Opening Comments on "Eternal Life" and Being "Born from Above"

1. "Eternal Life." It seems to me that what is at issue here in these texts, the bottom line, is what constitutes real life, "eternal life." How does one achieve it? Or perhaps the word "achieve" belies the problem. We don't achieve real life, we receive it as a gift through faith. It's all our grasping after life, thinking we achieve it, that leads to death.

It's amazing how we can so easily turn a gift into an achievement. Being familiar with the story of Abraham and Sarah, for example, we might be tempted to think of their faith as an achievement. We notice how willing they were to move away from family and friends in order to receive the promise of descendants that will make a great nation. Faith, according to our achievement oriented way of approaching things ("flesh"?), is being able to give up everything in order to receive something else. But that giving up everything is still an achievement.

St. Paul, in his interpretation of the story of Abraham and Sarah in Romans 4, goes to great pains to make sure that we understand that the life-giving promise which Abraham received was not something he earned but was reckoned to him as a free gift through faith. But, until one gets to Romans 8, I think that St. Paul does not as clearly put this in the cosmic context as does our Gospel text from John. When I read much of Romans, I think it is still too easy to keep things on the level of personal or individual justification through faith. Only in the few verses in the middle of chapter 8 does one more clearly get the cosmic context.

John's Gospel more helpfully, I think, presents this matter of faith as a matter of true life, "eternal life." Jesus tells Nicodemus that we must virtually be born again, from above, of the Spirit this time. And the key is once again faith in Christ, "believing in him." But the divine righteousness, the divine plan, is more readily perceived because John presents these matters of faith as a matter of real life, "eternal life." And the wider context of real life is not just my life, either now or in "the hereafter," but the cosmic context of God in the process of saving the world. "God so loved the world...." God sent the Son into the world to save the world. Not just to save you or me, but the world.

Then, what's the point of personal faith? Why is that so important? Faith, belief, engages us in that work of saving the world right now. We become part of what God is doing to rebirth the world into real life right now.

The very heart of James Alison's Girardian reading of the Gospel also revolves around this issue of death vs. true life. The pivotal chapter in his The Joy of Being Wrong is the fourth chapter, "The Resurrection and Original Sin," in which he unpacks the doctrine of original sin as centering on the issue of death vs. life. We are beings whose lives have come to revolve around death, and God in Jesus Christ came to offer us true life, "eternal life," for all those who believe in him.

At the heart of this pivotal chapter is this key paragraph, at the heart of which is a reference both to John 3:16-17 and Paul's key argument in Romans:

However, God did not raise Jesus from the dead merely to demonstrate his own deathless-ness, or to rescue Jesus from the middle of the human reality of death as a bodyguard may rescue a beleaguered pop star from the midst of a pressing crowd of fans, to get her away from it all as quickly as possible. The third step in the recasting of God and the recasting of sin is that God raised up this man who had been killed in this way for us. The victim of human iniquity was raised up as forgiveness; in fact the resurrection was the raising up of the victim as forgiveness. This it was which permitted the recasting of God as love. It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us. This is the witness of the remarkably similar passages found in John 3:16-17 and Romans 3:21-26, as well of course as 1 John 4:9-10. If the third step reveals God as forgiving us (and the presence of the crucified-and-risen victim was exactly this revelation), then it also simultaneously reveals that death is not only a human reality, and one inflected by sin, but that the human reality of death itself is capable of being forgiven." (The Joy of Being Wrong, pp. 117-118)

But the other aspect of Alison's work that is compelling to me, in light of what we have talked about here, is the way in which he always immediately brings in creation when we begin to experience the full impact of the Resurrection's saving power. To experience the power of the Resurrection is to begin to really experience God's saving power of life for the whole world. That's the import of such an early theological leap in the life of the church to a Cosmic Christ who shared in God's work of creation since the beginning of time. The example of Alison's work that I have made readily available on this site is the last part of chapter 2 in Raising Abel, a portion entitled (excerpt) "The Third Step: Creation in Christ." He makes a similar move in chapter 3 of The Joy of Being Wrong (pp. 94-102).

Finally, in his writings on John 9 (The Joy of Being Wrong, pp. 119-125; Contagion 1997, pp. 26-46; Faith Beyond Resentment, chapter 1), Alison points to how Jesus' act of healing the man born blind echoes the creation story: Jesus takes the soil of the ground mixed with his own spit to continue his Father's work. And 'doing his Father's work' is the same response Jesus had used to challenges of healing on the sabbath in John 5. What is God's work? Creating. Jesus reveals the power of eternal life by continuing to do God's work of creation. Healing is the work of on-going creation. When the Resurrection brings God's work of forgiveness in such a decisive manner, the work of renewing creation begins in earnest, and, through faith (where the Spirit blows), we are able to join in that work of life, too.

But that's not all. The evangelist John emphasizes that "Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind" (John 9:32). Alison suggests that this points to the wider anthropological context of humanity's being blind since the beginning of our worlds -- blind to the foundation of human culture in collective violence. And the lifting up on the cross, with just such an act of collective violence against the Lamb of God, will finally reveal the truth of those foundations, making it possible to heal the blindness humanity has suffered since our birth. The revelation of such violent foundations, paired with the forgiveness of the Risen Christ, brings the possibility of rebirth for humanity into a new culture, eschatologically anticipated through life in the church. Humanity's complicitness with the forces of death can be forgiven, and we can in faith begin to live anew -- to have "eternal life."

