1. Jesus honours Nicodemus most by taking him by the straightest path and at the swiftest pace to the very centre of the Christian faith and life. It might have been pleasanter for Nicodemus if He had kept him viewing for a while the outposts of Christianity, instead of leading him at once to the citadel; if they had lingered together on the threshold of the temple of truth, instead of immediately penetrating the inner shrine. But time was precious, and that night had to be made the most memorable in Nicodemus' life. So, without any prelude, Jesus at once utters the mighty truth, “Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
In emphatically proclaiming that truth Christ does what John the Baptist had done not long before-He lays the axe at the root of Pharisaic pride. He knew, as everybody else knew, that the Pharisees had not accepted the baptism of John. In the great revival, when multitudes of all classes had come to the austere prophet for baptism in the Jordan, the Pharisees had stood aloof. They “rejected for themselves the counsel of God, being not baptized of him.” They were in the habit of saying of any Gentile who embraced Judaism, “He is born again”; but that a Jew, and above all such a Hebrew of Hebrews as every Pharisee counted himself, should need to be born again before he could enter into the Kingdom of God-this was monstrous, incredible! When the Kingdom of the Messiah came, every conscientious and law-abiding Jew would naturally have a place in it, and the Jewish nation would, equally as a matter of course, have precedence of all the Gentiles.
That was the creed of the time. But Jesus fairly staggered Nicodemus, and shook the foundations of Jewish piety, by proclaiming, “Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Not “except a publican or sinner,” not “except a Greek or Roman,” not “except a barbarian of wild Scythia or heathen of dark Ethiopia,” but “except a man.” And Nicodemus knew that Jesus was not wasting time upon abstract propositions, but was speaking to the point, plainly meaning that Nicodemus and all those in whose name he was speaking needed to prepare themselves for the Kingdom of God by humbling themselves under God's mighty hand, coming to a deep sense of their sin, and receiving a new heart and a right spirit.
The Pharisee, like every common man, needed to be born of water and of the Spirit. He had refused the water of repentance which John had offered, and he may now refuse the life-giving Spirit which Jesus offers. But the refusal cannot alter the fact: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Thus Jesus effects a simultaneous process of levelling down and levelling up-levelling down the Jews, even the best of them, and levelling up the Gentiles, even the worst of them. Thus He makes them all one before God, one in need and one in privilege: every man must be born anew, and every man may be born anew. Thus He obliterates all distinctions. That obliteration was, in the eyes of the Jews, His unpardonable sin, but it is now, in the eyes of all mankind, His unique and inalienable merit.
The doctrine of the new birth is still a source of perplexity and amazement to many. It is said of an Archbishop of York [Dr. Drummond] that he once rebuked one of his clergy in words that sound strangely from the lips of a Christian preacher, saying, “He would be better employed in preaching the morality of Socrates than in canting about the new birth.” There are many who dismiss the truth as the cant of evangelicalism; who see nothing but absurdity or impossibility in it. It is easy to misunderstand or misrepresent a truth which is instinct with the grace and hope of the gospel. Yet where there is any glimmer of spiritual intelligence, the idea of the new birth quickly commends itself. The Old Testament promise, “A new heart also will I give you,” misleads no one, and the new birth is equally intelligible. For it must never be forgotten that the expression “born from above” is only a figure-one illustration among the many which are employed to describe the beginning of salvation in the soul of man. It is a passing “from darkness to light,” “from the power of Satan unto God,” a “conversion,” turning to God from idols. It is a “redemption” from slavery, a “rising from the dead into newness of life.” It is a “justification” as in a court of law. There is no end to the symbolism of salvation. All the great experiences of the life of man which involve a radical or effectual change are susceptible of spiritual significance. The figure of birth differs from all others only in the pregnancy of its meaning, and in its suggestiveness of mystery and human helplessness. The life of the Kingdom of God is something different from the natural life of man. The experience with which it begins is so thorough in its effects and so hidden in its method that it is likened to a birth. In no clearer way could the distinctively spiritual character of that life be described.1 [Note: John Reid, Jesus and Nicodemus, 66.]
2. If Nicodemus reeled under the blow which the quiet words of Jesus inflicted on his pride, he quickly recovered himself. There was something, not only in the authoritative manner of Jesus, but also in Nicodemus' own conscience, which made it impossible for him to question even for a moment the truth announced by the Teacher come from God. At home among his books, over which he had burned so much midnight oil, he might have questioned, and repudiated, the humiliating doctrine. In the Sanhedrin among his peers he would have heard it not only questioned but even ridiculed on every side. But in the presence of Jesus, whose pure eyes searched the depths of his soul, he inwardly acknowledged the truth that even a law-abiding Pharisee needed to undergo as radical a change of heart as a profane publican or a godless pagan.
But, granting that a man-even a superman, such as every Pharisee imagined himself to be-must be born again before he can enter the Kingdom of God, there arises an extremely difficult problem as to the way in which this is to be done. To the wit of man it is not only a difficult but an absolutely baffling problem. How can an old man, bound by all the habits of a lifetime, free himself from his past, and begin a new life? It may be necessary, and who will deny that it is desirable? Who has not sometimes said in tones of infinite regret:
Oh, to go back across the years long vanished,
To have the words unsaid, the deeds undone,
The errors cancelled, the dark shadows banished,
In the glad sense of a new world begun;
To be a little child, whose page of story
Is yet undimmed, unblotted by a stain,
And in the sunrise of primeval glory
To know that life has had its start again!
Yet what seems so desirable, and what Jesus declares to be indispensable, may after all be impossible. That is the feeling of Nicodemus and of all thoughtful men in every age. They have come to an impasse. Ah! if it were but possible to be little children over again-to begin to live life again, to undo all the evils of our life, to be living and yet without the evils that have gathered about our life, to have no memory of sin, to feel no blots on our soul, to have made no mistakes in life, to have done no wrong, nothing that calls up the blush on our cheek, to have nothing against which we fret and dash ourselves in vain, like poor captive creatures against the iron cage that holds them, torturing ourselves over an irrevocable unworthiness; to have the joy and the unclouded hopefulness, the fresh and unstained powers of the child-to be born again when one is old! Can it be?
A man who is converted in the New Testament sense is one who has surrendered to forces immeasurably greater than anything he has of himself; one who has awakened to the overwhelming consciousness of a spiritual world brought to a focus before him in the Person of Christ; one who finds the little bay of his individual life, with all its little pebbles and little shells and little weeds, flooded by the tide of a great deep, over which the very Spirit of God broods.1 [Note: H. Wheeler Robinson, The Christian Doctrine of Prayer of Manasseh, 322.]
There is a touching little poem by Dora Greenwell (A Good Confession), suggested by the inscription on a tombstone in a country churchyard in Wales, which tells how he who lies below passed away at the age of eighty, and yet-referring to the date of his conversion to Christ-was only “four years old when he died”-
“If you ask me how long I have been in the world, I'm old-I'm very old;
If you ask me how many years I've lived, it'll very soon be told-
Past eighty years of age, yet only four years old!”1 [Note: G. Jackson, First Things First, 247.]
