Next, the text prepared by Pope Francis and disseminated by the Vatican for the General Hearing on Wednesday, which has been canceled for the fourth time for his hospitalization. The Holy Father stops in the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus, reported in Chapter 3 of the Gospel of St. John.
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
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With this catechesis we begin to contemplate some meetings narrated in the Gospels, to understand the way Jesus gives hope. In fact, there are encounters that illuminate life and bring hope. It can happen, for example, that someone helps us to see from a different perspective a difficulty or a problem that we are living; Or it can happen that someone simply gives us a word that does not make us feel alone in the pain we are going through.
Sometimes there can also be silent encounters, in which nothing is said, and yet those moments help us resume the way.
The first encounter in which I would like to stop is that of Jesus with Nicodemus, narrated in Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John. I begin with this episode because Nicodemus is a man who, with his history, demonstrates that it is possible to get out of darkness and find the courage to follow Christ.
Nicodemus will see Jesus at night: an unusual hour for an encounter. In Juan’s language, temporary references often have a symbolic value: here the night is probably the one in the heart of Nicodemus.
He is a man who is in the darkness of doubts, in that darkness that we live when we no longer understand what is happening in our life and we do not see the path to follow well.
If one is in the dark, obviously looks for light. And John, at the beginning of his gospel, writes like this: “The true light came to this world, the one that illuminates every man” (1,9). Nicodemus seeks Jesus because he intuits that He can illuminate the darkness of his heart.
However, the Gospel tells us that Nicodemus fails to immediately understand what Jesus tells him. And so we see that there are many misunderstandings in this dialogue, and also a lot of irony, which is a characteristic of the evangelist John. Nicodemus does not understand what Jesus tells him why he continues to think with his logic and categories.
He is a man with a well -defined personality, has a public role, is one of the chiefs of the Jews. But the accounts probably don’t come out.
Nicodemus feels that something no longer works in his life. He feels the need to change, but he doesn’t know where to start. In some moments of life this happens to us all.
If we do not accept to change, if we lock ourselves in our rigidity, in our customs or in our ways of thinking, we run the risk of dying. Life lies in the ability to change to find a new way of loving.
In fact, Jesus speaks to Nicodemus of a new birth, which is not only possible, but even necessary in some moments of our way. In fact, the expression used in the text is already ambivalent in itself, because Anōthen (ἄνωθεν) can be translated both as “from above” and “again.” Little by little, Nicodemus will understand that these two meanings go together: if we let the Holy Spirit generate in us a new life, we will be born again.
We will recover that life that perhaps was turning off in us. I have chosen to start with Nicodemus because he is a man who, with his own life, shows that this change is possible. Nicodemus will get it: in the end he will be among those who go to Pilate to ask for the body of Jesus (cf. Jn 19,39)! Nicodemus has finally come to light, has reborn and no longer needs to be at night.
The changes sometimes scare us. On the one hand, they attract us, sometimes we want them, but on the other we would prefer to stay in our comforts. That is why the spirit encourages us to face these fears.
Jesus reminds Nicodemus- who is a teacher in Israel- that the Israelites were also afraid as they walked through the desert. And they set both in their concerns that at one point those fears took the form of poisonous snakes (cf. Nm 21,4-9).
To be released, they had to look at the bronze snake that Moses had placed in a rod, that is, they had to look up and face the object that represented their fears. Just looking at what scares us, we can begin to be released.
Nicodemus, like all of us, can look at the crucified, the one who beat death, the root of all our fears. Let us also lift the look towards the one to whom they transferred, let Jesus also meet us. In it we find hope to face the changes of our life and reborn.
Papa Francisco
Pope Francis, born on December 17, 1936 in Buenos Aires (Argentina), is the first Latin American Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, assuming the papacy on March 13, 2013. His close style and his emphasis on mercy have left a distinctive mark in his pontificate.