I recently had a most ambiguous moment of self-realization—that at the age of sixty-one, I've gone to church almost every Sunday of my life.  That means that 61 x 52 = 3,172 church services.

I'm grateful for my heritage. I came by it honestly.  My mother was a church organist for twenty-five years in a small Presbyterian church.  Her grandfather was a Presbyterian pastor, and her mother spent seventy-nine years in great-grandpa McGrath's church.  My aunt has been worshiping for ninety-one years in that same church — ever since she was born.

Still, my long term religiosity has its risks.  The gospel for this week is a case in point.  A story about radical conversion — "You must be born again," and unqualified inclusion — "God so loved the world," has itself become so trivialized by religion that most people today hear it as a tired cliche that's been emptied of all meaning.

The strong wine of authentic religion always risks being watered down to formulaic religiosity.  And note who's responsible for this.

Back in January, we posted a review of Richard Holloway's book A Little History of Religion (Yale, 2016). Humanity has always been deeply religious, he observes — dating back 130,000 years ago to the funeral rites in which people painted the bodies of the dead with red ochre paint, and laid them to rest in special places, with special objects, and in special ways.

A recurring theme for Holloway is what he calls "the most important insight into God ever discovered by humans" — the Second Commandment prohibition against idolatry. 

Jesus and Nicodemus by Crijn Hendricksz, 1616–1645.

And note, "it's real target was religion.  And not just the kind that got people dancing around a golden calf.  It was warning us that no religious system could capture or contain the mystery of God.  Yet in history, that's exactly what many of them would go on to claim.  The Second Commandment was an early warning that the organizations that claimed to speak for God would become God's greatest rivals, the most dangerous idol of them all."

In the gospel this week, Nicodemus is the consummate religious professional — a conscientious Pharisee, a "member of the ruling Jewish council," and "a teacher of Israel."

But Jesus says that if he wants to "enter the kingdom of God," he must at some level repudiate his religiosity. He must be twice-born, once by his earthly mother through water, and then again by his heavenly Father through the Spirit. Only the free gift of God's love, and no religious effort, can do this.

It looks like Nicodemus learned his lesson.  He's mentioned only two other times in the gospels.  In John 7, he advises his colleagues that they should not judge Jesus without hearing him.  And in John 19, he and Joseph of Arimathea tend to Jesus's dead body.

Paul, too, needed a conversion not to religion but from his religion.  In his book In God's Shadow (2012), Michael Walzer of Princeton observes that Israel began with two different but related covenants — one with Abraham based upon kinship, family, and birthright as a chosen people, and another with Moses based upon a legal covenant, a nation, and law.

Nicodemus helps to take down Jesus's body from the cross by Michelangelo.

In the epistle for this week, Paul repudiates both of these religious appeals for divine favor.  He does so with an ironic appeal to Abraham himself, who in the reading was called by God to leave behind all that he held dear.  In doing so, he became the patriarch not just of the Jews but of "many nations."

Paul once boasted on both accounts. He was a "Hebrew of Hebrews" who could trace his ancestry to the tribe of Benjamin. As for the Mosaic law, he said he was "zealous" and "faultless." But Paul later repudiated his religiosity: "whatever was to my profit I now consider loss."

Counting how many times a word occurs in the Bible can lead to dubious interpretations. But Romans 4 for this week is an exception. At least 10 times Paul uses the word "credit" to describe our relationship with God. A credit is a free gift; it's the opposite of a wage that's paid for work, or an obligation that's earned.

No one can curry God's favor by keeping the Mosaic law, says Paul, or by claiming kinship with Abraham, or by any other well-intentioned religious effort (including those of Lent).

But everyone can receive a free gift — even those pagan Gentiles, says Paul, who are not part of Abraham's ancestry, and who are ignorant of the Mosaic law.

The apostle Peter experienced five conversions.  On the shores of Galilee he "left everything" and followed Jesus.  In Matthew 16, he confessed that Jesus was not just a rebel rabbi but the Beloved Son of God.  Then, after denying that he even knew Jesus, in John 21 Jesus lovingly reinstated him.  In Acts 10–11, Peter came to accept the Gentile Cornelius, and learn that "God does not discriminate against any person."  And finally, in Galatians 2, Paul describes how he "opposed Peter to his face" for his hypocrisy.  Having been converted to accept Gentiles, Peter later refused to eat with them.  We don't know the details, but somehow Peter was once again converted to embrace the Gentiles despite some Jewish pressures not to do so.

True religion requires lifelong conversion — often from my own religious ideas and practices.  I must be born again.  From above.  Again and again, all my life long.  In my thoughts, in my words, and in my deeds.  May it begin in me this Lent.

The Entombment with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea by Pietro Perugino, c. 1495.

For further reflection

C.S. Lewis

"Footnote to All Prayers"

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

Image credits: (1) Wikipedia.org; (2) Wikipedia.org; and (3) Wikipedia.org.