A Spiritual Awakening that Establishes Justice

Herb Montgomery | March 3, 2023

To listen to this week’s eSight as a podcast episode click here.

I would use the language of being “born again” differently than those early believers did, but I do believe we also need to experience a type of epiphany, a paradigm shift, an awakening that helps us understand we’ve been programmed by the systems of injustice we are living under in this beautiful world. It doesn’t matter whether we call it being born again, becoming “woke,” or just coming to view the world differently than those benefiting from the status quo would have us operate within.

Our reading this week is from the gospel of John:

“Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

“You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:1-17; Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™)

This story is a narrative that the author of the gospel of John creates where Nicodemus and Jesus symbolize their respective communities: the Johannine community of Jesus-followers and the school of the Pharisees.

Before we try and extract something life-giving from this for our justice work today, there are a few things about the setting worth mentioning.

First, the setting of the story is at night. This story element characterizes the Pharisees as “in the dark,” grasping to understand what the Johannine communities believed was the truth about Jesus. By contrast, the next exchange with Jesus in the very next chapter happens at noon, when the sun is at its highest point. The woman of that story fully discerns whom the Johannine community claim Jesus to be. They understand his truth.

As I’ve mentioned before, given how White supremacists have characterized darkness and light, we must be careful with this imagery in our sacred text. We don’t have to villainize darkness or blackness. Both light and dark are needed. Life is fostered when an egalitarian balance exists between the darkness and the light. Too much of one or the other is harmful and destructive.

The binary of darkness and light also has a particular history in the context of the Gospel of John. To understand it better, we need to consider early Christian and non-rabbinic Gnosticism, proto-Gnosticism, and 1^st Century Jewish apocalypticism. These are the soils out of which the gospel of John grew. From each of these, narrative symbols and elements are artfully combined to create this unique version of the Jesus story.

In Jewish apocalypticism, proto-Christian Gnosticism, and Christian Gnosticism, dualistic cosmology explains why our world looks the way it does. This dualistic cosmology is often expressed in binary contrasts between good and evil, darkness and light, the flesh and the spirit, earthy forces and celestial “powers,” and so on.

The gospel of John is believed to be written during the time of proto-Christian gnosticism, and was the canonical gospel that later Gnostics favored. Early church father Irenaeus wrote in his book Against Heresies that the Ebionites favored Matthew only, while Marcionites favored Luke. A third group that questioned how humanity and divinity combined in Jesus favored Mark’s gospel, and according to Irenaeus, some Gnostics favored the gospel of John (Against Heresies, chapter 11, paragraph 7).

Scholars debate the connection between the gospel of John and early Christian Gnosticism. Those who have a high view of scripture and its authority say that John was written in the language of Christian Gnosticism so that it could address and combat Christian Gnosticism. But this claim fails to explain why a gospel that was meant as a response to Gnosticism predates that Gnosticism. Even the latest possible dates for the writing of John’s gospel place it in the era of proto-Gnosticism, late Jewish apocalypticism, and early Christian apocalypticism.

I side instead with those who view the author of John as sharing many of the explanations of our world that would later develop into Gnosticism. This idea explains for me why John’s version of the Jesus story is so unique and why the language used to tell this version of the story is so vastly different from the other canonical gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke).

There is a second binary in our reading this week between the flesh versus the spirit. Certain sectors of Christianity today teach that we need to born again because we are born as human beings either evil (at worst) or at least broken (at best). This is not the reason John’s gospel gives. For the Johannine community out of which the gospel was written, the reason is the binary of flesh and spirit. It’s an example of proto-Gnosticism. In this way of explaining our world, the material universe is negative and keeps our good souls or spirits trapped in our physical bodies. Our spirits are imprisoned within this material world that’s characterized by pain and suffering. Salvation, then, is when our spirits are at last liberated from our fleshy housing to live eternally in a state free from pain and suffering. A lot of Christianity today still teaches this way of looking at the world.

In our story for this week, the Johannine community makes the ritual of baptism, being born of water and spirit, a way to show that the one being baptized has experienced a paradigm shift. This person will now live according to the spirit in the hope of being liberated from the flesh in the future, and no longer live “according to the flesh.” If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because the New Testament scriptures are chock-full of this way of explaining the world.

