March 1, 2026, Year A, The Second Sunday in Lent

John 3:1-16, Psalm 33:12-21, Romans 4:1-17

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you, on this Second Sunday in Lent.

Last week we were in the wilderness with Jesus, watching him face the tempter with nothing but the word of God on his lips. Three temptations—appetite, presumption, and idolatry—and three times Jesus answered with Scripture and stood firm where Adam had fallen. We were reminded that the wilderness is not evidence of God's absence; it is often the very place where he is most powerfully at work. Our job is to trust God at all times, especially in the wilderness.

John's Gospel takes us somewhere quite different. Not into the blazing wilderness, but into the shadowed cover of night. A man comes to Jesus quietly, carefully, privately. His name is Nicodemus. And the conversation that follows is one of the most searching, most penetrating exchanges in all of Holy Scripture.

Our Gospel reading this morning is John 3:1–16, found on page _______ of your pew Bibles. We also heard this morning from Psalm 33:12–21 and from Romans 4:1–17, and all three readings illuminate one another beautifully. But first, let us attend to John. These sixteen verses contain what may be the best-known verse in the entire Bible: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16, ESV). And yet those words are far richer, and far more demanding, than a bumper sticker or a poster at a football game might suggest.

Nicodemus is no fool and no villain. He is a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, which is to say, he is a member of the Sanhedrin, the highest religious governing council in Israel. He is a man of learning, influence, and impeccable credentials. He has given his life to the study of the Torah. He knows the Law and the Prophets. He knows what Israel is waiting for.

And yet he comes to Jesus by night. Why at night? Perhaps out of fear—fear of what his colleagues might say if they saw him seeking out this controversial rabbi from Galilee. Perhaps out of a desire for a private conversation without the pressing crowds. Or perhaps John gives us a deeper clue: darkness is a recurring theme in his Gospel, a symbol of our human condition apart from the Light of the world. Whatever his reasons, here is Nicodemus, a great man of Israel, coming to sit with the carpenter from Nazareth.

He begins with what seems like a compliment in verse 2: "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him" (John 3:2, ESV). It is a generous, if cautious, acknowledgment. But notice that Jesus does not accept this opening address and politely return the pleasantries. He cuts straight through to the matter at the very centrer of Nicodemus's need—and ours in verse 3: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3, ESV).

No preamble. No small talk. Just the truth, delivered with the weight of divine authority. "Truly, truly"—the double “amen”—signals that what follows is of the gravest importance.

Now here is something crucial that we must not miss. The Greek word Jesus uses, anothen, carries a beautiful and deliberate double meaning. It can mean “again"—as in a second time. But it also means "from above." The same word, two meanings, both of them true. It is likely that Jesus had both meanings in mind.

On the one hand, those who are dead in sin need to be given new life in what might be thought of as a “spiritual birth,” so that in some sense they undergo a second birth. On the other hand, as Jesus himself came from heaven (John 3:13), those who enter his kingdom must receive life from God who is in heaven (John 3:3, 7). As John put it elsewhere, we must be “born of God (John 1:13, 1 John 3:9; 4:7; 5:1, 4, 18).

Nicodemus hears only one meaning, and in its most literal sense of the word, “again." And so he protests in verse 4 with the bewildered literalism of a man who has not yet grasped what he is being offered: "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" (John 3:4, ESV). It is almost a tragic-comic response. Here is one of the greatest teachers in Israel, and he cannot find the door.

But Jesus is speaking of something altogether different from a biological repetition. He means a birth "from above” or “born again by the Spirit”—a birth that originates not in human flesh or human will, but in heaven itself, in the sovereign, regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. Regeneration is a revitalizing act of God where he implants a new desire, purpose and moral ability that leads to a positive response to the gospel of Christ. This is grace that produces faith, that leads to salvation. In other words, it is to give us ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to receive, and respond, to the gospel in faith, i.e., to be saved. This is the birth that cannot be arranged, earned, or inherited. It cannot be achieved by joining the right synagogue, mastering the right rituals, or keeping the right rules. Even Nicodemus's impeccable religious pedigree cannot produce it.

