Lent 2 2008
The Answer my Friend is Blowing in the Wind.

One of my heroes from the sixties Bob Dylan wrote a hymn for my generation. The second verse.

 How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

 This week saw a moment in the history of our nation, the significance of which will only be fully realised in the 20/20 vision of hindsight. The Prime Minister apologised to our indigenous sisters and brother for their experiences of dispossession and dislocation, 11 years after an apology was identified as necessary by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission in the land mark report, Bringing them home.

This apology represents a sea change in thinking. Over the last decade in particular, the debate has been highjacked, by notions of blame and justification. From this perspective, it’s true that much of what was done to aboriginal Australians was done with the best of intentions. Those who implemented the policies which led to what we now call the stolen generations were not by and large wicked people. They were doing the best they could, from their perspective.

In order to see what this means, it’s necessary to do as the Commission did, as the Prime Minister did, as I and countless like me have done. It’s necessary to sit with those who were stolen, and listen openly and humbly to their stories. To suspend what we call reality for a moment, and enter into the world of the other. To look at life through their eyes and so to have our own vision transformed.

For us Christians, this is precisely what the story of Nicodemus and Jesus tells us.

It’s so hard to think of God except through recourse to our own experience, our social location, our prejudices. Arguably the greatest theologian of the 20 th century, Karl Barth warned, “‘God’ is not ‘human’ uttered in a loud voice.” But it’s awfully hard not to be guilty of buying our theology at the nearest Woolworths. Barth asks, “What are you doing…with the word of God upon your lips? Did one ever hear of such overweening presumption?”

A thoughtful parishioner comes to me and asks, “How could any intelligent person believe that Jesus was conceived of a virgin?” And how am I to respond? The parishioner is, like me, living in an accustomed world were certain things happen with reassuring consistency. These predictabilities, we call “laws of nature.” For something more interesting to occur, it’s like breaking a law. 

We’re not nearly, we intellectual types, as expansive in our intellects as we like to think. It’s tempting, in matters of the Spirit, to seize some pleasing platitude, some corner of the divine and cling tightly to that fragment as if it were all there was to be had.
Oh that’s right, we’re educated, sophisticated people who are open minded, broad spirited, incapable of shallow reductionism!

He comes to Jesus, “by night,” this Nicodemus. In the gospel of John night is so much more than night. It’s ignorance, seeing but not seeing, time of confusion and not knowing (see John 1:5; 9:4). Which makes it all the more odd to find a man like Nicodemus in the dark. Odd, because Nicodemus knows. He’s a “leader” of the synagogue, a knowledgeable person, a bishop in the church of God . Nicodemus is us, those of us “in the know. “Rabbi, we know…” are his first words to Jesus. He speaks out of a self-confident, secure world where there are some who know, and are certain, and sometimes so smug in their certitude.

“Jesus, can we talk, teacher to teacher? Now we know, studies have proven that, a recent book by a most reliable authority has demonstrated beyond a doubt that….”
We, that is everyone in this Cathedral, seated around this table, members of this club, we know that you, Jesus, must be from God. For your works seem certifiably divine.

"No you don’t,” says Jesus. “Nobody knows what is possible with God unless one is born from above, reborn from top to bottom of the Spirit.”

Nicodemus is dislodged, dislocated. This isn’t what he expected.

“How can this be?” he asks. Which sums up the rest of Nicodemus’ conversation, a whining attempt to put back together the pieces that Jesus seems to have scattered. Nicodemus came to Jesus to get a few things nailed down, more rigorously defined, settled (he’s big on defining, and fixing, this man-in-the-know – who does he remind you of? There’s a whole strand in contemporary Anglicanism which wants to nail the Gospel down- define exactly its limits – who’s in and who’s out. And if the Church is fractured in the meantime – so what. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, the argument goes. We know the word of God. We know – and you don’t.).

And yet here we have Jesus, launching out into dangerously wild, unexplored territory ruled not by what we know, not by conventional wisdom, but rather ruled by the Spirit.

Don’t you find it interesting that when Nicodemus comes to Jesus, asking what it’s all about, Jesus responds with two of the most uncontrollable, uncontainable of human experiences, birth and wind? That’s what the Greek word “Spirit” means. Wind. Pneuma.
‘Oh my dear, stupid, scholarly friend. Forget your officially approved definitions, the pneuma blows where it chooses. You can hear it, feel it, but you can’t predict or control it.’

And poor old Nicodemus, who still doesn’t get it, responds stammeringly, “Teacher, do you mean pneuma in the theological sense of ‘spirit,’ or in the more ordinary sense of ‘wind’?” And Jesus says, ‘Yes.’

W.H. Auden said it’s hard to be a Christian if you’re not something of a poet. We know…then, wind, spirit, where it chooses …leaving the once self-confident Nicodemus muttering, How can this be?

There’s a very important lesson to be learned from the experience of Nicodemus. And it’s this. My ideas of reality are what I have been programmed to think of as reality, but there are hundreds, thousands, of ways of thinking of reality that are always out there beyond my momentary consciousness, my limited way of seeing the world. And if today I’m tolerant of viewpoints quite different from my own—those of Aboriginal Australians, Muslims or Hindus, asylum seekers or gays, artists or poets — it’s because I have realized how completely I am at the mercy of my restricted vision of life, how wrong I may be about everything, not because of the things I know but because of the things I don't know. There are whole worlds out there that I am missing.

That’s part of what the Bible is about, part of what it is trying to get us to see and understand. Jesus said to Nicodemus, "You can't see the things I am trying to teach you from where you've been standing. You must be born again, this time from above." He said to the woman at the well, when she was quibbling with him about whether he had a vessel into which she could pour the water he had requested of her, "If you only knew who is asking you for some water, you would be asking him for a drink, and he would give you eternal water, water of such fine essence that your soul would never thirst again."

We never hear of Nicodemus after this night, until toward the end of John’s Gospel. Jesus, the one to whom he came at night with questions, is dead, crucified. And among the few daring to be near was Nicodemus. Considering that Jesus was crucified by the wise and the powerful, it’s quite a surprise to see Nicodemus, member of the establishment, risking that. He is there, at the end, not as interrogator but as a disciple, not as a visitor in the night, but as a committed follower of the light. There, at the cross, there is none of that “We know….”

In fact, Nicodemus doesn’t say anything. He comes bearing spices to honour the body of Jesus. He comes to worship the Son of God, slain for sin. He offers not questions or answers but sweet smelling spices whose aroma is carried by a wind that blows where it will, even today, where it will, stopped by no darkness, questions, or answers we have been able to put to it, contained in no boxes of our devising, no categories of our invention.

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind. For the wind ever blows where it chooses.