Recovering Faithful Participation in a Therapeutic Age – Series Page
Phase 5 – What We Can Say About the Spirit
There’s something strangely suitable about arriving here today.
For the past several articles, our grip has loosened on the idea that the Christian life requires a script. We’ve looked at some assumptions we bring to Scripture, the ways certainty (in what we expect God’s faithfulness to look like) can become a substitute for faith (in God’s faithfulness), and what happens when the explanations we rely upon no longer seem to work. Our efforts are much like trying to be a master of the wind.
We’ve considered the example of Job. At the end of our expectation for explanation, we’re left with God’s presence. It’s there where we must acknowledge our tendency to talk about the things of God that we don’t understand; things that are too extraordinary for us to know. We’ve also considered Peter’s social exiles and a hope extends beyond wishful thinking since it doesn’t depend upon knowing how every story will turn out.
Now we ask what it might mean to live the life Jesus came to give on the ground – the ordinary ground of work, relationships, grief, generosity, disagreement, meals, neighbours and unanswered questions.
We also paused to consider the people who actually had to do this before us. Jesus left. The disciples remained. And they had to learn how to live.
They weren’t left to work it out on their own. They had the Hebrew scriptures, memories of Jesus and one another. Those followers of Jesus had the testimony of those who walked with Him for 3 years. Together they experienced a community forming around His life and teaching.
They also had the Holy Spirit but they no longer had Jesus standing physically before them to answer every question.
I don’t think the question was ever about, “How do we get the script right?”
Maybe it’s more like, “How do we learn to walk with the One who gives us life?”
The Master of Institutional Mechanics
Here we turn to an encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus.
Nicodemus came as an academic; a Rabbi looking to learn the nuts and bolts of what another Rabbi was doing. He wanted to understand the mechanism behind miracles, categorize the phenomenon, analyze the framework, and fit Jesus into a manageable grid.
But as an educated elite in first-century Judea, Nicodemus was shaped by the Hebrew Scriptures and a Hebrew understanding of what it means to be human. Yet when this master of institutional mechanics tried to make sense of the Kingdom of God, Jesus redirected his eyes away from human frameworks and pointed him straight out into the night air:
“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” — John 3:8
In a single sentence, Jesus dismantled the entire expert framework Nicodemus represented.
The Uncontainable Breeze
The word for Spirit (pneuma) is the same word for wind or breath.
Today we can measure atmospheric pressure, temperature and velocity. We can watch weather systems develop on radar and explain the movement of air and the forces that produce it.
We can even harness the wind.
- A sail can catch it.
- A turbine can turn because of it.
- A windmill can put it to work.
It’s natural for us to want predictability and safety. We figure if we can get the scaffolding right, we’ll be able to manage life inside and get the results we expect.
This instinct also has a long history in matters of Christian faith.
Over centuries, we’ve built elaborate organizational structures designed to house, manage, and measure out the life of God. We build religious institutions, draft policies, define official channels of authority, and establish organized systems to keep everything running smoothly. This isn’t wrong in itself. As I’ve said in a previous reflection, a field and the farm have their place. The key is for the farm to serve life within the fields and barns and not the other way around. The same could be said of our religious institutions serving the best interests of the people rather than the other way around.
The big idea behind this reflection article is we can work with the wind but we can’t capture, contain and control it. And perhaps that’s part of what Jesus was getting at when He spoke about the Spirit.
Like the wind, the Holy Spirit can’t be captured, contained or controlled. The Spirit of God isn’t a divine mechanism that gives us the detailed instructions we wish the Scripture writers would have written down. They weren’t forgetful or incompetent; they left lots of blanks. I suspect they knew there’s only one Master of the Wind and that’s not us.
A bit earlier in the conversation, Jesus laid down a stark, basic reality:
“Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” — John 3:6
What Is Born of Flesh
Here’s a pivot Nicodemus didn’t expect.
Here’s the irony of the encounter. Nicodemus was the master teacher of Israel. He possessed a complete command of Hebrew Scripture and metaphor. He knew that when the prophets spoke of God granting new birth or a new heart, it was a matter of covenantal reset, cognitive renewal, and divine origin – not obstetrics.
Yet, confronted by Jesus, this premier scholar sputters a hyper-literal, biological objection:
“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
It seems odd to me that a master theologian; someone steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, would focus on a physical impossibility.
In John’s account, Jesus uses the word anōthen, which carries a double meaning: “from above” (referring to divine origin) or “again/anew” (referring to repetition). By responding strictly to the idea of being born “again;” asking how an old man could re-enter his mother’s womb, Nicodemus fixates on a biological absurdity.
I can’t know if this was a genuine misunderstanding or a convenient deflection. However, the effect is the same. It keeps the conversation safe on physical grounds. To entertain the idea of a life generated “from above” would mean confronting a more uncomfortable truth:
No amount of career achievement, religious pedigree, or institutional status could secure his place in God’s kingdom.
Arguing over a physical impossibility was safer than dismantling the foundation Nicodemus built his life upon.
The “flesh” Jesus speaks of in this context isn’t merely muscle, bone, and blood. Neither is it inherently evil. To a first-century Pharisee, flesh represented the sum total of human capability. It’s everything we can build, manage, and reproduce on our own terms. Jesus told the nation’s top scholar that no amount of refined flesh; no family pedigree, no meticulous rule-keeping, no administrative mastery, can ever manufacture the life of the Kingdom.
Human effort can only produce more of the same. A wind tunnel can generate recirculated air, but it can’t produce the wind.
To participate in the reality Jesus unveiled, means being generated from a source from above (anōthen) by a power completely outside the human control room.
Standing on the Threshold
Nicodemus came to Jesus looking for a blueprint he could build out.
Instead, he was left standing in the dark night air. Listening to the breeze move through the trees, maybe he starts to realize that his entire framework of understanding was useless in capturing what God was doing.
The conversation ends unresolved. Nicodemus stands suspended between the security of the systems he mastered his entire life and the uncontainable, open-air reality of the Spirit. However, I think this encounter with Jesus was the start of a gradual internal shift that would show much later. Curious? Read John 7 and take note of verses 50 & 51. Also read John 19 and see how the story ends in verses 38 to 42.
For now, we’re also left standing with Nicodemus in the dark night. On the threshold, realizing that if we want to experience the life that Jesus came to give, we need to stop trying to manage the wind. Instead, may we step away from our inclination to harness what we can’t control and learn what it means to live in the open air. That’s where we’ll walk next time.