If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe,
how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?
Sacramental realities like baptism contain both an earthly and a heavenly aspect. There is the water, on the one hand, which is richly symbolic. On the other, there is the Spirit, the agent of transformation who imparts grace to the believer. Jesus seems to recognize that he must ground his communication with us in things that are familiar and intelligible in order give us access to realities which are transcendent and invisible. We are creatures compromised of both matter and Spirit, and he addresses himself to us accordingly. But he does want to lead us through that which is earthly into participation in heavenly realities. He wants to guide us to the spiritual and immaterial realm in which the Father himself dwells in inapproachable light. But we can't bypass the earthly and jump straight to the spiritual. If we will not believe Jesus about the necessity of baptism how can we hope to be sufficiently docile to be led into the life of the Triune God?
There is a certain humility that is required when Jesus deals with us as the sort of creatures we in fact are. After all, we are not angels. We are not beings that comprehend everything at once with no intermediate steps. We must be willing to be taught by means of parables and led by means of Sacraments. These things may seem excessively simplistic to our prideful egos. But what we mistake for superficiality is in fact clarity and profound and inexhaustible intelligibility. The word of God is similar. On the surface there is the literal meaning which educated men like Augustine found embarrassingly inelegant. But in addition to the level of the letter there is also the level of Spirit, which is life-giving. But the historical sense is foundational. Without it, the spiritual sense seems fanciful and irrelevant, in the same way that a prophecy that never comes true is not an authentic prophecy.
No one has gone up to heaven
except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.
Jesus, by means of his incarnation, is the bridge between the earthly and the heavenly. Only he has perfect clarity and complete understanding of heavenly realities. Only he can revel the Father to us. By shunning parables, Sacraments, and the letter of Scripture, we are in fact also shunning the human nature Jesus chose to assume for our sake. But when we embrace these we embrace not only the human Jesus, but also, through him, the Triune God. We are thus caught up in the invisible realities which Nicodemus wished to know. Such a desire was not wrong. It only needed to be properly ordered.
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
One particular instance of realizing the spiritual meaning of Scripture is presented to us today. The saraph serpents in the desert were more than merely a punishment for a specific instance of disobedience. They were symbolic of the poisonous nature of sin itself. So too did the mysterious way in which the effect of the saraph serpents bite was finally negated point forward to the way in which God ultimately dealt with sin itself. Because we can read the literal meaning of the historical text we come to understand things about both the nature of sin and salvation that would be otherwise more obscure. Just as the serpents revealed the ugliness of disobedience so too did the cross reveal the ugliness of sin. Gazing on what the people had wrought in the form of a bronze statue allowed them to be healed. Gazing upon what our sin did to the spotlessly innocent lamb of God allowed us to experience salvation. But we see that there was absolutely no way around reckoning with the problem.
Let's believe Jesus about earthly things so that he can then reveal to us heavenly things. Then our communities of faith on earth will more and more closely come to resemble heaven itself, as was the case with the early Church described in Acts.
There was no needy person among them,
for those who owned property or houses would sell them,
bring the proceeds of the sale,
and put them at the feet of the Apostles,
and they were distributed to each according to need.
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