the semblant of nicodemus.

The discussion between Yahshua and Nakdimon concerns being “born again.” Nakdimon appears not to understand the intent of Yahshua’s words and perhaps there is some validity to his questioning. However, he was a well respected teacher in Israel with knowledge of the Hebraic phrase referred to as being “born again.” So, what exactly was this conversation all

about?

So Nicodemus comes to talk with Jesus AT NIGHT. This is key. The night in Hebrew and Greek literature is never just the night, there is always more to it. The night means you’re coming alone. No one spurred you on. You’re also risking your life against the possible dangers of the dark: wild animals, robbers, and all the possibilities in between. But even deeper than that, what is going on here is even deeper than all of the above, the darkness represented ambiguity. Fear. Distance from everything that is known.

If you reach out in the darkness, you might just lose your life — Exactly!

Jesus uses terms like Holy Spirit, born again, wind, womb, going back into and an arsenal of Hebrew metaphor to someone who would have gotten all of the hints. All of them. Like us, Nicodemus fully didn’t grasp what Jesus was getting at. But the Aramaic and Hebrew help us to get a glimpse into this mysterious conversation.

Nicodemus is entrenched in a patriarchal culture where power is defined as a top-down model, very much like some Fortune 500 companies today or even some Churches, or maybe those churches who perceive themselves to be consensus based but are really still masking a top-down model.

Nicodemus lives in that place.

And it’s a male dominated culture, where no power is given to anyone other then the male gender. It is steeped in very provincial and colonial thinking. Their perceptions are the right perceptions and everyone else might lucky occasionally, but truth must be measured by their standard.

Now, when you begin dissecting the Hebrew behind the phrase born again, you come up with all kinds of multi-layered meanings. On one level it signifies a horticultural act of transplanting and on another level it speaks of this idea whereby the person being spoken to must be willing to divorce themselves of their family of origin. To remove themselves from their roots of origin. To begin again. To ideologically say goodbye to what they think they know about a subject or object of their gaze.

The danger then here is to remove something and then to replace it with something else that resembles the loss. Lacan refers to this as a semblant. “The importance of the concept is indicated by Lacan’s description of objet a as a semblant that fills the void left by the loss of the primary object. If we can explore the nature of this semblant, we shall be able to come to a better understanding of some aspects of objet a. For Lacan a semblant is an object of enjoyment that is both seductive and deceptive.”

If we simply divorce ourselves from the ideas we have been indoctrinated to believe and replace them with new one’s or find ways to re-create the same idea with different rhetoric, then we seduce ourselves to believe we have actually made a change without truly doing so.

I think the greatest lie we can participate in is believing what we think about God is ever enough.

Or to think that these feable representations we refer to as theology can somehow live up to the deity we are attempting to know. Maybe to be born again really means that we are continual deconstruction of all the things we refer to as our belief systems. To be born again means we must embrace a posture of ideological renaissance rather than hegemony.

This conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus is a window into the human condition. The human condition to think to believe means we have to understand. Jesus talks about the wind and relates that to the spirit. This deity we refer to as God can’t be contained, not even in Christianity (or any other religion). This is where the conversation starts between Jesus and Nicodemus, that Nicodemus has been looking into small of an ideological territory. The word for born here is Yalad, it connotes this idea of sharing your family tree, essentially Jesus says to get a new one.

To be born anew. To be renewed. To be re-educated. To repent.

Which is the Aristotelian definition for education. An ongoing, never-stopping re-education of self. Now, this is a big no-no in a culture where patriarchy is God, you don’t tell someone to give up their family of origin in a family-based culture. Jesus was being intentionally radical and also metaphorical. He was telling Nicodemus that he has to let all the things he thinks he knows about God and give them up. In fact, divorce yourself from them.

Essentially what he is saying to a guy who is entrenched in the religious way of thinking, is to stop thinking religiously. Or in our context, he is saying stop being Christian. Notice Jesus statistically hardly ever refers to God directly? But rather assumes God’s place is already within the narrative. Maybe that’s what we have to do. Maybe what it means to be a better Christian is to give up being Christian.

Maybe Christianity is about bringing us to the edge of our atheism and instills us with the patience to see what lies beyond it….