Nicodemus’s initial faith is similar to that of many of us: we have to see to believe, touch to believe. He shows this attitude when he tells Jesus, “no one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him”. (John 3:2-10)
Jesus response to Nicodemus is puzzling: “Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born anew he cannot see the Kingdom of God”. Nicodemus cannot comprehend what Jesus is asking of him. And he reacts complicating the issue: Do I have to get into my mother’s womb again?
Faith is both grace of God and human response, which entails the need to make it grow. God gifts all of us with the grace of Faith. And although some may reach the goal through reasoning, what He wants in return is a simple “here I am, I believe”.
“Obedience is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam 15:22). And Jesus abolished the sacrifices and holocausts of old, replacing them with His own Sacrifice, by accepting the Will of His Father: “Here I am! I am coming to do your will. He is abolishing the first sort to establish the second” (Heb 10:9). “Not my will but yours be done." (Luke 22:42)
Likewise, we must offer our everyday hectic life and our own doings and actions, replacing them with the soothing Will of God.
When we live yearning for His constant presence inside our hearts, tenure and even His coming, His Will becomes soothing to our soul. St. Augustine explains: “our souls become restless until they rest in God”.
In order to “rest in God”, it is necessary to completely shed our own wants. Saint John the Baptist said: “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3: 30). This entails dying internally to one’s self, that is, to our own will, and filling ourselves with the Spirit of the Lord. God’s Will and our own will are mutually exclusive actions: one cannot cohabit with the other. His Will should progressively become my will.
For Nicodemus this meant accepting the new ways of Jesus Christ and shedding the old Jewish ways, but for us? What do we have to shed to accept God’s Will in our hearts?
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