for no one can do these signs that you are doing
unless God is with him.
One can see the plausibility of the signs from an outside perspective, external to the Kingdom of God. Nicodemus recognized that the signs that Jesus was doing required a supernatural explanation. He saw that God must be cooperating with Jesus in order to allow him to do things which were not possible in the natural order, but which were full of the goodness and mercy that was characteristic of God. He was unable to determine more than this, however. He was limited by his normal human understanding which obtained only to the natural and the earthly. He heard Jesus talk about being born again and interpreted it in a literal sense. However, since he recognized that resulted in a non-sequitur he asked Jesus to clarify.
Nicodemus said to him,
"How can a man once grown old be born again?
Surely he cannot reenter his mother's womb and be born again, can he?"
Like us all, Nicodemus had been born of flesh, was a member of the human race, created in the image of God. But this did not give him the wherewithal to understand the new spiritual reality that had sparked his curiosity. He needed a new beginning, a new birth, an origin that was rooted in divinity and not only in humanity. Only from the inside could one truly see the Kingdom of God so as to understand it. And only as a child of God did one enter that Kingdom. The way that one who was not a God's Son by nature became a child of God was by sharing in the Sonship of Jesus. This was brought about through the sacrament of baptism by which the believer was united with Jesus himself, in which water symbolized death and rebirth. The new birth, however, was real, and came about through the Spirit was given by the Father, making the newly baptized into sons and daughters of God. What Jesus was by nature believers became by divine adoption through baptism.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless one is born of water and Spirit
he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.
What Nicodemus wanted to see and understand was something that could only be grasped from within. This was not because of elitism, or because of the layered secrets of mystery cults. It was rather because spiritual realities required spiritual interpretation. Or, put another way, what God was doing in the world only made sense to those who had the mind of God. To the those possessing a merely human mind God once said through Isaiah, "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways" (see Isaiah 55:8). But the baptized are able to say with Saint Paul that "we have the mind of Christ" (see First Corinthians 2:16). Normal human intellectual capacity could never discover the fact that God was a Trinity. But the person renewed in the Spirit could believe it. And not only could he believe it, but he had in fact entered into the reality of the love between the Father and the Son, the very Spirit himself who was brought about his new birth.
The wind blows where it wills,
and you can hear the sound it makes,
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes;
so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
Those born of the Spirit are hard to understand for outsiders. They care an awful lot about things that seem abstract or implausible to others. They are motivated to seek first things to which nonbelievers are entirely indifferent since they cannot perceive them. They seek to move in response to the will of God as sailboats respond to the wind. But it is for the most part the family of God that experiences his guidance in this way. Nonbelievers look upon these waters and seem to see boats sailing rapidly, even on days that seem to them to have no wind. We think of Paul who sometimes initially made plans to go in one direction but was then prevented by the Spirit and then allowed himself to be redirected somewhere else. And we think of Philip whom the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took away somewhere else after he had baptized the Ethiopian.
It is the Holy Spirit that inspires Christians to withstand tyrants and corrupt leaders as did the disciples described in our reading from Acts. They understood that this sort of opposition was foreseen in the divine plan and were thus not overly disturbed by it. They saw it as a fulfillment of a prophetic psalm.
Why did the Gentiles rage
and the peoples entertain folly?
The kings of the earth took their stand
and the princes gathered together
against the Lord and against his anointed.
But the Apostles did not rage or entertain folly in response. They did not meet the hostile oppressors on their own terms, since they had been indeed shown a different way by Jesus their leader. Instead of human retaliation they chose to rely on the Spirit to equip them to respond and then to guide that response.
And now, Lord, take note of their threats,
and enable your servants to speak your word
with all boldness, as you stretch forth your hand to heal,
and signs and wonders are done
through the name of your holy servant Jesus."
As they prayed, the place where they were gathered shook,
and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit
and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.
The reason we are often unable to be bold in the face of opposition is that we tend to try to meet them on their own terms. Let us instead learn from the Apostles and seek the Spirit even and especially in times of crisis. The world absolutely needs bold Christians now as much as ever. It does not need vitriol or even arguments so much as it needs signs and wonders that reveal the lordship of Jesus himself. Once people recognize that reality the rest will work itself out in turn.
David Crowder Band - Here Is Our King
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