In Sunday’s gospel reading, we hear the story of Nicodemus sneaking out at night to find Jesus and ask him some big questions. I’d love to start a ‘Nicodemus group’ at some point, as a safe place to ask ‘everything you ever wanted to know about God but were too afraid to ask’. Asking questions and wondering about what’s just beyond what we can understand is one of the big things that sets human beings apart from other bits of God’s creation. The theological Kark Rahner suggested that when God created humanity he placed within us, as part of our make-up, the desire to seek that which is just over the horizon: he made us such that we would want to search for him. Several centuries before, St Anselm had spoken of ‘faith seeking understanding’ – not that understanding replaces faith, but that the very nature of our faith is dynamic, questioning, growing, deepening, engaging all the time more deeply with the God we trust.
Questions are wonderful – in fact, they’re essential – but there are some bits of our faith and theology that are bigger than words can ever quite express. In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus has a good go at putting the love of God into words in John 3.16 (God so loved the world that he sent his only beloved son….), but the truest expression of what those words hinted at can only really be seen in the action of Jesus himself – arms stretched wide on the cross, his silence then is the most eloquent way of saying, “You wanted to know how much I love you? This much.”
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