Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
With this catechesis we begin to contemplate some meetings told in the Gospels, to understand the way in which Jesus gives hope. In fact, there are meetings that illuminate life and bring hope. It may happen, for example, that someone helps us to see from a different perspective a difficulty or a problem we are experiencing; Or it may happen that someone will simply give us a word that does not make us feel alone in the pain we are going through. There can
Sometimes being silent encounters, in which nothing is said, yet those moments help us to resume the path.
The first meeting on which I would like to stop is that of Jesus with Nicodemus, narrated in chapter 3 of the Gospel of John. I start from this episode because Nicodemus is a man who, with his story, shows that it is possible to get out of the dark and find the courage to follow Christ. Nicodemus goes to Jesus at night: an unusual time for a meeting. In John’s language, temporal references often have a symbolic value: here the night is probably the one that is in the heart of Nicodemus. He is a man who is in the darkness of doubts, in that darkness that we live when we no longer understand what is happening in our life and we do not see the way to follow well.
If you are in the dark, obviously look for the light. And John, at the beginning of his Gospel, writes like this: “The real light came into the world, the one that illuminates every man” (1,9). Nicodemus therefore seeks Jesus because he has sensed that he can illuminate the darkness of his heart. However, the Gospel tells us that Nicodemus cannot immediately understand what Jesus tells him. And so we see that there are many misunderstandings in this dialogue, and also a lot of irony, which is a characteristic of the evangelist Giovanni. Nicodemus does not understand what Jesus tells him why he continues to think with his logic and categories. He is a man with a well -defined personality, he has a public role, he is one of the heads of the Jews. But probably the accounts do not return to him anymore.
Nicodemus feels that something no longer works in his life. He feels the need to change, but he doesn’t know where to start.
In some passages of life this happens to all of us. If we do not accept to change, if we close ourselves in our rigidity, in habits or in our ways of thinking, we risk dying. Life lies in the ability to change to find a new way of loving. In fact, Jesus speaks to Nicodemus of a new birth, which is not only possible, but even necessary in some moments of our journey. To tell the truth, the expression used in the text is already ambivalent in itself, because anōthen (ἄνωθεν) can be translated both “from above” and “again”. Slowly, Nicodemus will understand that these two meanings are together: if we let the Holy Spirit genres in us a new life, we will be born again. We will find that life, which perhaps was turning off in us. I chose to start from Nicodemus also because he is a man who, with his own life, shows that this change is possible. Nicodemus will make it: in the end he will be among those who go to Pilate to ask for the body of Jesus (cf. Jn 19:39)! Nicodemus finally came to light, is reborn, and no longer needs to stay in the night. Changes sometimes frighten us. On the one hand they attract us, sometimes we want them, but on the other we would prefer to remain in our comfort. This is why the spirit encourages us to face these fears. Jesus reminds Nicodemus – who is a teacher in Israel – who also frightened the Israelites as they walked in the desert. And they stared at so much on their concerns that at a certain point those fears took the form of poisonous snakes (cf. Nm 21.4-9). To be freed, they had to look at the copper snake that Moses had put on an auction, that is, they had to look up and stay in front of the object that represented their fears. Only by looking at what scares us in the face, can we start being freed. Nicodemus, like all of us, will be able to look at the crucifix, the one who defeated death, the root of all our fears. We also look up to the one who pierced the one, let us also let us meet by Jesus. In him we find hope to face the changes of our life and to be born again.
