An expectant dad's sympathy for Nicodemus
Nicodemus is perplexed. There's a lesson for us in his confusion.
Maybe Nicodemus is on to something. When the fan-by-night of Jesus asks him how a person can be born a second time, Jesus doubles down on his insistence that a second birth is necessary to enter the kingdom of God. I wonder if Nicodemus's confusion is less an argument with Jesus on this point and more an acknowledgment. Each of us plays such an alarmingly small role in our first births that it is difficult to imagine how something that is not ours to do or initiate, but which is nevertheless essential to our being, comes to be.
In other words, maybe Nicodemus is wondering how a full-grown man crawls into the womb, but surely becoming smaller would not have given him any more of an ability to be born on his own command. After all, as my children regularly remind me, human babies are the least developed of all mammalian babies, the least in position to coordinate any action.
Maybe Nicodemus wrestles with the necessity of what can only come as gift. If this is the case, then Nicodemus's perplexity is itself a gift to us. History is replete with instances of human insistence on misconceiving God's gifts as commandments to perform. But none of us thought to be born or had any input in the matter. Faithfulness, with respect to birth, is not in the being born; faithfulness is thanking God for gifts we did not make ourselves, our selves not least among those gifts. Indeed, even the wherewithal with which we lift up our hearts is a gift of the living God.
