You Only Live Twice

In the latest Bond film, Skyfall, there is a scene in which Bond has been captured trying to infiltrate the residence of the arch-enemy of civilized nations, Silva.  I don’t recall the full context, but Silva is up to something when Bond states, “Everyone needs a hobby.”  Silva ponders and asks, “So what’s yours,” and a defiant Bond says, “Resurrection.”

When the film came out in 2012, there was an article in the British newspaper, The Guardian, that suggests we are inundated with resurrection and miraculous recovery themes in television and film these days.   It lists Jason Bourne, Lt. Ellen Ripley in Alien, Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem, as well as the B.B.C.’s, Sherlock.

I watched last Sunday evening’s new serial on ABC, Resurrection.  The first episode entitled, The Returned, sees an eight year old, Jacob Langston, awake out of a rice paddy in rural China.  He, evidently, is shipped around from Chinese authority to Chinese authority, they assume, he is American and ship him off to New York.  An immigration officer uncovers where the young lad might live.  When he arrived at his home in Missouri, the parents are incredulous.  He may look like Jacob, talk like Jacob, know the stuff that Jacob should know but their son, Jacob died 32 years earlier after falling into a river.  You feel for these parents who are 32 years older, have done their grieving, don’t believe what they see, and yet hope.  Jacob’s mother is the first to accept him.  Jacob’s best friend who is now the town pastor, 32 years later, says, “in my heart, I know it’s him but even though I preach the miracles of God every week, I can’t believe this.”  Jacob’s father is really struggling, “My boy died 32 years ago,” he tells the immigration officer, “am I to believe the impossible.”  “Maybe you’re missing the real question,” replied the officer, “Do you want to believe?”   … it’s only the first episode and I may be hooked already (but who knows what it will bring forth).

I got hooked on the whole concept of life and afterlife as a young boy.  I was actually a bit disappointed at the second film, I was allowed to go and see on my own as a youngster.  I just had to see, James Bond in, You Only Live Twice.  The opening scene appears to show Bond murdered, but apparently, it was a fix, to cause Bond’s enemies to think that he was dead.  It wasn’t really a resurrection, in the film, let alone a second life, Bond just continued living the same old life he always lived; exciting but same old.  Ian Fleming’s book, You Only Live Twice, was much more creative.  In it, at least, “living twice” served as a metaphor for a huge transformation in Bond’s character (the storyline is very different from that of the film).

But I was hooked on this stuff, and I am not alone.  It’s one of the biggest questions we have as human beings, “Is there more to life than this?”  It’s a question that’s been asked since human beings had the power to think.  Some of the earliest writings that we have from ancient Sumer and Akkad depict Gilgamesh and Enkidu going on a journey to find the plant that will bring eternal youth.  The stories of the Holy Grail are all caught up in the theme of eternal life.  As a society, we’re getting into things like cryonic preservation in the hope that a person may be revived by more advanced medical practice in the future.  Plastic surgery hopes to keep us looking young, but what we really want more of is life.  What we really want more of is hope of a future?

That’s exactly what came up in Nicodemus’ discussion with Jesus.  Above all he wanted to be a part of God’s kingdom, something that was eternal.  Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a leader among the Jews, so he came to Jesus at night.  He feared being seen with one whom so many other leaders were opposed to but when they met he seemed interested in the Kingdom.  Je
sus says to him, “Very truly, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above/again.”
There are two Greek words in the manuscripts which we translate into our English Bibles, gennéthé anõthen, which can be translated either “born from above,” or “born again.”  I think that both translations should be held together, as one, “born again” is being “born from above.”   Nicodemus, however, took Jesus to mean simply being, “born again,” in a physical sense.  He wants to know how anyone can enter a mother’s womb a second time and be re-born.  Jesus, however, has something more complex in mind.  “No, no, no,” he says to Nicodemus, “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit, you must be ‘born from above,’” he says, “be born again” of God, and he compares the Spirit’s coming to a wind which blows where it chooses.

There’s a passage in the Bible in the third chapter of Genesis that speaks of the Garden of Eden and the, then, new world that God had created.  In the garden, God walked with Adam and Eve and we get a picture of closeness and relationship between Creator and created.  But then there was what is called the Fall, when Adam and Eve went against God’s commands and it caused a rupture between God and humankind, a great gulf developed between them, relationship was all but lost.  Human beings were forced out of the garden into a physical world to live by the sweat of their brow.  They were separated from God’s realm.  But God was not happy with this circumstance and he kept coming back to his creation trying to redirect them back into relationship.  He worked with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, through Moses and Aaron, King David, the prophets, and others.  Then God came himself, in the person of Jesus, he bridged the gap between himself and human beings, and Jesus taught that the fullness of relationship can be restored in human beings when they are “gennéthé anõthen,” born again, born from above, re-born of the Spirit of God.  You can live twice, says Jesus, once from a physical birth, and the second from a spiritual birth, from above, and that’s when a person truly enters the kingdom of God even now on earth.

Nicodemus didn’t quite get it, and like him, we don’t always get it.  Many of us think that we’re good with God if we’re reasonably nice people.  Some of us think we’re good if we just go to church once in a while; or, perhaps, if we send a few dollars to the local homeless shelter; or, even, if we get rid of the bad feelings we have, jealousy, anger, resentment.  All good things, but, “What must I do to enter the kingdom of God?” one man asked Jesus.  Like him and Nicodemus, we don’t quite get it.  It’s something more enigmatic, something from that other realm of God, something we don’t quite fathom, the Spirit of God has to work in us.

