Where the Wind Will

John 3.1-17 (LIT Bible, translated by Brandon C. Vélez Johnson)

¹ There was a man, one of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, who was a leader among the Judeans. ² He came to Jesus in the night.

“Rabbi,” he said, “We understand that you have come as a teacher from God; no one is able to produce the signs that you do unless God is with them.”

³ “Truly, truly I’m telling you,” Jesus answered, “Unless someone is brought into being from above, they are not able to understand God’s Reign.”

⁴ “How can a person be brought into being when they’re old?” Nicodemus said. “Can they go into their mother’s womb and come into being a second time?”

⁵ “Truly, truly I’m telling you,” Jesus answered, “Unless someone is brought into being from water and from the Life-breath, they aren’t able to start participating in God’s Reign. ⁶ Whatever has been brought into being from the body is a body, and whatever has been brought into being from the Life-breath is a life-breath. ⁷ Don’t be shocked that I told you it’s necessary for you to be brought into being from above. ⁸ The wind blows where it wants and you hear its sound, but you don’t see where it comes from or where it’s going. That’s how it is with everyone who has been brought into being by the Life-breath.”

⁹ “How can these things happen?” Nicodemus asked him.

¹⁰ “You are the teacher of Israel, but you don’t understand these things?” Jesus responded. ¹¹ “Truly, truly I’m telling you that we’re talking about what we have come to understand and we report what we’ve seen, but you don’t accept what we report. ¹² If you don’t trust what I’ve told you about things happening on the land, how will you trust it if I tell you about heavenly things?

¹³ “No one has ascended to the heavens except the one who descended from the heavens, the Son of Humanity. ¹⁴ Just like Moses raised up the snake in the wilderness, it’s necessary for the Son of Humanity to be raised up ¹⁵ so that everyone who trusts him will have agelong life. ¹⁶ You see, this is how God loved the whole world: God gave the One-of-a-kind Son so that everyone who places their trust in him would not be lost to death but would have agelong life. ¹⁷ God did not send the Son to the whole world in order to put the whole world on trial but so the whole world would be liberated through him.

This passage from John has always made me scratch my head.

A second birth.

Born from above.

Born of water; born of the Spirit.

Jesus might as well be saying to me personally, “How is it that you are a teacher of the people of God and yet you don’t understand these things?”

In all my years of studying the Bible, teaching, and preaching, I’ve never gotten a grasp on this passage. It feels esoteric. Talk of new birth from the Spirit is necessary to enter the kingdom of God. Sure, we could take that to mean a good ol’ fashioned “give your heart to Jesus” kind of thing, but that never sat right with me.

I mean, Jesus talks about being the only begotten Son, and that he didn’t come into the world to condemn, but to save. So maybe there’s more to this passage than, “get ye saved!” in some spiritual sense. Jesus didn’t walk Nicodemus through a Romans road tract or explain to him the sinner’s prayer.

Besides, Jesus is talking to one of the religious leaders of Israel. Nicodemus was an expert in the law of Israel, and that included washing. He may have even gone down to the river to be baptized by the wild John the baptizer.

Maybe this passage is about baptism, how important it is to our salvation. But is that baptism as an infant or as an adult? And if baptism is part of salvation, then are we really saved by grace alone though faith? Is baptism some sort of work? Is it some ritual to get us into the reality of God’s reign? And with that thought, I’m right back to some esoteric nature of this passage that I simply don’t have access to.

Sometimes we scratch our heads, just like Nicodemus did.

Here’s what I do know: Nicodemus didn’t need to “get saved.” Nicodemus needed to be liberated.

I have this theory that maybe Nicodemus was board. He knew the religion, knew the politics, knew the steps required of him every day. He knew how to spiritually lead people, how to pray, how to argue the scriptures… he knew what it took to be a teacher and leader in Israel. He was a Pharisee after all.

But when we know something inside and out, it’s easy to fall into complacency and repetition that loses its meaning.

I think Nicodemus was spiritually board. It had all become old hat to him. It wasn’t that he was being suffocated by religion or that he didn’t believe. It had just become too familiar to him.

Nicodemus needed liberation from his complacency.

And here comes Jesus.

Jesus, the itinerant preacher from backwater Galilee, was doing signs. They weren’t miracles—he did those as well, but so did other people in that time—they were signs, proof that pointed to the indisputable fact that Jesus was God’s representative.

What Nicodemus saw wasn’t a miracle worker. Nicodemus saw someone who was demonstrating the reality of the presence of God in their life with actions, words, and demeanor that displayed the reality that this person was entrusted by God to carry God’s message to the people.

