Why Christmas? 2: Born from Above (John 3.1-15)

I grew up in a Christian home in the United States. It’s hard to describe the Christmas season in America to someone who’s never experienced it. Take all of the decorations, the songs, the feelings that we have at Christmas here in France, and raise the volume on all of that as far as it can go. Christmas in America is like a national campaign to feel good.

And the centerpiece of it all is, of course, the image of the baby Jesus in the manger, with his mother and father, the shepherds, the wise men, and maybe some barnyard animals looking on.

All my life, I had assumed that this picture was the one we latched onto for two reasons. The first is that Christmas is the story of Jesus’s birth, so that makes sense. The second is because newborn babies make people feel good—they’re cute, and they sleep all the time, so it’s peaceful. We sing songs like “Silent Night” and it’s like a mini-tranquilizer for our souls, making us feel calm and at rest.

But it wasn’t until I was much older—until I had, in fact, been a Christian for many years—that I realized why the image of Jesus in the manger is such a weighty image. It’s not just because that’s what happened, not just because the coming of Christ is what we celebrate at Christmas. This image is weighty because it’s a mirror, a projection, of what Jesus’s birth does to those of us who believe.

If you were here last week, you’ll know that we are spending the month of December in John chapter 3. It may seem an odd text to choose for the Christmas season, but we chose it for a very simple reason: it makes no sense to go over the story of Christmas without understanding why the story was written.

We know the story, at least in its general details; we’ll have the pictures in our minds that we mentioned before—Jesus in the manger, the angels and the shepherds, and so on. But in this week’s text, that’s not where John starts—he’ll get there, but that’s not where we start.

John tells us the why behind the Christmas story through a conversation that happens at night.

That is not accidental. In John’s Gospel, night is never just a time of day. It’s a condition of the soul.

This is John’s way of telling us something uncomfortable right at the start: Christmas does not begin with warm feelings. It begins with darkness.

And it begins with a man who, by all outward appearances, should not need saving.

1. “You Must Be Born Again” (v. 1–8)

V. 1:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night…

Nicodemus, John tells us, was a formidable man. He was a member of a hyper-strict religious group called the Pharisees—they were very morally serious and religiously disciplined. Nicodemus was a “ruler of the Jews”. He was influential and respected. And he was “a teacher of Israel”—educated, knowledgeable, and orthodox. If you’re at all familiar with our evangelical context in France, think of someone like Henri Blocher. M. Blocher isn’t a member of a strict religious subgroup, but in terms of the esteem he holds in people’s eyes, and his recognized knowledge, that’s sort of what we see in Nicodemus.

If anyone should be “close to God,” it’s him.

And yet he comes to Jesus at night.

Why?

Mainly because he doesn’t want anyone in his group to see that he’s coming to talk to Jesus. The Pharisees have been critical of Jesus from the first, and Nicodemus wants to keep his reputation intact. So he’s very cautious.

But he’s also curious, because what he had seen in Jesus has troubled him. As he says at the end of v. 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.”

Notice the language. He calls Jesus “Rabbi”—a term of respect that recognizes Jesus as a teacher.

Next, he says, “We know that you are a teacher come from God.” He speaks to Jesus as an insider, as a peer—someone who is evaluating Jesus from a position of authority.

But Jesus immediately flips the situation.

He doesn’t say that Nicodemus’ is right. He doesn’t thank him for his openness.

Instead, he challenges Nicodemus’s view of himself.

V. 3:

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

It’s almost funny how ubiquitous that term has become—being “born again”—although if you asked ten people what they thought it means, you’d likely get ten different answers. Rest assured: it was as confusing to Nicodemus as it can be to us. He asked the most obvious, literal question in v. 4:

“How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

Obviously, that’s not what Jesus is saying. So Jesus gives a little more information. V. 5:

5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Now I may be reading between the lines here, but it’s hard to imagine these words as anything other than disconcerting for Nicodemus. Even if he didn’t understand exactly what Jesus meant.

