some text as in concrete, casting aside every other consideration. They think that by fixing on a text they have grasped God. It is a waste of a good word; they are not fundamentalists; they are superficialists, like the Pharisees. Neither are they traditionalists: they cast tradition aside and fix on their own simplistic literal interpretation of a text. We have to throw open the shutters and let the Spirit enter the narrow caves in which we bury ourselves.
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