By Jessica Martin
“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).
A very strange thing is the wind.
And no-one knows how it beginn’d.
And nobody knows where it goes.
It is wind; it beginn’d; and it blows.
This little children’s verse, by the poet John Masefield, appears in passing in his book The Midnight Folk. It turns Jesus’ words into song, a song with a breeze running through it; it makes visible the sheer wonder of what Jesus is telling Nicodemus. Wind is a matter for wonder, not only in its unpredictable caps and currents and gusts in the astonishingly breathable atmosphere of our world, but in its deeper identification with the life that animates everything. Wind is God’s breath, source of all inspiration; and wind, too, is the parallel breath that blows through our creaturely bodies, in and out, in and out, holding us into the world, so that for us wind and life are scarcely separable.
In the creation story Jesus knew, the breath of God blew upon chaos before God brought light into being. In the domestic world Jesus knew, each baby born yelled or cried or mewed its first experience of its life-wind, that first breath that marked the beginning of a separate existence from the maternal body.
All that is wonder enough. But Jesus is showing Nicodemus something else, in his picture of God’s life-giving as wind. This is not in your control, he says. It’s not part of any bargain, or exchange system. You can’t make it come, or stop it coming; you can’t earn it. The wind is the wind; you can hear it and know it and be blown upon or mark its sound upon trees or upon water; but its ways are as mysterious as the gift of life. No baby chooses to be born. Where each one of us comes from before our conception, where we go after the long exhale of the last breath: these are things we do not control. The spirit, the breath, is in the hand of God who gave it. No bargains.
You don’t earn the gifts of your baptism in water and the spirit. You don’t even have to understand them. You just receive God’s life into you, blowing like the wind from no one knows where, blowing you onward toward no one knows where; endless, unexpected, playful, overwhelming, or stormy or tender or scarcely felt, but always a gift.
We human beings are systematizers. We like to balance things, make order, find explanations. These are good things. But because systematizing seeks control, our habits of understanding have certain dangers. They can start to exclude wonder, and gratitude, and the readiness to accept the life of God as the gift it is.
The religious systematizing we call theology has this danger too, in a big way. Nicodemus knows its temptations: he tells Jesus, for example, that he knows he must be from God because he’s showing proper God-touched characteristics. If this, then that. Jesus says no, it’s not like that: you can’t control this thing you long for, you can only accept it, the unpredictable new inhale, exhale, of a new kind of being. Nicodemus is taken aback by the illogicality of Jesus’ reply: “How can these things be?” he asks.
Jesus tries to meet him on his own ground: the grounds of proof, or evidence, “that which is seen.”
“We speak of what we know,” Jesus assures him, “and testify to what we have seen.” If that’s not enough, what will be? It takes Jesus a little while longer to use the word that the unpredictable wind really expresses; and it’s the word love: “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”
This isn’t about balancing what you get with what you deserve. It’s like love, where what you deserve doesn’t come into it. It’s like love, which doesn’t make calculations or count its costs. It’s like love, which we don’t choose to have blow into us, which we mourn desperately when it leaves us. Come on, says Jesus, it’s not even that it’s like love. The wind of God — it is love.
John is the only one of the gospel writers who does not tell the story of Jesus’ baptism. He tells this story, the story we have heard today, instead: a story showing what baptism is. The tit-for-tat of “repent and be purified” is absent here. Instead, we see the heavy disappointments of human experience, the weights of time, whipped away by God’s wind, washed away by the water of life, in favor of a newborn creature, all potential, all helplessness: the baptized soul, taking everything God gives as gift alone, bathed not in judgment but in love; not condemned, but cherished; rescued from the terminal punishments of time.
The new life of baptism is not about what we ought to have. It’s not about rights; not even about righteousness, at any rate of the sort we could buy through good behavior; it’s not something to work for or earn or demand in payment. The Spirit comes on the wind, and in his own time; he comes like love, out of nowhere and running toward we know not what. All the rest — the doctrine, the system, the beautiful patterns of what humans deserve or don’t deserve — is just so much vanity. We don’t really need it. All we need is to trust “the presence of God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
A very strange thing is the wind.
And no-one knows how it beginn’d.
And nobody knows where it goes.
It is wind; it beginn’d; and it blows.
The Rev. Canon Jessica Martin is canon residentiary at Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, England.