What Jesus says is, you’ve been born once—you’re alive, you’ve been born of the flesh—but something else needs to happen. You need to be born of the Spirit. And this spiritual birth is something you can’t categorize or label or put into an easy framework. The wind blows where it wishes, he says in v. 8, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

He’s saying, You can’t do this yourself. You can’t control it; you can’t predict it; you can’t manage it. God must do for you what you can’t do for yourself.

That’s why Christ needed to come—if humanity could fix itself, the Son of God would never have needed to take on flesh.

Everything Jesus is saying here would have hit Nicodemus like a slap.

Jesus doesn’t say: “You need more clarity”, or “You need deeper devotion”, or “You need to refine your theology.”

He says: You need to be born.

Nicodemus’ entire identity—the Pharisees’ entire identity—was built on achievement: moral achievement, religious achievement, intellectual achievement. Improving in these areas is something they all feel confident that they can do; it may take work, but it’s manageable.

But Jesus tells Nicodemus that none of these things qualify him to even see the kingdom.

Christmas forces this truth on us: The problem with humanity is not that we are uneducated, uncultured, or insufficiently religious. The problem is that we are dead.

And dead people don’t need advice. They need birth.

This isn’t only devastating to Nicodemus, but to us too; it cuts against everything we instinctively believe.

We assume that better parents produce better people; better education, or better efforts, produce better outcomes; better systems produce better humans.

And all of that might be at least superficially true. But if we’re talking about the change that actually matters, the change that brings us to the kingdom of God, it will never be enough.

No matter how refined, disciplined, or sincere it is, human effort cannot generate spiritual life.

That’s why Christmas is not about inspiration. It’s about intervention. God does not come to motivate us. He comes to recreate us. And we aren’t able to decide when or how that will happen.

This idea is terrifying…unless the God doing the recreating is actually good. And Christmas is God’s declaration that he is good.

The Serpent and the Son of Man (v. 9–15)

So Nicodemus is, at this point, flummoxed. “How can these things be?” he asks in v. 9.

To which Jesus gives an answer we might find a bit sharp (v. 10):

10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?”

This isn’t mockery. It’s diagnosis.

Nicodemus knows the Scripture, but he doesn’t yet know God’s grace.

And here is the warning for us, especially for those deeply embedded in the church:

You can know Christian language. You can teach Christian truth. You can defend Christian doctrine. You may be able to do all these things…and still miss the point of Christmas entirely.

Because Christmas is not about knowing about God. It’s about being made alive by God.

Jesus presses further (v. 11):

11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

To put it another way: Jesus comes with a simple message—everything he has been saying about the kingdom of God and the new birth, these are “earthly things”, things that happen here and now. Nicodemus wants more information, but his problem isn’t information; it’s belief. I’ve told you of earthly things, Jesus says…and you do not believe. He doesn’t say, “You don’t understand.” He says, “You don’t believe.” You don’t accept it. You don’t trust it.

What Jesus is saying isn’t all that difficult to understand; but understanding’s not the problem. In order to see the kingdom of God, the Spirit has to wake us up, change our hearts, bring us to faith—everything God promised to do in Ezekiel 36.

It’s not hard to understand what Jesus is saying, but it’s difficult to accept it, because it’s scary to accept that our salvation is out of our hands. We like to be in control, we like to take things forward. And there are some things we can and must do.

But this part—the essential part—is out of our hands.

If you don’t believe when I speak of earthly things, how will you believe if I tell you of heavenly things? There is more to know, yes—but before you’re able to hear it, you have to believe.

If Jesus stopped here, this would be a horribly sad, almost hopeless statement. “So there’s just nothing I can do, then?” we might want to say. “I just have to sit and wait for God to do it in me?”

The answer is both yes and no. Yes, we can’t do this for ourselves—God has to do it for us.

But we don’t have to just sit and wait. Because God already has made the decisive step toward us; all we have to do is see it.

V. 13:

13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

So we see two really essential things here.

First, we see that the one speaking to Nicodemus isn’t merely a teacher, as the Pharisee had earlier said. He is the one who descended from heaven. The Christian faith, the reason for Christmas, is not humanity reaching up to God; it is God stepping down into humanity. It was God’s initiative; it was God’s plan. He made the step toward us.

