Jesus loves us !

There are many excuses that we can find for things in life. I am of course very nearly perfect so I don’t really need to find many excuses for anything, but with Helen, one of her main excuses is that she doesn’t drive. Because of that she tries to excuse her appalling sense of direction. It is true to say that even if she has been somewhere once she is unlikely to find that place again ! Even when she has been somewhere lots of times she still has to double check the way ! She’s got a postcard which sums her up well. It’s a picture of a sheep on its own in a field where it is raining, the sheep is saying, “Lost ! Me ? I know exactly where I am… I am here”.

Anyway I promise I’m not being too cruel behind her back – she has read everything I’ve written !

As we look at the reading that we have heard this morning, there is a sense of being lost. There is a sense of someone needing direction and of needing to know the way, and that person is Nicodemus. I am not sure what people have given up for lent, if anything at all.

One of the things that perhaps I should try and give up is watching rubbish on television – a few weeks ago I did watch a particularly strange programme, called “Are you smarter than a ten year old ?” I have to say, I started watching, thinking that I was bound to be… I was very, very wrong.

Basically on this programme an adult has to answer questions that are based on different aspects of the national curriculum. These questions should be really easy, if a seven year old, or a ten year old can answer them, then the adult should be able to. There is in the studio a group of children who answer the questions nearly always correctly and the adults have varying degrees of success.

In the gospel reading this morning we heard of Nicodemus and his meeting with Jesus. Nicodemus went to Jesus with questions. He wanted some answers. It is possible that he was trying to work out what Jesus was up to, it is possible that he wanted to hear that Jesus was dangerous and should be stopped, and it is possible that he really was interested in seeing if what he heard of Jesus being a great man was true. As a very learned man, who could probably have done very well on the programme “are you smarter than a ten year old” he would not have expected to be given an answer that at first seemed very stupid.

You can almost imagine Nicodemus, sitting there ready for a great argument, and then Jesus provided an answer that at first may have seemed ignorant, and an answer that certainly did not provide Nicodemus with any clear direction. The answer Jesus appeared to give was that the direction to Heaven was in being born again. Poor Nicodemus, if he had been looking for an answer to debate well, then this was not it.

In the television programme, the adults often look very upset at the fact that they have been trumped by a child, and Nicodemus has this type of experience. He thinks logically, and he knows very well that physically you cannot be born all over again. However, in a moment Jesus shows Nicodemus that he needs to admit his need for God, and realise that the most important thing in life is being someone who has accepted God and knows Him.

Nicodemus thought he knew all there was to know about God and yet Jesus was showing that he actually knew very little and that the most important thing is to become as new, to accept that actually we do not have the answers, and that only God does. It is to accept that we need God and we need to be born of Him. We need to have a relationship with Him where we realise that we must become a new person, a new creation, someone who believes that God can and does make a difference.

A group of students were once listening to the great academic theologian Karl Barth. He has written lots of really long and complicated theological books on all kinds of different subjects, but in this one lecture a student asked him, “Professor Barth, after all your years of study what is the most important thing that you have learned ?” The students waited for some great piece of wisdom, and Karl Barth paused and then answered, “The most important thing is that Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.”

This is real direction, this is knowing the way.

Over the last week or so there has been a huge amount of publicity about the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury talking about Shari’a law. Regardless of the right and wrongs of what he said, and most of us, including myself, really struggle to understand what he actually said, the sad point of that whole episode is that people have been talking about Christianity in terms of controversy and division, rather than highlighting that wonderful and simple truth that God loves us.

The challenge to us, is though, not just to accept these words, or to speak these words, but to actually let them change us as we go through lent and each and every day of our lives.

As we move through lent, our spring and time of celebrating new life, we need to put into practice in our lives the points of what it means to be a true follower of Jesus. We need to show people around us that we have found a direction, and that direction is founded upon the very simple truth that Jesus loves us ! AMEN.