Untitled Sermon (2)
3:14–15. “Lifting up” is another play on words (3:3–4): Jesus returns to heaven by way of the cross, “lifted up” like the serpent Moses lifted up to bring healing (Num 21:4–9; for “lifting up” see comment on Jn 12:32–33).
The tenses of the Greek verbs indicate the sense: “This is how God loved the world: he gave his son.”
Only begotten” is literally “special, beloved,” and was often applied in Jewish literature to Isaac, to emphasize the greatness of Abraham’s sacrifice in offering him up. Eternal life is literally the “life of the world to come”; John’s present tense (“have”) indicates that those who trust Jesus begin to experience that life already in the present time.
3:3–4. Jesus speaks literally of being born “from above,” which means “from God” (“above” was a Jewish circumlocution, or roundabout expression, for God). One could also construe the phrase as meaning “reborn,” which Nicodemus takes literally. (Ancient writers, including those of the Old Testament—Jer 1:11–12; Mic 1:10–15—often used plays on words, and John includes quite a few other puns; they also sometimes used other characters as less intelligent foils for a narrative’s main spokesperson.) Because Jewish teachers spoke of Gentile converts to Judaism as starting life anew like “newborn children” (just as adopted sons under Roman law relinquished all legal status in their former family when they became part of a new one), Nicodemus should have understood that Jesus meant conversion; but it never occurs to him that someone Jewish would need to convert to the true faith of Israel.
3:5. Converts to Judaism were said to become “as newborn children” when they were baptized to remove Gentile impurity. “Born of water” thus clarifies for Nicodemus that “born from above” means conversion, not a second physical birth.
The Greek wording of 3:5 can mean either “water and the Spirit” or “water, that is, the Spirit.” Ezekiel 36:24–27 used water symbolically for the cleansing of the Spirit (cf. especially the Dead Sea Scrolls), so here Jesus could mean “converted by the Spirit” (cf. 7:37–39)—a spiritual proselyte baptism. Whereas Jewish teachers generally spoke of converts to Judaism as “newborn” only in the sense that they were legally severed from old relationships, an actual rebirth by the Spirit would produce a new heart (Ezek 36:26).
