Look and Live
Lent II
Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night.
Not because he’s hostile. Not because he’s trying to trap him. But because he’s careful. Respectable. Sincere.
He’s a teacher of Israel. A serious one. He knows the Scriptures. He knows the tradition. He knows how faith works, or at least how it has always worked for him.
And still, something in Jesus unsettles him enough to come quietly, after hours, when no one is watching.
Jesus doesn’t flatter him. He doesn’t affirm his curiosity. He doesn’t say, “You’re almost there.”
He goes straight for the heart.
“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Not improved.
Not instructed.
Not more disciplined.
Born.
Which means this is not something you do.
It’s something that happens to you.
Nicodemus is confused. He hears Jesus in the only categories he has: effort, process, achievement. “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” In other words, how does this work? What’s the method?
Jesus doesn’t answer the question.
He undoes it.
What is born of flesh is flesh.
What is born of Spirit is spirit.
Nicodemus is sincere. But this is something else.
Even good, faithful religion tends to assume continuity, a straight line from who I am now to who I will become if I try hard enough, believe deeply enough, get it right often enough.
Jesus interrupts that story.
The life God gives doesn’t evolve from what we already have.
It comes from above.
So Jesus turns to images: birth, wind, flesh and Spirit. Things you cannot force. Things you cannot organize into a system. The wind moves and leaves its effects behind. You hear it before you understand it. You feel it without managing it.
So it is with the Spirit.
Control slips through our fingers.
Salvation no longer rests on our competence.
Then Jesus takes him back to the wilderness.
There, the people were dying. Moses lifted up a bronze serpent. And those who looked lived.
They weren’t healed because they understood why it worked.
They weren’t healed because they deserved it.
They were healed because they looked.
“So must the Son of Man be lifted up,” Jesus says.
Not so the world might finally climb up to God,
but so God could reach down into the mess.
This is the scandal.
The kingdom isn’t a ladder.
It’s a lifeline.
“For God so loved the world…”
Not the worthy.
Not the enlightened.
Not the ones who had their theology sorted.
The world.
The whole snake-bitten mess of it.
God does not send the Son to condemn what’s already condemned. He sends the Son to rescue. To give life. To bring light into the night. To birth something entirely new where only death seemed possible.
Nicodemus fades from view after this conversation. We don’t see him decide. We don’t get a clean conversion moment.
But later, he shows up. Quietly defending Jesus before the council. Then again at the burial, bringing seventy-five pounds of spices—extravagant, public, perhaps too late, but still drawn.
We don’t know when the birth happened.
We don’t see the moment the wind blew through his life.
That’s the point.
The Spirit moves where it will. It doesn’t always announce itself with trumpets. Sometimes it comes slowly. Quietly.
The kind of thing you only recognize looking back.
That is how new life often comes.
New life is not achieved.
It is given.
And like all births, it is less about our strength
and more about our surrender.
Look at the One who has been lifted up.
Look up.
And live.
These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached: