The Verb He Can Parse

The lamp on his desk has been the only light in the house since ten o'clock.

Everything is where it has been for nine years. The Greek text on a wooden stand at eye level, the spine cracked at the fourth gospel. The lexicon flat on his left, a strip of cereal box holding the page. A legal pad, three sharpened pencils, and a mug of tea that went cold around eleven and that he keeps drinking anyway.

He is in the third chapter of John, and he is on the verb.

He writes on the pad in the small square hand he has used since college: born again, born from above, born again from above. Under it he sets the adverb that carries the whole argument, and beside it the three ways it can be taken, lettered a, b, c. He can defend all three, and has, twice a year for nine years. He can have a student change his mind by Thursday, then turn the room around and have him defending his first answer again by Tuesday. They love him for it.

The furnace ticks downstairs. His wife turned the upstairs light off an hour ago. Down the street a dog makes a decision about something and then decides against it.

And in the quiet after the dog, the thing stands up.

It never announces itself. It stands at the back of the room the way a person stands at the back of a lecture hall, and it does not raise a hand, because it does not need to. He knows the question by heart. It is not what does the word mean. He knows what the word means.

The question is whether the thing the word describes has ever happened to him.

He looks at the pad a moment. Then he reaches, the way he always reaches, for the next book on the stack, and starts reading. And the thing at the back of the room sits down again, patiently, the way it always does.

You know the desk. Yours might be a lexicon, or four translations in columns, or thirty years of teaching a class that is grateful for you. And you know what stands up when the house goes quiet, and you know exactly which book you reach for so that it will sit back down.

The statement he came in with

Nicodemus did not arrive with a question. That is the first thing to see about him, and it is the thing that will matter most to you.

The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God.John 3:2

That is a finding, and a well built one: a claim, a warrant, evidence underneath. He watched, he weighed, he concluded, and then he walked across a city in the dark to deliver it in person to the man it was about. He sat on the council, and he is the only man on that council who came.

And Jesus does not answer the finding.

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.John 3:3

Read that as debate and it is a non sequitur. Read it as a man being met and it is the most direct sentence in the chapter. Nicodemus brought what he could say out loud; Jesus answered what was underneath it, with nobody else in the room.

You are known by the One you have spent nine years studying, and He answers the question under the sentence rather than the sentence you brought. John 3:3 is what a careful man received when he opened with a compliment, and the Spirit of God is why that exchange is not a museum piece: He takes what is written and stands a living reader in the room where it was said.

Notice also what Jesus did not do. He never once, in that whole conversation, asked Nicodemus to be less of a scholar.

You have never been required to phrase it correctly before it could be answered. The man's first attempt came out as a grown adult asking whether he could enter his mother's womb a second time, and it is written that Jesus answered him anyway, twice more and at length; the same Spirit who moved over that conversation is not standing behind your chair with a red pen.

A word with two doors in it

Now the word, once, plainly, and then I am putting it down.

The adverb Jesus used can mean again, and it can mean from above. The Greek permits both, which is why the lettering on the pad is honest work and not a fudge. Nicodemus heard the first meaning, which is why he answered with the womb: he heard a repeat of something that had already happened once. Jesus did not reach for a lexicon and correct him. He did something stranger and kinder. He said it again with the other door showing.

Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.John 3:5

There is the second door, and once it is open the first one changes shape. This is not a second run at the birth already had. It is a birth out of another source, which is why it cannot be repeated, cannot be self administered, and cannot be studied into existence.

You are not being asked to master this before you are allowed anywhere near it. John 3:8 says the wind blows where it wishes and a man hears the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from, and that is no rebuke of study; it is a description of an act carried out by the Holy Spirit on people who did not schedule it.

You were never the one who had to do the birthing, and that was never a hidden clause. It is written that those who received Him were born not of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God, and it is His Spirit, not your comprehension, who carries that out. Which is why none of this asks a man to close his books. Nicodemus kept his learning and used it: four chapters on, when the council is ready to condemn a man unheard, he stands and quotes them their own law (John 7:50-51). The scholarship stayed, and it got braver.

What the desk can do, and what it cannot

Every instrument has a range. A scale weighs a loaf; it cannot tell you whether the bread is good. A lexicon gives you the range of a word across a literature; it cannot tell you whether the wind has been through the room.

That is no fault in the lexicon. I keep books for a living and I will not have books slandered. It is a fault in the errand we send them on. There are two questions on that desk and they only look like one. The first is what the text says. The second is whether God has done this thing to him, and the desk has never been able to say and never will.

You have the right instrument for the first question and a Person for the second, and Scripture never asked the instrument to do the Person's work. The book records what was said; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes what was said living for one man reading at one in the morning, which is a different act entirely and not a smaller one.

So here is the honest word about parsing, from a man who loves the work. Parsing is not the problem. Parsing that has become a place to stand instead of a door to walk through is the problem, and the difference is invisible from outside. The elders cannot see it; from where they sit this is the man who knows.

You are welcome to bring the whole desk with you, the lexicon and the legal pad and the nine years and the cold tea. Nicodemus came carrying everything he had built, and it is written that he was received at that hour and answered at length; the Spirit who blows where He wishes never asked a soul to arrive empty handed first.