A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. A certain Pharisee notice that a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, came to Jesus at night. Of course, this now we're going back, to the lifetime of our blessed lord. So, Nicodemus came to Jesus one night and he said to him, rabbi, we know you are a teacher, come from god. For no man can perform signs and wonders such as you have performed unless god is with him.
Jesus replied to Nicodemus as follows. I solemnly assure you, no one can see the rule of God unless he is begotten from above. And to that, Nicodemus replied, well, how can a man be born again once he is old? Can he return to his mother's womb and be born all over again? And Jesus replied, I solemnly assure you, no one can enter into god's kingdom without being begotten of water and spirit.
Flesh begets flesh. Spirit begets spirit. Do not be surprised that I tell you that you must all be begotten from above. The wind blows where it will. You hear the sound that it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where the wind goes.
So it is with everyone begotten of the spirit, and this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. You would have guessed that this text was from Saint John if I hadn't told you or if you didn't recognize it.
And this is the kind of thing, because there's lots of this in the New Testament, which became the foundation stone of what we call Gnosticism. And believe me, don't don't think that I'm talking about ancient history. We have this attitude right with us today. As I've said more than once, you will find in the year of our Lord 1985, sincere Christians, and no question of that, who will say this doesn't make any difference whether Christ rose from the dead physically. What matters is the spirit.
That's what matters. And so they interpret the whole life of Christ. It after all, all this talk about conception and birth and all of that, that's physical. And after all Christ himself told us what matters is spirit, not body. And therefore, to be a first class Christian, emphasize spirit.
And you can quote texts like this. This is a very strong text. I'm the first one to admit it. I can read. Not much else, but I can do that.
And, obviously, our lord here is a is extremely strong. Here he talks about being reborn. Nicodemus remember, Nicodemus is no slouch. He's no fool. He's an educated man.
Nicodemus is a pharisee. And that word, unfortunately, has a bad connotation. But the pharisees were the cream of the cream, and so he takes our blessed lord literally. Do you expect me to go back and be reborn again? I mean, that's asking a whole lot of his mother.
You ought to consult his mother on that too, you know. But anyway, they he Nicodemus takes our lord literally, and our lord says, oh, forget it. Don't be stupid. I'm talking about your soul. I'm talking about your spirit, but you must be reborn of the spirit.
And then our lord asked add some more that sort of down grains the body. Now this attitude, as I say, it's a it's a trend of thought. It's it's a it's an atmosphere of thinking and of and of of projecting and of making conclusion, drawing conclusions that we think of Christ as as as God, as pure spirit, because God is pure spirit, then we can use these texts and you can get some very strong ones from Saint Paul emphasizing spirit, spirit, spirit, so that you can easily come to the conclusion that this old body of mine, especially if you add a strong dose of neo platonism. You can easily come to an attitude where you despise the body. When you despise it, So much so that you can draw this conclusion that it's impossible to think of God having a body.
How could God be omnipotent, The God that you can't make a single proposition about. The God who is completely divorced from matter. How can you even think of associating him with this awful thing called body, with all our emotions, our passions, and a whole lot of our sins as they thought came from the body. Sin doesn't come from the body, of course. But, of course, they didn't do much thinking anyway.
But they this is this is Gnosticism, and it was one of the chief heresies of the early church, the earliest church. And so with the councils of Nicaea and Ephesus and Chalcedon and Constantinople, those four councils, here you had you had now remember, I against it. These are people who are supposed to be very elite Christians, not just grubby Christians. Grubby Christians, you know, think that the body's important. These are elite Christians who wouldn't accept the fact that Jesus Christ had a body because they thought that that was irreconcilable with thinking of Christ as the son of God.
Now, you you see, you can you can quote texts that will will reinforce that, and this is called Gnosticism, and it's still with us. It's always with us in more or less degrees, and yet Jesus Christ was truly man. Truly man. It took four councils, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople. It took all those councils to enforce the idea that that that Mary had a baby, that that baby was truly God, and that that baby was truly man in every respect, a human being.
And in one of the readings of during the holy week in our breviary, there was this from an ancient anonymous writer. He said, he's speaking he's speaking in the person of Jesus Christ, and he's saying, if you run away from me as your lord, run to me as your savior because it was as a savior that Christ was on the cross. And he couldn't be on the cross without a body. And to try to tell me that this is all illusion or myth or some such nonsense as that, it's simply to absolutely deny deny the essence, the whole caboodle. And yet it's been done.
I'm not this is not this has all been done. I'm speaking from history. Very easily verifiable. Very easily verifiable. And so we come to this very difficult situation, as I've said.
Bible. You can prove anything almost from any book. Just depends on selecting passages. It's a sign of an ignoramus, but it can be done. And if there's anything sure, our blessed lord emphasized his humanity.
His humanity. He suffered. He died. He was miserable. He knew despair.
Jesus Christ knew despair. Now don't ask me how it works. I do not know. But he did. From the cross, he said, my god, my god, why have you abandoned me?
That's a pretty human emotion. That's a very human weakness. Christ knew us he knew humanity perfectly because he was human. He's just as much human as he is divine, and he's just as truly divine as he is human. As somebody said, that Jesus Christ is the is the most perfect conception, divine conception of man and a perfect conception of God by man.
And that's that's putting it very very very cogently. And so we have to be on our guard. You see, we take so much for granted. But when you look at that cross and you see a body up there, remember that is God that was on that cross because there's only one person in Jesus Christ. That's what these four councils were all about.
The fourth and the fifth century AD and they're all Greek, they're over in Asia Minor. That is what we believe. It's complex, very complex, because we're trying to hold together contraries. The spiritual and the material, the divine and the human, the the this the intellectual and the emotional, everything, and we're putting that all together. And why?
Because that's the way God did it. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen.