(1.) Disposition of the People and Pharisees towards Christ. -- Dispositions of Nicodemus.

Many of the people were attracted to Christ during this his first stay at Jerusalem. And although the prevailing Pharisaic party looked upon him with an eye of suspicion, they could not openly oppose him, as he had not as yet arrayed himself against their statutes and traditions, but directed his blows against abuses which no one dared to defend. And even of the Pharisees it cannot be supposed that all were hypocrites, governed only by selfish motives; doubtless there were many whose piety, however debased by the errors of their entire system, was yet sincere. Such could not remain without Divine impressions from the words and works of Christ.

A specimen of this better class was Nicodemus. To him, especially, the miracles of Jesus appeared to be works transcending all merely human power, and undeniable signs of a Divine calling. Beyond this general impression, however, he had no clear views of Christ's person or mission; and his desire to obtain more definite information was the greater, because he had participated in the expectations awakened by John the Baptist, in regard to the approaching reign of Messiah. Recognizing Christ as a prophet, he determined to apply to him personally, and came to him by night, to avoid strengthening the suspicions of his colleagues in the Sanhedrim, probably already aroused against him.

We may presuppose that he shared in the ordinary Jewish conceptions of the Messianic kingdom, and expected it soon to be founded in visible and earthly glory; although he may have had, at the same time, some more worthy and spiritual ideas in regard to it. He considered himself sure, as a rigidly pious Jew and Pharisee, of a share in that kingdom. and was only anxious to be informed as to the approaching manifestation of Messiah.

Addressing Christ as an enlightened teacher, accredited from God by miracles, he expected to obtain from his lips a further account of his calling and of his relation to the Messianic kingdom. But instead of entering upon this, Christ purposely gives an answer especially adapted to the moral and religious wants of Nicodemus, and all of like mind. The truth which he uttered was not only new and strange to Nicodemus, but also fundamentally opposed to his whole system: |Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.|

(2.) The New Birth.

Uprooting the notion that any particular line of birth or descent call entitle men to a share in God's kingdom, Christ points out an inward condition, necessary for all men alike, a title which no man can secure by his own power. His answer to Nicodemus presupposes that all men are alike destitute of the Divine life. It was directed as well against the arrogant self-righteousness of the Pharisees as against the contracted externalizing of the kingdom of God in Jewish particularism. It involves also (although we are not sure, from the form of the expression, that Christ intended precisely this) that a faith like that of Nicodemus was insufficient; springing, as it did, from isolated miracles, and not from inward experience, or an internal awakening of the Divine life. Certainly it hit the only point from which Nicodemus could and must proceed in order to change his mode of conceiving the Messianic kingdom. Even if he at first still expected it to appear as an outward one, he must have had a higher and nobler moral conception of it. He doubtless took Christ's words |cannot see the kingdom| to mean |cannot share in the visible kingdom;| while Christ meant an inward spiritual |entering into| that kingdom which was first to be founded, as a spiritual one, in the hearts of men.

The mere figure of a new birth, in itself, would have been nothing so unusual or unintelligible to Nicodemus; he could have understood it well enough if applied, for instance, to the case of a heathen submitting himself to circumcision and the observance of other Jewish usages. But what startled him was the altogether novel application which Christ made of the figure; not to a change of external relations, as in the case above supposed, but to a totally different change, of which the learned scribe had not the glimmering of an idea. He knew not what to think of such an answer to his question, and no wonder; a dead, contracted, arrogant scribe-theology is always amazed at the mysteries of inward, spiritual experience. This first direct impression, perhaps, did not allow him, at the moment, to distinguish between the figure and the thing, and he asked, |How can a man be born when he is old?|

(3.) The Birth of Water and of the Spirit.

But Christ confirms what he had said, and explains it further: |Verily, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.| He thus describes more exactly the active principle (the creative agent) of the new birth, the Divine Spirit, which implants a new Divine life in those who give themselves up to it; producing a moral change, a reversion of the. universal tendency of man, as the offspring of a race tainted by sin.

So much is clear. But what shall we say of the |water?| We infer from the fact that Christ says nothing more of |water,| but proceeds to explain the operations of the |Spirit,| that the former was only a point of departure to lead to the latter. It was the baptism of the Spirit, the |birth of the Spirit| into a new Divine life, that was unknown to Nicodemus; whereas John's baptism might have already made him acquainted with water as a symbol of inward purification, pointing to a higher purification of soul, to be wrought by the Messiah, and aiding in its comprehension.

After this preparation, Christ sets forth the general principle on which his previous declarations to Nicodemus were founded, viz., the total opposition between the natural life -- the life of all those who continue to live according to nature simply -- and the new life which God imparts [|That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit|]. But as this |birth of the Spirit| was still strange to Nicodemus, Christ made use of a sensible image to bring it more vividly before him. |As none can set bounds or limits to the wind, as one hears and feels its blast, but can not track it to its source or to its aim; so it is with the breath of God's Spirit in those who have experienced the new birth. There is something in the interior life not to be explained or comprehended, which reveals itself only in its operations, and can be known only by experience; it is a life which no one can trace backward to its origin, or forward to its end.|

The light begins to dawn upon Nicodemus. But to his mind, yet in bondage to a legal Judaism, prone to conceive all Divine things in an outward sense, and to keep God and man too far apart, the fact asserted by Christ seems marvellous; and he exclaims in amazement, |How can this be?| Jesus seizes upon this exclamation to humble the pride of the learned theologian, to convince him of his want of insight into Divine things, and to make him feel the need of further illumination. |You, a teacher of Israel, and this, without which all religion is a dead thing, not known to you! And if you believe me not when I speak of a mere matter of fact, which every man upon earth may test by his own experience, how will you believe when I proclaim truths beyond the circle of man's experience and transcending the limits of his reason; when I tell you the hidden and unfathomable counsels of God for human salvation!|

(4.) Jesus intimates his own Sufferings.

This introduction prepares us to expect something totally opposed to the ordinary conceptions of the Jewish scribes. It would have been quite inappropriate if Christ had merely been about to speak of the exaltation of Messiah, for that idea was familiar enough; or even if he had been about to apply that exaltation personally to himself as Messiah; for this claim could not appear very marvellous to Nicodemus, who was already inclined to recognize him as a prophet. But nothing could have been more startling to Jewish modes of thought, or even to the mind of Nicodemus, who was still in bondage to the outward letter, than an intimation that Messiah was not to appear in earthly splendour, but was to found the salvation of mankind upon the basis of his own sufferings. This was indeed, and ever, the stumbling-block of the Jews.

But Christ did not announce this truth, so strange to Nicodemus, plainly and in full breadth. Employing a well-known figure from the Old Testament, he compared the lifting up of the Son of Man with the serpent that was raised in the wilderness before the eyes of all the people; and, having thus intimated the truth to the scribe by a simile drawn from his own familiar studies, he left it to be further developed by his own thoughts. The brazen serpent may have appeared to the fathers a paradoxical cure for the serpent's bite; and such a paradox is the salvation of the world through a suffering Messiah. The very strangeness of the comparison must have stimulated the mind of Nicodemus.