2. "Born from above." John 3 further presents us with the image of being born from above. In 2005 I began the Lenten season by preaching the story of Genesis 3 around the insight of mimetic theory into persons as being constituted through the eyes of others. "Self-consciousness," often tied with the maturation process of 'losing the innocence' of childhood, is, according to mimetic theory, more accurately an "other-consciousness." We become increasingly aware of how others see us, and so we increasingly see ourselves through the eyes of others. My reflections for Lent 1 bring out the role of eyes in the Genesis 3 story; and I suggest a good February story, the movie Groundhog Day, as an illustration of seeing ourselves and the world through the eyes of others. I also suggest an ideal Girardian resource for understanding this theme, namely, Chapter 9 of James Alison's On Being Liked.

John 3 presents the opportunity to extend this theme over several weeks -- the theme of persons constituted through the eyes of others -- through its language of being born from above. We are reborn from above as we find ourselves being known through God's loving eyes in Jesus Christ. Nicodemus is still perhaps too closed off to this possibility. He even comes under the cover of darkness, signaling his not wanting to be seen. But the Samaritan woman at the well in next week's John 4 text provides a good example. She encounters Jesus in the bright light of high noon, and through the eyes of Jesus she is able to see herself in a new light. And Lent 4A brings a climax of these themes, perhaps, with the John 9 text about rebirthing humanity and healing our blindness by seeing ourselves through the forgiving eyes of Jesus. Will there be an extension of these themes for the John 11 text of Lent 5A? In 2005 I'm in a team ministry and don't preach every week; but perhaps 2008 will provide the opportunity for five weeks under the theme: "Reborn from above to eternal life through God's loving eyes in Jesus Christ."

Genesis 12:1-4a

Resources

1. Gil Bailie, has several places with good insights on Abraham: "Creation, Fall & Sacrifice" audio tape series, tape #2; Violence Unveiled, pp.140-143; "At Cross Purposes" audio tape series, tape #1. A summary of his view on Abraham and Sarah is that they begin the mission of being Church, to be called out (ekklesia) of conventional human culture, based on making and expelling victims, to the life of being the expelled one as the basis for God's culture. Abraham's first baby step away from the human culture of his day was to move decisively away from human sacrifice when he hears the voice of God offering him a ram.

Reflections and Questions

1. These verses have become among the most important to me in all of Scripture. As I seek to live my faith from day-to-day, there is no more simple theme than "blessed to be a blessing." The promise of blessing to Abraham and Sarah is not just for their sakes but that "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

2. From the perspective of mimetic theory, it is the difference between catching God's desire and catching each other's. In the flesh, to use St. Paul's terminology, our desires are for limited objects and lead to rivalry. In the Spirit, God's loving desire for the whole world begins to become our desire. In making a covenant with Abraham and Sarah, God initiates a long process of salvation that promises to bring us into line with God's desire, with a goal no less than the blessing of being chosen in order to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. A sense of chosenness for its own sake is a failed sense of calling. Chosenness must always be for the sake of being a blessing to all the families of the earth.

3. On Romans 4 immediately below, the idea of history is raised in connection with the doctrine of election. Again from the perspective of mimetic theory, history begins with a calling out of conventional human culture -- mired as it is in the "eternal return" (Nietzsche), the cyclical nature of sacrificial crises and their sacrificial resolutions -- into covenant with the Creator of the whole earth. This will always mean a call away from sacrifice because the latter always must have a logic of being over against someone or something. The Creator of the whole world is never against anything she has made, so being chosen by the Creator God means a responsibility to the whole world, to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. But humanity is so mired in sacrifice that we could never be wholly called away from conventional culture until we clearly see God's having absolutely nothing to do with sacrifice, so much so that it took God's Son becoming a willing self-sacrifice to our sacrifice to reveal it and forgive it, turning it into the possibility of true repentance, a true coming into God's Culture of Life. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son..."

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

Resources

1. Gil Bailie, "The Letter to the Romans" audio tape series, tape #3. One of the insights most helpful to me is his Girardian take on Paul's difference between flesh and Spirit.

2. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence. Abraham's call brings up the doctrine of election, which is primarily dealt with on pages 129-139, on Romans 9-11.

3. The journal Dialog, Vol. 32, Fall 1993, is entitled "Paul and Luther: A Debate over Sacred Violence," with Hamerton-Kelly's book as the central item for debate. One of the key items of debate ends up being what Hamerton-Kelly says about the doctrine of election. René Girard ("A Girardian Review of Hamerton-Kelly on Paul," Dialog 32:4 [Fall 1993], pp. 269-274) has a review, as well, and one of the only places where he disagrees a bit with Hamerton-Kelly is on the notion of election (see p. 273). For more on this discussion between Hamerton-Kelly and Girard, see the resources for Romans 9 in the page for Proper 13A.

