John 6 (NRSVUE). 59 He said these things while he was teaching in a synagogue at Capernaum. 60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” 61 But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But among you there are some who do not believe.”
After Sunday services and the coffee hour at my parish church, a few of us meet in the sanctuary for a small group discussion called Dwelling in the Word. An initiative of the Central/ Southern Illinois Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, it’s a little bit like lectio divina. We read the pericope or assigned Gospel reading for next week, and we ask ourselves three questions: “What do I notice? what do I wonder? and where might God’s Spirit be nudging us?” It’s more streamlined than lectio, but I think it touches the same bases.
So on a recent Sunday morning, we were plowing through the “bread of life” passages in the gospel of John. They’re quite lengthy, and the common lectionary — a schedule of Gospel readings agreed to by Catholic, Lutheran and other liturgical church authorities — assigns five Sundays to go over them. (John can be pretty verbose, at least to my ears, and it seems more like 500.) Sunday’s picks up in the middle of an ongoing argument with “the Jews” in the synagogue at Capernaum in which Jesus says he is “the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which the ancestors ate, and they died.”
This isn’t exactly good news to the folks in the synagogue, who grew up on stories of the Passover, the Exodus and the manna that God provided the children in Israel in the wilderness.
I’m not wildly enthusiastic about it either — John’s always carrying on about “the Jews” (hoi Ioudaioi in Greek), and it’s partly responsible for 20 centuries of antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust. I try to forgive John’s quarrel with hoi Ioudaioi as his sense of grievance at being thrown out of a synagogue, perhaps in Ephesus, as Raymond Brown and many other scholars maintain. (I’ve blogged about it HERE.) But I can understand why some of Jesus’ disciples, who, after all, were Jewish themselves, found it a difficult teaching. So do I.
What do I notice?
Back to our discussion of Sunday morning’s passage. I noticed that Jesus says it’s “the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” Hey, I say, maybe he’s spiritualizing it, maybe he doesn’t mean to be taken literally. But even as the words were tumbling out of my mouth, I realized I was off on the wrong track. We moved on.
But I was left wondering, what does Jesus — or John, as the case may be — mean here by the spirit? When I got home after church, I looked it up.
John’s gospel is more theological than the others, more intellectualized (at least to me), and more symbolical. So my inner child (who majored in English as he grew up and went off to college) says I have to read John as a whole and interpret passages like this in terms of the gospel’s narrative arc. When John’s Jesus talks about things like spirit, bread and flesh at any one point — in this case the synagogue in Capernaum in Chapter 6 — he’s elaborating on concepts that undergird the entire gospel. The word made flesh in Chapter 1, the Son of God and the incarnation, not to mention the Eucharistic overtones to the miracle of feeding 5,000 earlier in Chapter 6, in other words the whole ball of wax.
So I wasn’t surprised to discover that in order to learn what Jesus meant by spirit in this passage, I was quickly referred instead to his conversation in Chapter 3 with Nicodemus, the Pharisee who comes to him at night and asks what he had to do in other to attain the kingdom of God. It’s one of the key inflection points in John’s gospel. This dialog ensues:
Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”[b] Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You[c] must be born from above.’[d] The wind[e] blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” — John 3:4-8 (NRSVUE).
I’m fascinated with this story! For one thing, Jesus sounds a little bit here like the Jesus in Mark, Luke and Matthew. He’s not theologizing, he’s speaking in metaphors, in parables like behold, a sower went out to sow, down-home metaphors about mustard seeds, a fig tree leafing out in the spring; this time he’s saying the wind, the breath of God, blows wherever it wants, we hear it but we don’t control it.
For once in the gospel of John, Jesus is using metaphors a first-century Galilean peasant or fisherman would find relatable. I can’t help but wonder if we have an story here that came down in oral tradition from eyewitnesses independently of the synoptic gospels. I’m also intrigued with a passing comment by early 20th-century English cleric Henry Watkins in Ellicott’s Commentary. Archdeacon of Durham and professor at Durham University, he said Jesus’ exchange with Nicodemus has the sound and “method of Rabbinic dialogue.” Given John’s testy relationship with “the Jews” (hoi Ioudaioi), I want to know more.
What do I wonder?
So I rummage through the books in my home office, which is beginning to look like a combination used bookstore and unlicensed landfill.
The first place I look is Robert Kysar’s John: The Maverick Gospel. It was very helpful, but he parses the meaning of the Greek and Hebrew words for “spirit” (which intrigued my inner English major, who took Old English in grad school and developed an interest in philology and word origins which can lead me down rabbit holes). So you’ll have to bear with me a minute or two while I go chasing across first-century Greek- and Hebrew-speaking Palestine after the wind. Or spirit. Puns are ever so much more fun when you chase them across three languages over 20 centuries.