This is the truth that ought to both humble and liberate us. None of us drifts into the kingdom of God. None of us inherits eternal life through family connections, church attendance, intellect, or our best efforts. The new birth is the sovereign work of God—and because it is his work, it is utterly reliable. As Jesus says in the first part of verse 8: "the wind blows where it wishes; you hear its sound but cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes" (John 3:8, ESV). The Spirit moves with sovereign freedom. And those born of the Spirit carry the marks of that heavenly origin.

This is precisely where Paul's letter to the Romans, which we heard this morning, casts such searching light. Romans 4 is Paul's great exposition of Abraham—the father of faith. And Paul's point is devastating to every form of spiritual self-reliance we share.

Abraham was not justified, or saved, because he perfectly observed the Law. The Law had not even been given yet. He was not justified by circumcision—Paul carefully notes that justification was counted to him before he was circumcised. He was justified, or saved, because he believed God. "Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness" (Romans 4:3, ESV, quoting Genesis 15:6).

This is the pattern that John 3 embodies so vividly. Nicodemus's problem was not that he was insufficiently religious. It was that he was trying to approach God on the basis of what he could produce—his learning, his intellect, his piety, his obedience, his standing. And Jesus says, plainly: what flesh produces is flesh. We cannot manufacture a heavenly birth from earthly materials.

Paul's conclusion in Romans 4:16 is the hinge on which the whole argument turns: "That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace" (Romans 4:16, ESV). Grace and faith belong together. If it depends on our performance, it is no longer grace—and none of us is safe. But if it rests on grace, received through faith, then the promise is secure for everyone who trusts in Christ, Jew and Gentile alike, the ancient patriarch and the twenty-first century sinner both sitting in the same pew of the New Testament Church.

Lent is the season when the Church asks us to stop pretending. We received ashes on Ash Wednesday. We heard the Great Litany last week. Again and again the pattern: we are dust, we have sinned, we cannot save ourselves, "Good Lord, deliver us." This is not morbid self-flagellation. This is a deeply honest reckoning with our shared human condition—clearing the ground, so to speak, so that the grace of God has somewhere to land among us.

Jesus does something remarkable in verses 14 and 15. He reaches back into the Old Testament and finds a strange, almost uncomfortable image: "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3:14–15, ESV).

The reference is to Numbers 21, when Israel sinned against God in the wilderness and was bitten by fiery serpents. God's remedy was astonishing: he told Moses to make a bronze serpent and lift it up on a pole. Anyone bitten who looked at it would live. The instrument of death became, paradoxically, the instrument of healing. The very thing that brought judgment became the means of rescue.

Jesus is saying: I am that pole. I am that lifted-up one. When I am lifted up on the cross, all who look to me in faith—all who see in that broken, crucified body the remedy for our poisoned condition—will find life. The cross is not a defeat. It is the appointed means of rescue, planned from before the foundation of the world.

Our Lenten journey is always heading here. The ashes, the fasting, the self-examination, the prayers of the litany—all of it is an extended preparation for us to see the cross clearly. To look honestly at what our sin required. And to look, with the eyes of faith, at the one lifted up in our place.

Psalm 33, which we prayed together this morning, gives us the frame within which all of this makes sense. The psalmist declares in verse 12: "Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage" (Psalm 33:12, ESV).

Note carefully: the blessing flows from being "chosen," not from having achieved. God looks down from heaven in verse 13, observing all the children of men. It is he who acts first, who moves first, who draws first. The psalmist continues in verses 18 and 19: "Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love, that he may deliver their soul from death and keep them alive in famine" (Psalm 33:18–19, ESV).

The eye of the Lord is upon those who "hope in his steadfast love"—not those who have earned it, but those who have stopped trusting in their own resources and cast themselves upon his mercy. This is the posture of faith that Abraham demonstrated, that Nicodemus was being invited into, and that we are all called to maintain throughout these forty days and all the days of our lives.