Nicodemus saw something new, something refreshing, something that challenged the boredom of his days.

With sparked interest, Nicodemus goes to Jesus to talk about this, to see what he’s about, to find out if his hope is true.

And Jesus rattles off some words that make absolutely no fucking sense to this Pharisee.

New birth.

Born from above.

Born of water and Spirit.

That’s how you get into the kingdom of heaven?!?

“I don’t understand,” was all he could muster to say.

At some point, Jesus says, “The wind blows where it will.” He’s obviously referring to the Spirit of God—after all, the word for “Wind” is the same as “Spirit” in Greek and Hebrew. So the Spirit moves where it will.

The Spirit of God, the wind of God, the breath of God isn’t bound by religious rules and structures. She’s not captive to our rituals. The Spirit, the same Spirit that brooded over the primeval dark waters of creation, doesn’t follow our rules very well.

The wind comes and goes, blowing into a storm or a gentle breeze. North of south, east or west, it comes when it comes, how it will come.

The wind is like the Spirit.

The Spirit moves where she will. There is no corralling her into a neat box of methodology nor is there stopping her force from doing whatever the hell she wants. She will come from whatever direction she chooses, change midcourse, leave where it’s unexpected, and return when she chooses to. She is unpredictable, wild, and untamable.

She is a force.

And she was already haunting the halls of Nicodemus’ heart.

When Nicodemus saw Jesus and the signs, his heart must have leaped for joy… and that was only the tickling breeze of the Spirit beginning to work in him. She was set to call him out of complacency, out of boredom, and into the liberation of the kingdom of Heaven.

Nicodemus began to be changed by that night when Jesus told him about the wind. Eventually he quietly defended Jesus to his peers, and at the crucifixion he publicly was part of the gentle burial of the one he knew was from God. The Spirit began a work that eventually placed Nicodemus in the presence of Jesus, changed, born again, made new by this internet preacher from Galilee.

So, let me ask: what is the Spirit doing in you?

Where is She already moving?

You may not even have an answer to that yet, and that’s okay. But it’s worth paying attention to, listening to see what we can hear of the breath of God whispering in our bones, calling us eventually to the cross because we have been set free from empire, and empire can’t stand freedom.

The Spirit, the breath, has been showing up in my life in places I never thought I’d see her. But there she is, fluttering, beckoning, gusting me into a new awareness of life and liberty. There is no controlling her… and that includes by limiting the movements of the wind of God to Christianity.

The other day, I was on a train, and I helped a woman figure out how to get to her destination. We got to talking, and I discovered her family, her life, and her religion. She’s Muslim.

As our conversation ended, she pulled out a beautiful set of prayer beads. I couldn’t help but comment on how gorgeous they were.

She insisted I take them. No matter my protests, she kept at it, telling me she had more at home and that these were for me. So, I accepted them. Now I have some Islamic prayer beads. I’ve started trying to pray with them, using the Sufi phrase, “There is no god but God” to guide my prayers.

There was a time in my life where I couldn’t have used these beads for prayer because I didn’t believe the Spirit would meet me in the practice of prayer with Islamic beads.

I also never thought that the Tao Te Ching could teach me so much about killing the ego and learning to live in the way of reality, the way of love.

These other religions and practices I am doing are doing something in me, and that something can only be described as a sign that God is with me.

I am becoming more mindful, more curious, and more gentle. I am becoming more like the Christ I see in the Gospels. I’m listening more, hearing what the Spirit is saying, even when she says things that are hard, that I don’t like.

This is me, post-Christianity. I haven’t given up on Jesus—after all, he won’t leave me alone—but I am finding his image and his Spirit in places I never would have thought to look.

This is how the wind is blowing. This is how the breath is filling me. This is how the Spirit is haunting me.

What about you? Can you hear the whistling of the Spirit through the forests of your soul? What is she inviting you to see? Where is she challenging your boredom? How is she blowing through your bones, urging, calling, wooing you to something bigger than you have now?

The Spirit brings liberation.

Feel it on your skin.

This isn’t esoteric knowledge to unravel.

This is the Spirit walking beside us, moving in us, bringing us into wide open places where we can finally breathe and find that we have been born again.

If you’re aching to listen for God in the real stuff of life—grief, wonder, doubt, desire—I offer spiritual direction as a space to breathe and be heard. We listen together for the Spirit moving in the ordinary, the hidden, the in-between. No fixing. No formulas. Just presence, honesty, and room to be fully human before God.

If that sounds like what your soul needs, I’d love to walk with you

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