Nicodemus - faith and reason

Year A, Lent 2
Readings: Genesis 12:1-4a Romans 4:1-5, 13-17 John 3:1-17 Psalm 121


The story of Nicodemus is fascinating to me. I think it describes what often happens when a logical, analytical mind encounters spiritual truth.
Nicodemus is trying to understand who Jesus is and where his power is coming from - because he figures it has to be from God, but how does that work, exactly?
He's sincere - he really wants to understand, "What is this relationship between body and soul? - between God and man?" but when Jesus answers him, Nicodemus finds the reply very confusing.
Jesus had said that, to see the kingdom of God, everyone needed to be 'born from above,' but that didn't make sense to Nicodemus. "How can anyone be born after having grown old?"
Jesus tells him. "What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit..."
That still didn't clarify it totally for Nicodemus, because his next comment is, "How can these things be?"
I find this conversation encouraging, because I think Nicodemus is an intelligent person, so if he's confused, I feel reassured that, when I'm confused about faith questions, it's not that I'm not smart enough, it's just that the answers really are hard to understand.
I also find it encouraging that, when Nicodemus says he's confused, Jesus works harder at explaining it. I'm grateful for people who have the courage and honesty to say when they don't understand something, even if it makes the teacher irritated, because usually then the teacher will say it again more clearly and maybe use some examples, and the result is that everybody understands better. Think how many people have come to understand God's purpose in sending Jesus to save humanity - which is what our faith hangs on - from the single verse of John 3:16 - part of Jesus' further clarification to Nicodemus. It's such a clear explanation. When I was little, we memorized it in Sunday school. You probably know it, too.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."
We can partly thank Nicodemus for that excellent summary because he asked the question.
Asking questions is, I think, an important foundation of scientific inquiry, and we've come up in a scientific, questioning age. Everything is being and has been questioned and examined, turned inside out, defined and re-defined - like we were trying to chart and re-map in specific details all the vagueness of the past, to take away the element of mystery that wrapped around everything in the medieval period. We don't want 'hocus pocus'; we want reality - something solid and definite to believe in.
Here's an interesting little piece of linguistic information about that word 'hocus pocus,' the way we talk about words or rituals that seem silly and pointless. "Hocus pocus...abbra cadabra, and Viola! Here's a bunny!"
But it's fake; it's a trick to make you think the magician has powers, but really he doesn't. He just knows how to make you look the other way at the right time.
During the Protestant Reformation, people were beginning to question what the rituals in church were all about, really. The service was all in Latin, and so people didn't know what was being said and mostly didn't understand what was being done, but at some point, the priest would say a particular thing, a bell would ring, and everyone was supposed to look, because the priest would hold up the bread, and that was how you received communion - that's how you received grace. The people who attended the service didn't actually take communion by eating the bread or drinking the wine; they received it by seeing it. So, if you weren't paying attention then, you could miss the main part of the service and seemingly it wouldn't do you any good. But some people started to wonder whether any of those things, which they didn't understand, were actually doing them any good anyway.
People had lost track of what all those things meant that the priest was doing and saying, and they started to question whether those things had any meaning at all. The words sounded like gibberish. When the priest held up the bread, he said (in Latin) "Hoc est corpus meum" - "This is my body." But most people didn't know Latin. So it's not suprising, really that when the priest said "Hoc est corpus meum" - and maybe the bells would drown out the 'meum' part, leaving just "Hoc est corpus..", it's understandible that what people heard was 'Hocus pocus,' - - and that came to have a meaning of its own related to how they felt about what they saw and heard in church. Maybe all these rituals and unintelligible words don't really have a meaning. It's just 'hocus pocus...'
People became dissatisfied with accepting things they didn't understand; they wanted reasons and answers.
Religion has reacted in different ways to this cultural shift of wanting to question everything - in many instances defensively, making it wrong to question issues of faith, which put a lot of people in the predicament of feeling they had to choose between thinking or believing. Some people were executed because of dilemmas like this. And some fought back, carrying out executions of their own and breaking all the things that smacked of mystery and 'hocus pocus' to get back to a 'true religion' based on reason and not meaningless movements and unintelligible words. But just because someone doesn't know the meaning or understand the words doesn't mean they don't have meaning - we have to be careful to balance our capacity for reason and desire for explanations with respect for what we don't understand.
As Fr. John and Fr. Jack discussed in the Lenten series class Wednesday night, "faith vs. reason" is a false dichotomy - that's just not how it is - God made us with the ability to reason. It's only right that we should use it - and the faithful use of gifts God gave us will not lead us away from God but toward God, even if the path seems to wind around.
And it has wound around quite a bit - even in the past 10-20 years, not to mention the past 100. Our culture has changed a lot in this questioning and exploration. One thing I think we're learning from this process is that we're not likely to ever understand it all. For every new thing we've learned this century, we've discovered whole areas of things we never dreamed about before - and each new thing is more beautiful, and complicated and amazing than we imagined. Remember what whole new worlds, literally, were opened up to our imaginations by the invention of the telescope and the microscope, for example, and more recently with quantum physics, genetics, and multi-dimensional math.
As we look for answers to our questions about life and the world, as we try to understand, God shows us new things, and each thing we understand is more amazing than we had imagined before... until I think eventually, more than answers to our questions about life and the world, we begin to want to know the God who made this world and gave us life.
In our class Wednesday night, talking about how the world began and why we're here, we had a big discussion about this relationship between faith and science. George Kondos made a comment about Einstein saying that science was trying to understand the mind of God. Einstein represents to many people the pinnacle of modern scientific thought - one of the most brilliant minds of all time - and his conclusion is that science is essentially a search to know God.
Isn't that really theology?
I love theology, and I think it's the highest of all fields to study, but I think even that is not where the journey of faith is leading. One of the most brilliant theologians of all time - St. Thomas Aquinas - after he had written tomes of material constituting a complex and beautiful systematic theology, one day completely stopped writing. Because, he said, something had happened while he was celebrating the Eucharist one day, and whatever that experience was, it made everything he ever wrote seem like 'so much straw.' Compared to what he'd been trying to describe in his theological writings, the reality was so much more amazing - so the thing to do then was worship, not write about it.
Our ability to reason and our desire to understand may be things God created in us, but they're tools, things to help us get to where we understand enough to worship, and at that point, the rest of it, as amazing and complicated and beautiful as it is, won't even be able to hold a candle to the one who made it. This may partly explain the stories why some people who meet Jesus just stop whatever they were doing to follow Him - even though not everybody does it immediately when they meet him, like some of the disciples did.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I love the story of Nicodemus, because it took him a while to work it out. Today's gospel reading is not the only place he shows up. Here, in this passage, we see the beginning of his journey - questioning, trying to understand who Jesus is and how he has access to God's power. Later, he comes up at Jesus' trial, trying to offer a voice of reason in Jesus' defense. Then, still later, he is one of those who come to take Jesus' body down from the cross, "bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes.." - kind of like those wise men from the East, whose scientific inquiries led them to follow a star.
Nicodemus, a Pharisee who was diligently trying to observe and follow the law, started from a different place. While the magi started from science, Nicodemus started from religion, but they all found themselves on a journey of faith that ultimately led them to worship the God who made it all, who created the star, and who gave the law, and who sent his Son to show us how much God wants us to know him and be with him, because he made us and loves us, brains, questions, and all.

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Given to St. John's, Silsbee
Feb. 17, 2008