Fourth gospel: precompressed helical spring

Tuesday in  

the Second Week of Easter

April 21st

READING: John 3: 7-15

Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.” The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, 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 said to him, ‘How can these things be?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

‘Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

REFLECTION

To understand John – or at least to help do so – picture a slinky. I first encountered slinky as a child, furloughing in England from Ghana. We were staying in a two-story house in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. For a slinky to work there must be stairs, and because there was, I enjoyed hours of fun. A slinky makes its way down the stairs, I am told, through delicate balances of momentum and gravity. Technically it is a “precompressed helical spring.” That might have interested me had I been able to comprehend the words at six years old. Or not.

But it’s closer to my meaning now: a slinky is a coil. So is John’s gospel account – which is why it is so hard to take slices of it for liturgical reading. John moves around and around in circles, building words, dropping key words in as signposts, repeating, enlarging, developing. Did you notice how, for example, Nicodemus develops as the gospel moves forward?

John’s narrative moves relentlessly towards the lifting up of the Son of Man on the cross, and to glimpses of an incomprehensible beyond. That “beyond” is briefly, famously referred to in Jesus’ speech to Mary Magdalene at 20:17, and is part of the “bookends” of the slinky. These bookends are the overall, “big picture” descent and ascent, from heaven to heaven via suffering, psychological and physical, and brutal death. But Jesus’ final words in these spirals of his meaning are “follow me” (John 21:22). Follow me: as the Son of Man is raised up, and all within his embrace are invited to follow, to an eternity beyond sight and understanding.

In this slice of John 3 we cross two cycles of John’s story, though the cycles are always thematically inseparable. Nicodemus, something about being “born from above,” and an enigmatic association between Moses and his rod and the lifting up of the Son of Man. This is the second time John has used the phrase-title “Son of Man.” It’s a title pregnant with meaning throughout John’s gospel-account. Borrowed from Daniel, it seems to emphasize the humanity of Jesus, but it’s never that easy: for divinity is lurking, too, granting something called “eternal life,” made available to us because of, through, Jesus’ descent and ascent.

In John 1:51 the Son of Man is marked as destined for a particularly vivid visitation of divine blessing and glory. Later we will discover that “lifted up” is a brutal double entendre. Between now (John 3) and the end of the machinations of “lifting up” we will learn much about the cost of being “born again / born from above.” The divine Son who is the human son, enters into all our grot and darkness and lifts us, born anew in him, into some incalculable mystery that Jesus, in John’s telling, calls “eternal life,” made available to us by the wind who blows where she wills.