“Born
from Above”
by Donne Hayden
Listening to the
news this past ten days has been almost beyond bearing; I am overwhelmed by the
tragedies and incalculable sorrow of people in Japan and the Middle East. Knowing that you hear about it all the time, too,
and that most of you are already giving and doing what you can, I decided to give
us all a small respite from the news today by focusing on something I heard on
NPR this past Wednesday.
That day, March
16, I listened with delight to Garrison Keillor’s homage to Henny
Youngman (1906-1998) on his birthday,[1]
and it gave me a new appreciation for
the concept of “comic relief.”[2]
I remember seeing Henny
Youngman when I was a kid when he performed on the Ed Sullivan Show and other
variety shows. He always had a violin
with him and was known as “the king of the one-liners” because his style was
marked by rapid-fire delivery of punch-lines.
Youngman was a genius in the way he wrote jokes so that no long build-up
was necessary—it was simply punchline after punchline. In a
twenty-minute act, Henny Youngman would deliver
dozens of jokes punctuated by a few bars played scratchily on his violin. Here
are some samples:
"When I read
about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."
"The secret
of a happy marriage remains a secret."
"My
grandmother is over 80 and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the
bottle."
"I once
wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up — they have no holidays."
"I told the
doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those
places."
"Why do
Jewish divorces cost so much? They're worth it."
"You have a
ready wit. Tell me when it's ready."
"My dad was
the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad; but New
York City?"
"If at first
you don't succeed ... so much for skydiving."
And perhaps his
most famous: “Take my wife—please.”
All these are
funny because of the way Youngman plays on words. We think we know how he means
a word, and then in the next part of the sentence, he uses it a different
way. When he says, “Take my wife,” we
assume he’s using that phrase with the “for example,” understood as in “take my
wife, for example.” We expect him to
begin describing something she does or how she is, but he turns the meaning of
“take” around, and he does it with just one word: “please.”
Being a word person, I appreciate the intelligence of such humor.
In one of the
lectionary passages this week, John 3:1-17, I see the possibility that even
early Christians had a sense of humor and enjoyed a good joke in the form of
word play. Unfortunately, later
Christians who read the Bible in translation from the original Greek didn’t get
the joke and, in different times and places, have given each other great grief
because of the translation of a single word in this passage. First, let’s
consider the entire passage as it is usually translated into English:
Now there was a man of the
Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to
Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come
from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God
were not with him."
In reply Jesus declared, "I
tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."
"How can a man be born when
he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time
into his mother's womb to be born!"
Jesus answered, "I tell you the
truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the
Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You
should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows
wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes
from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."
"How can this be?" Nicodemus
asked.
"You are Israel's teacher,"
said Jesus, "and do you not understand these things? I tell you the
truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still
you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things
and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly
things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from
heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so
the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may
have eternal life.
"For God so loved the world that
he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but
have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the
world, but to save the world through him.
These verses include
some of the most-often-quoted phrases in the New Testament, like “For God so
loved the world,” and generally we read this passage with great intensity and
seriousness as we are inclined to do with everything in the Bible. Though I do
take seriously the ultimate message of this passage, I would like to look at it
through the eyes of someone who loves words, for surely the author of the
Gospel of John loved words. This is,
after all, the gospel that begins with great poetry:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God; all things
were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
In him was life, and the life was the light of
men.
The light shines in the darkness, and the
darkness has not overcome it. (John 1: 1-3)
This is
magnificent poetry, even in the English translation from the original Greek,
but poetry is easier to translate than humor, especially word play. Imagine trying to translate a joke like “Take
my wife—please.” Chances are that
whatever language you were translating it to would not have the idiomatic
expression “Take my wife” with “for example” understood as English does. A listener in another language would probably
hear this with the literal meaning of “take,” and find very little funny about
a man asking someone to take his wife somewhere. Anything in translation usually misses humor
a native speaker would hear.
This is so in the
conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus which, in the original Greek, hinges
on a play on words in the line usually translated “no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is
born again.” This phrase in
English is a bit enigmatic, though we have heard it so often we’ve stopped
thinking much about what it could really mean.
But the word “anothen” translated here
as “again,” as in “must be born again,” has two meanings in Greek; it can mean
“anew” (we usually say “again”) or “above.”
In fact, the literal translation of anothen
is “up-place,” which in Greek apparently
not only indicated “above,” but also was an idiom for a beginning place, i.e.,
starting anew or again. In the
conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, Jesus uses the word “anothen” one way, but Nicodemus hears it
another way. Jesus says one must be born
in the up-place, born at a higher
level, a place that is not in the flesh, and his following comments about being
born in the Spirit make sense. Nicodemus
hears the word literally as in re-entering the womb and coming out again.
An English translation that uses only the word “again” or even “anew,”
misses the point Jesus makes about the up-place. A translation that endeavors to keep this
point still loses the humor in the situation. For instance, the NRSV gives the exchange
like this:
Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell
you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being
born from above." [notice the translation]
Nicodemus said to him, "How can anyone be
born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb
and be born?"
Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of
water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit
is spirit.”
This makes more
clear that Jesus is using a word that means “above,” but Nicodemus’ reaction
then makes no sense—how could he focus only on the word “born” without noticing
the strange “from above”? In Greek, it
is obvious that Jesus means “anothen” one way and Nicodemus
hears it another way, but there is no way to render that in English without
using two different words.
We could also
examine the phrase “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of
water and Spirit,” which given the context, also seems to contain some word
play. “Born of water” may, of course, as
most orthodox Christians interpret it, refer to the act of baptism, but perhaps
it refers to something else everyone
understood at the time. Perhaps it
refers to the womb and “waters” involved in a fleshly birth, the amniotic fluid
and/or water used to clean the child. We
can never know for certain. Fortunately,
the entire of Jesus’ speech in this passage makes clear that “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit
[with a capital “S”] gives birth to spirit.”
So what
difference does this make really? Perhaps none. But I
wonder how much more we miss in our understanding of scripture because we read
it in translation—translation not only in language but in time. The writers of scripture must often have used
expressions understood idiomatically in their time that we are forced to take
and translate literally because we do not know the language or culture as they
did. It would be ironic if contemporary Christians who, when they hear “born of
water” hear it as referring only to
water baptism, and thus make a mistake similar to the one Nicodemus made in
taking the phrase “born again” so literally.
To me, being “born from above”
happened when I recognized that my life is about more than me; when I understood
that if I permit it, something higher and finer can manifest through my time on
the planet. A beautiful expression of
this comes from the mystic Teresa of Avila who lived from 1515–1582. “Christ
has no body but yours,” she wrote. (Quakers would probably say “The Light has
no body but yours.”) “No hands, no feet on earth but yours, / Yours are the
eyes with which he looks / Compassion on this world, /Yours are the feet with which
he walks to do good, /Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.”
Being “born from
above” is when I say to the Light—the Christ Spirit—(to paraphrase Henny Youngman), “Take my life—please,” be born and live through
me.