An emeritus professor at Emory’s Chandler School of Theology, Kysar notes that the Greek word for “Spirit” (which he capitalizes) is pneuma. It’s also the Greek word for wind; moreover, pneuma “is equivalent to the Hebrew word ruach, meaning wind, life breath or spirit” (125-27). Therefore, spirit, wind and the breath of life are intertwined in John, as they are in the first chapter of the first book of the Hebrew bible, when “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” at the moment of creation. All of these meanings are in play as Jesus speaks to Nicodemus. Says Kysar:
Because this new birth is is the work of God, it is mysterious, like the blowing of the wind. (The Greek word pneuma means both wind and spirit.) This idea of the birth by the Spirit is a kind of metaphor to suggest the way in which the life of the believer emerges as a result of being embraced by the presence of God. The Gospel of John does not propose to tell us exactly how this pneuma birth happens, but — quite the opposite — suggests that it is as unpredictable and mysterious as the comings and goings of the wind on a March afternoon.
So when Jesus tells his disciples, and the others back at the synagogue in Capernaum, it’s “the spirit that gives life” and “the flesh is useless,” he’s using language that suggests matters of the spirit are beyond human comprehension.
Where might God’s Spirit be nudging us?
Kysar doesn’t interpret Jesus’ invocation of the spirit here as representing the third person of the Holy Trinity. That will come later, says Kysar, when Jesus speaks of the “Advocate” or “Paraclete” during his Farewell Discourse. But the Rev. Judith Jones, vicar of St. Stephen & St. Luke by the Sea Episcopal Churches, Waldport, Ore., writing in Working Preacher, a set of online commentaries on lectionary readings maintained by Luther Seminary in St. Paul, confidently asserts the contrary. “In his conversation with Nicodemus,” she says, “Jesus refers to all three persons of the Trinity.”
Me? I think they’re both right.
In a commentary on Jesus’ dialog with Nicodemus in John 3, Jones goes on to speak of spiritual rebirth in terms of the wind:
Those who place their trust in Jesus will have eternal life, being reborn from above out of/by water and the Spirit (Greek pneuma). Pneuma can mean “spirit,” “breath,” and “wind,” and Jesus plays with this ambiguity. Like the breath of God in Genesis 2, the Spirit gives life to believers. Like the wind, God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes, and though observers may perceive its presence, they neither comprehend it nor control it. Strikingly, Jesus says that those who are born of the Spirit share in the Spirit’s mysterious freedom (John 3:8).
There’s a lot here to chew on. It is the spirit that gives life […] The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life, says Jesus in the synagogue at Capernaum. No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit, Jesus tells Nicodemus. The wind [the spirit, the breath of God] blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. Luther, who could turn a pretty good down-home metaphor himself, had a lot of fun with this one in a sermon he preached April 6, 1538 at St. Mary’s Stadtkirche in Wittenberg: :
The Lord Christ cites only one such illustration here [John 3:8], but when we survey the whole creation, we behold plenty of them. You cannot explain the growth of a kernel from a stalk, the growth of an apple, a pear, or a cherry from a tree, or how a tree, entirely dry in winter, is green again in spring. And yet we are foolish and stupid with our “Why?” and persist in arguing about matters that one must accept solely on faith. (297)
In other words, sola fide. We’re a long way here from Jesus’ lecturing his disciples at the synagogue in Capernaum on the spirit, the flesh and the bread of life. (Maybe not quite so far after all, when you think about it.) And we haven’t come close to exhausting the topic. The prompt for the Central/Southern Illinois Synod’s Dwelling in the Word program asks, where might God’s Spirit be nudging us?” Well, it’s nudging me to take another look at Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John 3. I’ve got a feeling I’m not done with it — or, maybe, it’s not done with me.
Links and Citations
Judith Jones, “Commentary on John 3:1-17,” Working Preacher, May 27, 2018, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/the-holy-trinity-2/commentary-on-john-31-17-8
Robert Kysar, John: Maverick Gospel, 3d ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007): 126-27.
Dorothy A. Lee, “Commentary on John 3:1-21,” Working Preacher, Jan. 28, 2018, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/nicodemus-2/commentary-on-john-31-21-3.
Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, Chapters 1-4, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Vol. 22, Luther’s Works (St. Louis: Concordia, 1957): 292-303.
Henry Watkins, commentary on John 3, Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers, ed. Charles Ellicott (1905), rpt. Biblehub https://biblehub.com/commentaries/ellicott/john/3.htm
Wikipedia: Articles on Raymond Brown, Charles Ellicott, Farewell Discourse, Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit in Judaism. Nicodemus, Parables of Jesus, Paraclete, Stadtkirche Wittnenberg and Henry Watkins.
[Revised and uplinked Sept. 15, 2024]
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