And then we arrive at that most famous verse, verse 16. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16, ESV).

We have perhaps heard this verse so many times that it has lost its power to astonish us. Let us try, for a moment, to hear it afresh.

"God so loved the world." Not the respectable world. Not the religious world. Not the world that had its act together. The world in darkness—the world of Nicodemus coming by night, the world of serpent-bitten Israel in the wilderness, the world of Adam's children born in sin. That world. This world. Us.

"That he gave his only Son." This is the heart of the gospel, and it is, at its core, an act of sheer, undeserved generosity. God did not dispatch an angel. He gave the most precious thing in all of existence—his own Son, the eternal Word, the one in whom he is eternally well pleased. He gave him to be born of a woman, to live our life, to bear our sins, to be lifted up like that bronze serpent in the wilderness so that all who look to him in faith might live.

"That whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." The offer is breathtaking. Not "whoever is worthy." Not "whoever has achieved sufficient religious attainment." Whoever believes. The Greek word, pisteuo, means to entrust oneself—to lean our full weight upon, to stake our lives on. This is faith not as intellectual assent to a proposition, but as personal trust in a person—the ongoing act of returning, again and again, to the one in whom we have placed our weight, even on the days when the clouds gather and the doubts press in on our wilderness journeys.

Nicodemus did not fully understand what Jesus was saying that night. However, something in him recognized the voice of One who spoke with authority from above.  Perhaps the wind of the Spirit was beginning to blow on Nicodemus. By chapter 7, Nicodemus speaks up in defense of Jesus when the Pharisees seek to arrest him. And by the end of John's Gospel, in chapter 19, it is Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea who comes to claim the body of Jesus, prepare it for burial, and lay it in the tomb—no longer by night, but in the full light of public witness. The shift from private to public identification may be based in true faith and courage, similar to how the disciples hid in the upper room for fear of the jews after the crucifixion (John 20:19) and then were so bold following the resurrection and Pentecost. The early church venerated him as a saint in both Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

Nicodemus offers hope to those still wrestling with the faith for those we love, that just haven’t seem to have gotten it yet. His journey is from secret, cautious inquiry, to open discipleship. He represents the the idea that faith can develop gradually, and he’s sometimes called a “secret disciple”. Let us remain in prayer for ourselves as we are reminded that when we seek, we will find. And for those we keep waiting to join the fold, may we continue in prayer for them and never give up hope.

We are now two weeks into Lent. Ash Wednesday has come and gone. Last Sunday we watched Jesus hold firm in the wilderness. This Sunday, we are invited into this quiet, searching night conversation, and the question Jesus puts to Nicodemus he puts to us: have we been born from above?

This is a question worth sitting with together. Not "are we churchgoers?" Not "were we baptized?" Not "do we know the right answers?" But has there been, in us, by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit, a birth from above—a turning of our whole selves toward God, a receiving of the gift of Christ in faith, a new life that did not originate in our own striving?

Anglicanism, at its best, holds in beautiful tension the corporate and the personal, the sacramental and the evangelical. The Bible, and our Book of Common Prayer, call us, at every Holy Communion, to examine ourselves—to test the genuineness of our faith, to repent of our sins, and to receive Christ afresh. Our tradition is not merely about heritage and liturgy. It is about a living encounter with the living God, mediated through word, sacrament, prayer, and community, but real and personal and utterly transforming.

If any among us has never yet entrusted themselves to Christ—never yet looked to the one lifted up in our place—then this invitation is for us. We do not need to understand everything. Nicodemus didn't. We need only to look, believe, and live.

And if we are long-time believers, then Lent is our annual invitation to return. To stop relying on accumulated religious performance. To remember that the righteousness that counts before God is not ours—it is Christ's, imputed to us through faith, just as it was counted to Abraham. To lay down whatever new idol has crept onto the throne of our hearts and receive, afresh, the love of a God who so loved the world that he gave his Son.

“The eye of the Lord is upon those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love” (Psalm 33:18, ESV). May we be found among them.

Let's pray…