Gen 12:1-8 Ps.121
Rom. 4:1-5, (6-12)13-17 Jn.3:1-17
I would propose that the Gospel of John is about language and how to use it well.
Why would I make such a proposition?
The first verse of John's Gospel is a hint. "In the beginning was the Word; the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Same was in the beginning with God, and through the Word all thing came into being."
The Greek word for Word here is Logos. From this word we get all the "ologies" of fields of science and studies. One can propose that this notion of Word is not limited to word products such as speech, writing, language and symbolic systems, or to even the body language deeds within cultural systems which imply a meaning within every action of the body. One might say that notion of the Word implies the structuration of everything which exists. One mind say that this notion of Word implies the inherent connection of everything in always already relationship past, present, and future of everything with everything.
The premise of John's Gospel is that we accept this Logos principle and personage as the Priority of everything that can be known or experienced. The Greek translation of "in the beginning," or en arche can be understood as proclaiming our first principle as the Word, and it is God, in that it is that which none greater can be conceived, since even conceiving is a word and what is conceived is also in worded reality. So the writer of John admits that we are caught in some great divine Language Loop, in which we cannot help but live reflexively by and through the use of language. If there is something before Logos or the experience of the world without there having been language, it does not submit to being proved by having language. So the writer of John see Logos as the "bi-lingual" Being who can relate in human language and human experience the notion of the ONE who is "higher" than human experience.
If we can admit that being Worded beings is our first principle of being and knowing, from there we might be convinced that the goal is to live the best possible worded lives in the world of profound Language.
One of the goals of a writer of the Gospel of John is to provoke what might be called advanced language use or higher language use. Jesus as the prime Exemplar is shown to be a language metaphor supreme as one who can bring us to higher persuasion about better language use in our lives. Ponder all the metaphors for Jesus for the writer of John: Word from the beginning, Creator, Light, Good Shepherd, Gate, Vine, Lifted High on the Cross, and many others.
What is the difference between the very literal language use of the old Dick, Jane, and Sally elementary readers, and say the Sonnets of Shakespeare or of the mystagogical language of the New Testament? One might say that on the continuum of profound inwardness, of lyrics which move and inspire, compared with a more tight connection of a word with an external object or experience, that in spirituality, love, and aesthetics, the inward and non-literal modes of language use and interpretation are on a "higher" scale, higher that is, on a scale of aesthetic, moral and spiritual values. This does not diminish the hard connection of words with actual things and events in our external world, but it is a definitely different mode of language use.
The encounter which we have read in the storied dialogue between the Pharisee Nicodemus and Jesus is a study in language use and language interpretation, something which characterizes the entire Gospel of John.
Nicodemus, the example of an open-minded Pharisee who is curiously drawn by the Jesus phenomenon, is presented in dialogue with Jesus, the master of metaphors in provoking people to new insights.
Now one would think that Nicodemus was well aware of alternate modes to literality in language use, simply by being a reader of the Hebrew Scriptures. Surely, Nicodemus did not believe literally that God was a Shepherd, or that God was literally all the metaphors used for God in the Hebrew Scriptures? Surely Nicodemus understood analogical usage of words as the positive counter parts, of not being able to saying anything about the great apophatic unpronounceable holy Holy Name of God, particularly in all the positive attributes and names given for God in the Hebrew Scripture? Why is Nicodemus presented as a non-poetic literalist in this Gospel dialogue? Well, he is a foil, a set up personality for teaching what the Gospel channelers of the words of Jesus wanted to teach their readers.
This is exemplified in perhaps one of the most crudely hard to picture literal responses in language. It would even be but a grotesque cartoon to try to illustrate. The dialogue goes something like this: "Jesus, I can't understand your strange words because I am going to take them at their literal meaning. You say that I have to be born again, born anew? How can this old man climb back into my mother's womb?"
The dialogue is surely humorous and even absurd. But it presents one who is so devoid of poetic nuance that he crassly ignorant to the insightful metaphorical meanings implied in the words of Jesus.
Jesus is saying, "Nicodemus, you are a studied man of words and yet you are so crassly literal that you a hardened to miss the experience of the sublime because you are closed off from the possibility of the continuous conversion of the process of enlightening education of your soul."
Many century later, T.S.Kuhn, a historian of science would say that even a brute fact scientist came to be "converted" from a former scientific paradigm to embrace the "new" scientific paradigm. This conversion experience was called a "paradigm switch," and this was not to seen as threatening because science was so embracing as to be able to undergo as many paradigm shifts as needed in the continuous process of expanding scientific understanding of the world.
Jesus, as channeled through the words of John's Gospel, was saying, the Christ-community is appropriating the Hebrew Scriptures in a different way than the heretofore rabbinical schools had done. How so? Everything in the Hebrew Scripture was to be read as a set up precedent for understanding God in the God-in-Christ model which was now being preached and promulgated within the Jesus Movement. And one needed a new birth to come to knowing appreciate this Christ-paradigm.
Being born again for the Johannine writer meant understanding words differently because of how Jesus of Nazareth changed the spirituality paradigm. As Einstein was one who succeeded and surpassed Newton in some ways, without diminishing Newton, so too Jesus was one who could surpass Moses in standing on his shoulders without diminishing the wonderful significance of the Moses of Hebrew Scriptures.
What do we as "born again" Christians need to learn from the words of John about being born again? We need to learn the humility of accepting that something with universal import has the capacity in time to encompass many events of insightful impact which continue to retain their significance as learning events, even as countless other new learning events arise in time to be given to succeeding generations.
If the New Testament was a message to give the Hebrew Scriptures a new and different hearing within Christian contexts, it was a message that Judaism could do the same with their Hebrew Scriptures in new times and new places within Judaism itself.
The weak insecurity of members of any system of faith with universal claims, is to make the fatal claim of finality or final word. "We've said it all, we've said it best, we are the last and final word on God." Short on humility are such claims, and they are a denial of any self-surpassing future which is the largesse which should make any of us embrace humility in the present of our own current understanding.
Let us not be people who are committed to the finality of any word of Scripture or any final interpretation which would presume to make us infallible interpreters. Let us rejoice in the gift of new birth insights, on our way to further new birth insights.
Let the practice of being born again be the continuous conversion into the new which is the continuous promise of time as always a hopeful future to surpass ourselves individually and communally in our future in the excellence of Christ the Eternal Word, who encompasses all literality of worded meanings as well as literary worded meanings.
Being born again means being a perpetual poetic lover of God and life, but about hunger and care of the needy, we cannot be merely poetic, we need to be very literal in our pursuit and practice of justice. Christ as the Word of God invites to live on the continuum of literal to non-literal meanings in gracefully appropriate ways. Christ who is the Eternal Word, invites us to know ourselves better as we advance in learning better living through our completely worded lives. Amen.