The Spirit?  Most of us have grown up in a modern age.  We are realists, empiricists, scientific, advanced; we don’t believe what we do not see too readily.  O, we sing in Church, “Immortal, invisible, God only wise,” but we’re not sure about this other realm, the metaphysical, the spiritual.

You’ve probably heard of William James, the American philosopher, psychologist, physician, and author.  William James made a lifelong study of religious people.  He read hundreds of accounts of mystics and conducted many personal interviews with religious people of many stripes.  William James concluded that all religions have one thing in common, a belief in an unseen; a spiritual world from which the visible world draws its significance.  He posited that all religious people share a sense of living in a disordered world and see the cure for it in coming in contact with the unseen world, which is our true end.

William James was an agnostic, and did not accept every account of the people he interviewed, yet, he found that as a scientist, neither could he ignore or deny them.  He noted that contact with the unseen world had produced actual, transforming effects on individual personalities in this world and he summed up, “God and the unseen world must be real, since they produce real effects in human beings.”

Hmmmm, if an agnostic like William James can embrace that, maybe there’s more to this unseen world and Spirit-thing than meets the eye.  And maybe the “transforming effects” of the unseen world lend weight to this rebirth-thing that Jesus spoke of for, every time a person experiences this rebirth from above, it results in transformation; their lives are never quite the same.

He succeeded at everything he tried; as an officer in the U.S. Navy, a nuclear engineer, a farmer, and governor of the State of Georgia.  Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere in 1975-76 to gain the most powerful position in the world, President of the United States of America.  What an interesting man Carter has been.  His difficulty dealing with the Iranians during the hostage crisis led to his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential race.  After that, some belittled his presidency, but his quiet life of service since then, has raised his profile back up again.

Jimmy Carter never made a secret of his Christian faith.  Even while president, he taught a weekly Adult Sunday School class at a Baptist Church.  He understood this world and worked within it, but also had a love for another, the kingdom of God.  He entertained world leaders and statesmen/women and, when the election was lost, he returned to more humble beginnings in Plains, GA.  He had to rebuild a business that had accumulated debt while he was in office, but even in the midst of a lot of work, he has always had time for his church and a life of service.  He established a centre with an emphasis on human rights that has kept him in the public eye.  His support for Habitat for Humanity is not just that of lending his name to an organization, he is out there with hammer and nails.  His foundation targeted a handful of major diseases that plague poor nations, and as a result both guinea worm and river blindness have almost been eliminated.  Carter’s reputation recovered and his decades of work for peace in international relations and the Middle East led him to be awarded the prestigious, Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

But every weekend they are in town, Jimmy Carter continues to teach Sunday School at the Baptist Church in Plains.  Every month, he takes a turn cutting the grass of the church, and Rosalynn, his wife, a woman who entertained the world, helps clean the church bathrooms.   Of all the ex-U.S. presidential families, the Carters have shown themselves in an incredible light, devoting themselves to service and to God.  … It’s because of the Spirit.  As human beings, they could function in the most demanding job and the most demanding house in the world, but the Carters also work for another realm.  They would tell you that they had experienced a rebirth, a transformation, an encounter with Spirit of God, and it is the Spirit which truly guides their lives.

Well, Jimmy and Rosalynn are getting old now, yet they keep going, living, serving, believing that this life is not all there is for those who follow God.  When Jesus told Nicodemus about being born again, from above, he told him about a birth that transforms lives, but he went on to speak of the extent of the transformation; this birth, and this new life, is eternal.

Eternity is mentioned twice in this passage, the most familiar is, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”   We sometimes gloss over the familiar, but isn’t that the very thing that a lot of people are looking for?  It’s the subject of countless stories.  It’s a part of the television series, Resurrection, a part of another one, Saving Hope, central to Robin Williams’ film, What Dreams May Come, and a key part of one of my favourite films, The Sixth Sense.  We want there to be something more to life than this, and Hollywood is on the bandwagon.

While it may be the very thing we look for, we are not easily convinced.  People were not easily convinced in the time of Jesus when on the third day, after his crucifixion, he started appearing to his followers and others (1 Cor.15).  When we read the Gospel accounts of the resurrection, the main emotions expressed by his followers are not joy and happiness initially but “terror, amazement, fear, disbelief, lack of faith, stubbornness, and that’s just in Mark’s Gospel, which is the earliest of the four.”   Today, with our advanced minds, grounded in scientific empiricism, people are even less likely to believe.

But, perhaps, the fact that a scientific mind, like that of William James, believes in another realm (because he could see the transformations it made in people’s lives), perhaps, that might encourage those who struggle.  For, if Jesus was right about a “new birth” and transforming Spirit, maybe he’s also right about eternity.

…And the rest of us hear the accounts of Jesus’ appearances after death and we see how it transformed the lives of the disciples, and Paul, and others.  There is such credibility in that, in the life of Paul, for instance, that it is difficult not to listen to him.  A man, opposed to Christianity and who persecutes and kills Christians; what turns him around so much that he is willing to spend himself and die for this Jesus whom he once opposed?  What did Paul experience?  It would have had to be something big.

I go back to that scene in the new television series, Resurrection.  Young Jacob’s father is really struggling with the appearance of this child that looks like his son from decades earlier.  He is more than mystified.  He shows the immigration officer the tomb where he laid his son.  Regardless of what this boy’s return, looks like, he can’t get his head around it, it just is not possible.  The immigration officer says to him, “I saw you when you first laid eyes on him.  You believed.”  “Believed in what? snapped Langston, “The impossible?  That he’s not in that vault where I laid him 32 years ago?”  “Maybe your missing the real question,” replied the immigration officer.  “Do you want to believe?”

And really, this is where Jesus takes Nicodemus and us, “Do you want to believe?”  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”  You can live twice!