The second thing may be a bit confusing at first glance.

Jesus talks about Moses lifting up a serpent in the desert. If you don’t know the story, that won’t make a lot of sense—but Nicodemus, a teacher of the law, absolutely did know the story.

In the Old Testament book of Numbers, in chapter 21, we see the people of Israel grumbling against God in the wilderness. They believe God has abandoned them, led them out of slavery in Egypt to have them die in the desert. They despise the way God has provided food for them in the desert, exactly like kids who don’t want to eat their vegetables: they have food, they just don’t want the food that he’s given them.

So God does two things. First, he punishes their ungratefulness; he sends venomous serpents into the camp that start biting the people. This isn’t an emotional reaction, he’s not being unreasonable. He’s trying to show the people just how serious their lack of gratitude is, after everything he’s done.

And he wants them to see that he’s not punishing them with cruelty, because he provides healing for the bites. He instructs Moses to fashion a serpent out of bronze and to lift it up on a pole, and anyone who is bitten has only to look at the bronze serpent, and they will live.

On its own, even this story in Numbers is a little confusing—what is God trying to tell the people through his judgment, and through this image of the very thing which punished them (a serpent) being lifted up as a means of escape from that judgment?

The meaning of that event wouldn’t be fully clear until right now. Jesus tells Nicodemus that just as the serpent was lifted up in the desert, so too the Son of Man (Jesus himself) would be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

The reality is that all of humanity is under judgment for our rebellion against God—exactly like Israel in the desert. God is the one who judges sin, because sin is rebellion against him. But just as God exacts judgment against sin because he is just, he also provides escape from judgment, because he is good.

Later on, at the end of his ministry, Jesus would be falsely accused, he would take the sin of his people on himself, and he would be lifted up on a cross—his judgment for us visible for all to see. This, just like Jesus’s coming, was God’s doing, God’s initiative, not ours.

We couldn’t do it for ourselves; we couldn’t fix ourselves or make things right on our own. That was something God had to do—and he did it.

And like the people of Israel in the desert, all we do is look to him, and believe. Jesus was lifted up so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

Conclusion: What Christmas Asks of Us

What does Christmas ask of us all?

Our passage confronts us before it comforts us. Nicodemus comes to Jesus out of curiosity, out of interest. But Jesus isn’t interested in satisfying Nicodemus’s curiosity or answering his questions. He gets to the heart of the matter, and responds by telling Nicodemus what he needs.

The heart of the matter is not: “What do you think of Jesus?” or “Do you admire the major tenets of Christianity?” or “Do you celebrate Christmas?”

Rather, the heart of the matter is: “Have you been born from above?”

People can feel a lot of doubt around this question. Maybe you professed faith in Christ some time ago, but find yourself struggling to live the Christian life, and doubting whether or not the new birth has actually happened for you.

It’s really important for us to see that in this text, Jesus is speaking about origin, not intensity. “Born again” isn’t a measurement of how vivid your emotions are or how consistent your obedience feels. It’s about where life comes from, not how strong it feels today. No baby doubts whether it’s alive because breathing feels difficult. In the same way, struggle—and even failure—is not a measurement for birth.

Jesus’s whole goal in this passage is to point us outward, not inward. Jesus doesn’t tell Nicodemus to He doesn’t tell him to examine his heart endlessly; he doesn’t ask for introspective certainty

Instead, he redirects his attention: as Moses lifted up the serpent, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

New birth is seen indirectly—by faith looking outward, not by reflection pointed inward.

New birth doesn’t remove struggle; it introduces it. Jesus doesn’t ask you to find proof that you’re alive—He asks you to look to Him.

Next week, Jesus will tell Nicodemus how this new birth becomes possible. But this week, Christmas tells us what we need.

So as we get ready to celebrate Christmas on Thursday, we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by meals and presents and events and gatherings. The only way to truly enjoy Christmas for what it should be is to remember why Jesus came—to thank him for the new birth he has given us, or to ask him to bring us to life if that’s not already the case.

Jesus did not come to make us better; he came to make us alive. And all he calls us to do is look to him, the Son who was lifted up, to believe in him, and live.