LECTURE 2
7 “Do not be surprised that I said to you,
you must be born again.
8 The wind blows where it wills,
and you hear its sound, but you do not know
where it comes from or where it goes.
So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
9 “How can all this happen?” asked Nicodemus. 10 Jesus replied: “You are a teacher in Israel and you do not know these things?
11 “Amen, amen I say to you,
that we know of what we speak,
and we bear witness of what we see;
but you do not accept our testimony.
12 If I spoke of earthly things,
and you did not believe me,
how will you believe if I tell you of heavenly things?
13 No one has gone up to heaven
except the One who came down from heaven,
the Son of Man, who lives in heaven.
14 Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
15 so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost,
but have eternal life.”
449 Above, in his instruction on spiritual generation, the Lord presented a reason; here he gives an example. For we are led to see that Nicodemus was troubled when he heard that what is born of Spirit is itself spirit. And so the Lord says to him, Do not be surprised that I said to you, you must be born again.
Here we should note that there are two kinds of surprise or astonishment. One is the astonishment of devotion in the sense that someone, considering the great things of God, sees that they are incomprehensible to him; and so he is full of astonishment: “The Lord on high is wonderful” (Ps 92:4), “Your testimonies are wonderful” (Ps 118:129). Men are to be encouraged, not discouraged, to this kind of astonishment The other is the astonishment of disbelief, when someone does not believe what is said. So Matthew (13:54) says: “They were astonished,” and further on adds that “They did not accept him.” It is from this kind of astonishment that the Lord diverts Nicodemus when he proposes an example and says: The wind ( spiritus , wind, spirit) blows where it wills. In the literal sense, the same words can be explained in two ways.
450 In the first way, according to Chrysostom, spiritus is taken for the wind, as in Psalm 148 (v 8): “The winds of the storm that fulfill his word.” According to this interpretation, he says four things about the wind. First, the power of the wind, when he says, the wind blows where it wills. And if you say that the wind has no will, one may answer that “will” is taken for a natural appetite, which is nothing more than a natural inclination, about which it is said: “He created the weight of the wind” (Jb 28:25). Secondly, he tells the evidence for the wind, when he says, and you hear its sound, where “sound” ( vox , voice, sound) refers to the sound the wind makes when it strikes a body. Of this we read: “The sound ( vox ) of your thunder was in the whirlwind” (Ps 76:19).