And yet this way of understanding our world has not historically birthed good fruit. It tends to create humans who have less regard for people’s concrete, material, bodily experiences than for either experiencing a spiritual high now, or their soul’s salvation in the future. This helps us understand why so many sectors of Christianity focus much more on “saving souls” than working to save people from the concrete suffering and systems of injustice they are enduring in the present. I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve had a Christian say to me that as Jesus followers we are to be about saving souls not social justice. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke don’t follow that rule at all!

The Jesus of the synoptic gospels is all about liberating people from what they are suffering bodily, materially, and concretely in the here and now. His focus is never on liberating the soul from the body in the afterlife or leaving the body to go on suffering while the spirit longs to be free. The Jesus of the synoptics focuses instead on liberating people from injustice, violence, oppression and marginalization in the present.

The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is very enfleshed. And the work of the spirit is to establish justice for those being presently harmed by whatever system they find themselves trying to survive.

Lastly, we encounter in this Johannine version of the Jesus story Jesus being likened to the serpent in the wilderness. In early Jewish and Christian Gnosticism and in later Gnosticism, the serpent was praised and thanked for bringing knowledge (gnosis) to those trapped in the material existence of suffering. The serpent was the liberating savior and bestower of this knowledge (gnosis). The serpent also became a symbol of healing and appears around the Rod of Asclepius, the symbol of medicine. Many in Jewish Gnostic, non-rabbinic circles interpreted the story of Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness through these lenses.

This is the context in which our reading this week was written. Like the healing serpent, Jesus comes to the Johannine community bringing knowledge (gnosis) to those of us who are trapped in our material suffering. Jesus, like that serpent, is the liberating savior pointing toward a salvation of our souls from our bodies through obtaining knowledge (gnosis) (see John 17:3).

Like those early believers, I also argue for a Jesus who liberates—but through teachings that enable us to establish justice in the here and now, not by demonizing our flesh and then offering a post-mortem liberation of our souls from our bodies.

Lastly, in these Jewish and Christian ways of interpreting the serpent in the wilderness, there is nothing substitutionary about the serpent on the bronze pole or Jesus being lifted up on a Roman cross. The Roman cross merely lifted Jesus up or brought attention to him so that many could discover the knowledge (gnosis) he came to give to liberate their spirits from material captivity.

Honestly, I find all of this deeply problematic. The binary contrast of flesh and spirit quickly becomes an opiate for our world’s injustice and does not inspire us to get to work creating change. For proto-Gnostics, Jesus’ crucifixion was the moment his spirit was liberated from his body, not the state-sponsored injustice that it actually was. In that tradition, the resurrection has to be interpreted in some other way than as God’s reversing, overcoming, and undoing everything accomplished through Jesus death and causing Jesus teaching to live on.

A more life-giving definition of atonement for me is making something that has fragmented whole or one again. This is where the teaching of Jesus come in: they call listeners to practice justice, compassion, and inclusion, and to speak against marginalization.

I would use the language of being “born again” differently than those early believers did, but I do believe we also need to experience a type of epiphany, a paradigm shift, an awakening that helps us understand we’ve been programmed by the systems of injustice we are living under in this beautiful world. It doesn’t matter whether we call it being born again, becoming “woke,” or just coming to view the world differently than those benefiting from the status quo would have us operate within. To quote Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, “Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power.” (via RadicalDiscipleship.net, September 18, 2016)

I believe the teachings of Jesus still offer us a path toward that spiritual awakening, even today.

HeartGroup Application

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your HeartGroup.

2. How does the Johannine version of the Jesus story (the Gospel of John) inspire you to lean into choices that are more inline with societal justice? Share with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

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Also I want to share that we are partnering in a new weekly YouTube show called “Just Talking.” Each week, Todd Leonard and I will be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. Todd is brilliant in his discernment of how the Jesus story can speak into our lives today as we work together toward shaping our world into a just, safe and compassionate home for everyone.  He’s worth listening to. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

My new book, Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels is now also available at renewedheartministries.com

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

Now Available at Renewed Heart Ministries!

Herb’s new book Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels, is available at renewedheartministries.com.

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