“One step taken in surrender to God is better than a journey across the ocean without it.”[i]
In today’s Gospel passage (JN 3: 1-8), coming in the middle of the night to converse with Jesus, the Pharisee leader, Nicodemus, begins to question Jesus, and the idea of being born again comes up…
“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God,
for no one can do these signs that you are doing
unless God is with him.”
Jesus answered and said to him,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless one is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
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?”
Jesus answered,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless one is born of water and Spirit
he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.
Nicodemus first confronts his own belief in the power of God, pointing out that he recognizes that Jesus came from God and that God is with him, on account of the signs that Jesus was performing. This is an important point to make –to have come from God and to have God with you! Jesus, though, wants to take this farther. What does it mean to come from God and to have God with you? This is not simply a description of a past identity. What about now? What could coming from God mean now? What does it mean in the present to say that God is with you? Ultimately, the question may be, “is there any chance for anything new and transformative to come about as the result of this?” These may be the questions that Jesus is asking for Nicodemus to consider when he declares that unless one is born from above, he cannot see or enter the kingdom of God. We hear clearly the perplexity that Nicodemus is experiencing by this question:
“How can a man once grown old be born again?
Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?”
From a physical standpoint, we consider that our birth is a one-time event. And what a miraculous event that is! Along with our parents’ participation, we are called forth from God into life on this earth. Though we perhaps cannot remember our birth, many of us know the story of our births. In my own case, I know that I was born on my Great Grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. There are pictures I can look at from the anniversary party, especially the one of my brother who went with Dad to the party, while Mom and I were in the hospital. There is a inexplicable serene delight I get when I look at that picture of my brother in a bow-tie and a red vest, dressed for the party, knowing that this was right around the same time that I came into the world.
Having a series of birthday celebrations over the years fails to really captures what it means to be born from the Living God. I am not convinced that our lives are meant to be a rote repetition of the same thing over and over. Unfortunately, however, just as in Jesus’ time, we tend toward this lifeless repetition through all those certainties that we think we know about ourselves and our identities – religion, gender, occupation, politics, nationality, culture, etc. We return to these identities over and over again, telling ourselves unconsciously that these identities are who we are and they are all that we are. We have made our miraculous birth from God into a static preponderance of the familiar and that seems fixed by our physical one-time birth.
As the Gospel shows us, we have come from God, through that birth, and we are sustained in this life by having God with us at all times. Yet, we fail to see that being born is not a one-time event. How could that possibly be true if we have a living God with us at all times? Could it be that being born or reborn is the very way of life that Jesus is revealing and teaching.?
‘You must be born from above.’
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.”
The 13th Century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, describes it in radical terms as being born into God, which also means giving birth to God.[ii] He is talking about the unfathomable depth of what it means to have God with us at all times. We have God within us always and it is up to us to align ourselves with this divine creativity instilled within our depths. Quite simply, this means we are called to participate in the ongoing creation and Divine birth from within. We are created – given physical birth – to continue the same Divine Work of creating and giving birth. The divine spark within us, in our soul, is the kindling for this creative divine birth.
Because we are participating in the Divine, each birth is new, just as God is always new – this is the New Life promised in Jesus– the kingdom of God that cannot reside in stasis but must flow in that curious but wonderful wind of the Holy Spirit that does blow where it wills but cannot be controlled, captured or fixed in any one identity. We don’t know from where it comes or even where it is going. We are simply borne upon it if we allow it to continue creation in us. 
As Meister Eckhart points out, the problem is that we are always blind to that divine spark of goodness and light within us. Just as Nicodemus went to visit Jesus in the dark, so too we must go into the hidden depths within us – the darkness of not knowing – to find God or let God find us. In order to be reborn in water and spirit, we must draw closer to the Divine One within us, and when this happens God is born again in our midst. It is a movement to another mode of being that does not exit the world but brings transformative newness in birth to the world and all of our lives. This is the kingdom of God.
So how do we attune ourselves to this birthing process? Jesus seems vague and mysterious perhaps, but it seems that one thing he is saying to Nicodemus is that we have to let go (kenosis) of those things that are fixing us in rigid identities, preventing us from seeing, much less entering the kingdom of God, which is the dynamic birthing process through the Holy Spirit. This is Nicodemus ‘old man’ letting go to be windswept up into the womb of the Holy Spirit to be born again, and indeed, give birth to new life. This is the invitation to cease returning to stillbirths of rigid identifications and highly formulated plans for God and engage in the divine commission for openness and trust that we all have in Christ. It takes newborn eyes to see and a newborn sense of living and being to facilitate our entrance into this kingdom of newness. Being born over and over again is God’s delight! The possibilities are endless!
[i] Raymond Barnard Blakney, MEISTER ECKHART: A MODERN TRANSLATION (Harper and Row: 1941), 17.
[ii] Ibid., 60-62.