If We Are to Live…

“The most beautiful thing we can experience,” wrote Albert Einstein, “is the mysterious….The person to whom this emotion is a stranger, the person who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

Nicodemus (you can read the story in the third chapter of John’s Gospel) was as good as dead.  He came to Jesus knowing it all.  His eyes were closed; his ears could hear nothing.  He knew everything there was to know about religion—after all it was his specialty. When he approached Jesus, he made this known with his  very first words:  “Rabbi,” he said, “we know…” How does one deal with a “know-it-all?”  How does one break through such an allusion of certainty and self-complacent smugness?  

Most of us hear Jesus responding to Nicodemus with these words:  “In truth, in very truth I tell you, unless a man has been born over again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And that’s where we stop—and like Nicodemus we now think we know everything there is to know about religion.  But Jesus doesn’t stop there, he goes on to say,  “The wind blows where it wills; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from, or where it is going.”  But we do know about the wind.  The Weather Channel, with all its scientific equipment and weather experts can tell us where the wind is coming from, how fast it is moving, and where it is going.  Jesus can’t say to us in this twenty-first century what he said to Nicodemus in the first century:  “What! Is this famous teacher of Israel ignorant of this?” Because we are no longer ignorant about the wind!  We know now—“Rabbi, we know…” In our certainty and self-complacent smugness—our allusion of certainty—we now sing:

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

We know exactly what you are:

You’re just combusting so much mass

Of C and N and hydrogen gas.”

Suddenly the words of Jesus about the wind make sense to me.  It is the mood the words express—a mood that opens to mystery and wonder—the very things we need, according to Einstein, to recover if we are to live.  “We know” becomes a blindness to all that is beyond our knowing, beyond the wind, beyond the sunrise and the sunset.  “We know” becomes a deafness to all that is beyond our knowing, the sound of the wind and the waves of the ocean.  If we are to live we must again experience the mysterious (the beyond) and the emotion of wonder (not knowing).  If we are to see and hear, we must forego our “know-it-all” arrogance.  Yes, we must be born again!