Girard talks about election in terms of "maximum responsibility." To me, this makes perfect sense in light of the Gen. 12:1-3: the goal is nothing less than to be a blessing for all the families of the earth. It can be no other way if, in covenant love with God, we love the whole world. The flip side of this positive calling, then, is also "colossal failure," so that "the doctrine of the election is revealed as a call to repentance, an intensified awareness of our guilt, not a narcissistic contemplation of some imaginary superiority." And this sense of guilt is only productive when met with the sense of hope that also comes with being called. Girard writes:

The total Paulinian idea [of election] must be retained, I feel, in order to balance the sense of guilt with a sense of hope. The continuation of hope is the same thing as a belief in the significance of history. If we do away with hope, we run the risk of turning the sense of guilt into the destructive despair that is a negation of history.

John 3:1-17

Exegetical Note

The key pun in this passage (see, for example, Raymond Brown's Anchor Bible commentary, vol. 1, pp. 130ff.) is the Greek word anothen, which can be translated as either "again" or "from above" -- hence, Nicodemus' misunderstanding. He is thinking in terms of being born again, and Jesus is trying to get him thinking in terms of being born from above -- or both, being born again from above. The key, it seems to me, is that the source of rebirth comes from outside this world. Things of this world are flesh; the source of true life and power comes from above by the Spirit.

Resources

1. Gil Bailie, "The Gospel of John" audio tape series, tape #4. Bailie reads John 3 and 4 together. He gives a very helpful contrast: (1) Nicodemus: upright leader of the Jews, strict, orthodox Pharisee, a moral paragon, a man; (2) The Samaritan woman: a heretic by Jewish standards, a loose woman of moral disrepute, a woman. Also, the setting: at midnight vs. noon; and the theme: birth vs. marriage. These are two contrasting stories of encounters with Jesus, with the second one very definitely yielding faith. (The first outcome is left hanging; we don't immediately find out Nicodemus' ultimate response.) Link to my notes / transcription of Bailie's lecture on John 3-4.

2. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, the first section of chapter 4, pp. 115-119, as mentioned above, which is the title section of the book. Link to an excerpt of "The Joy of Being Wrong."

3. James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment, chap. 10, "Nicodemus and the Boys in the Square," pp. 209-235.

Reflections and Questions

1. I've thought about getting into character as Nicodemus and writing a monologue from his perspective, the sort of approach I take to a sermon every now and then (and did so in the following weeks of Lent A). But in 1999 I ended up making it one of those rare weeks that I explicitly share the Girardian thesis with the congregation. To do so, I still get into character but this time myself, sharing with them from the heart what the Girardian insight has meant to me in recent years for my encounters with Christ, in a sermon entitled "Dying for True Life."

2. In 1999, COV&R member Diana Culbertson responded to these texts with the following observations about Nicodemus:

...we do know how Nicodemus responded - eventually. He shows up at the beginning, the middle, and the end. Chapter 7 is one of the most interesting chapters in the Gospel. The reader is caught between conflicting voices. All the theories about the identity of Jesus are proposed. It is Nicodemus who urges us "to give him a hearing." His enemies (check the Greek) argue: "The prophet from Galilee will not arise" - which I believe is a legitimate translation of the text always given to us as something like "Prophets do not come from Galilee." At the death of Jesus we see him again, one of the last to touch the body of the Lord (19:39). I love to watch the gradual conversion of the scholar who arrives a little too late, who broods perhaps a little too long, but whose work of mercy is the sign of his ultimate and total conversion.

4. Do we need to talk about the difference between re-incarnation and resurrection? Nicodemus is thinking in terms of being born again, which is still trapped in the fleshly existence of this world that needs saving. This world needs to be reborn from above, from a source of life that is outside of it. Is Nicodemus' brand of thinking that of re-incarnation? Resurrection, on the other hand, is the first fruits of something much bigger, the rebirth of the whole world. And we begin to experience that true power of life as we live in the faith of the resurrection.

Such talk wouldn't necessarily need to be "inter-faith." How has the Christian faith lapsed back into one that is more in terms of "re-incarnation" -- except we jettison the re-incarnation part to talk about going directly into Nirvana by accumulating the good karma of believing in Jesus. Isn't the popularized version of heaven more like that? And so it isn't too surprising, is it?, that some contemporary Christians have begun to blend belief in re-incarnation with their view of heaven: This worldly existence is an endless hell unless we accumulate the good karma of believing in Jesus and being his disciple.

Mustn't a resurrection faith include the cosmic dimension of the whole world being reborn, saved? Resurrection is the first fruits of a new heaven and a new earth. It is God's power of life through Jesus, bringing forgiveness into this world that it might be based on grace instead of debt. Faith in Jesus Christ means being grafted to the vine of this new life come into the world, not some ticket to an other-worldly existence.

5. Rebirth of the world is akin to what John narrates of the man born blind in John 9. His healing, something which the man himself observes that "never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind" (John 9:32), signals the possibility of healing the world's blindness since the beginning -- in the terms of John 3, a rebirth from above by the Spirit. See the relevant resources from James Alison in Lent 4A and/or the comment there specifically linking John 9 to John 3.

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