Born of Wind, Breath, and Spirit
I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that John 3:16 is the most famous of all scripture verses. I remember as a boy seeing the words “John 3:16” painted onto the bare chests of freezing New York Giants fans while I watched Monday Night Football, seeing fans in Olympic stadiums holding up banners with the scripture reference, and of course, a little later on, seeing Tim Tebow sport the same thing painted on his face while playing for the Florida Gators.1 And while I can’t speak for everyone else who grew up in a tradition similar to mine, it was the verse that was most often taught in Sunday school, most often mentioned to new churchgoers, and most often quoted by youngsters when candy was offered to anyone who could recite a verse from memory (along with “Jesus wept”).2
I’ve often heard people say that John 3:16 is the one verse that sums up the who gospel message. That may be correct, but simplifying it in that way goes against the spirit of what Jesus came to do. It contradicts the mission Paul refers to when, talking about Jesus, he states that “the same one who descended is the one who ascended higher than all the heavens, so that he might fill the entire universe with himself.”
The mission of Jesus is to expand himself outward, from the cross, until everything he created is filled with, not only the omnipresent Holy Spirit of God, but with The Christ, with Jesus, with God-become-flesh. (I’ll admit, when I think on that too much, it makes my brain hurt a little!)
But we humans like to reduce things down to their base properties. We like to condense and solidify the airy, wispy parts of the world into things we can grasp, shape, and control. The gospel of Jesus Christ is no exception.
This is partly because, as children, the Scientific Method was drilled into us as the ultimate measure of reality. If you can quantify something, put it through its paces, and find a way to produce the same result every time you interact with it, you have conquered it, and then whatever-it-is can be seen as “useful.”
But it’s also the case that humans just like to tinker with things, take them apart so they can be understood. It’s the way God made us. And that is one of the reasons why the Gospel of John, chapter 3 is so important. In the first half of this chapter we read about a religious leader named Nicodemus who pays a visit to Jesus in the middle of the night so as to avoid being seen. Nicodemus isn’t sure how to begin the conversation, so he begins by saying something that, from a modern, Western perspective, reads like a compliment.
“Rabbi,” he says, “all of us recognize that God has sent you to teach us. Your miraculous signs are evidence that God is with you.”
(3:2, NLT3)
If I had been having a secret, nighttime meeting with a super-important religious and cultural leader, I might have been tempted to respond with, “Oh, wow, Nick, that’s really kind of you to say! I’m just doing my best and letting God do the rest, you know?”
But Nicodemus isn’t trying to flatter Jesus. Instead, he’s confronting Jesus with evidence that says, We cannot deny that God is on your side because of the miracles you are performing. I would imagine that the next point he hoped to make was something along the lines of, But we don’t understand why you’re not living up to the expectations we Jews have had about the Messiah for all of these centuries.
Jesus is about to take the conversation for a hard right turn, however, before Nicodemus’s intended line of questioning can gain any momentum. But before we turn to Jesus’s response to Nicodemus, it’s important that I mention something about a word Jesus is about to use, over and over again. It is the Greek word Pneuma.4
In the New Testament, the word for spirit is pneuma, which is translated as “air, breath, wind.” And in Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, the word for “spirit” is ruach, which is also the same Hebrew word often translated as “wind” or “breath.”
It’s important to remember that Christianity, like Judaism before it, is an Eastern religion. In Eastern thought, the world is not as compartmentalized as it is in the West. The universe—with its realities, both seen and unseen—is interconnected. The wind moves through the earth and is breathed in and out, sustaining life and spirit. The wind brings breath, breath brings life, and life is spirit. Wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word because they are seen as indistinguishable from each other.
In the Bible, interplays like this one aren’t coincidences. It isn’t an accident that these words are used interchangeably. It’s not because of translation errors or because some scribe got lazy back in the day . It was all done on purpose, with a purpose. But what, exactly, is that purpose? It’s certainly not just so the average Christian can stumble across another person’s commentary and have an “Aha!” moment.5
Instead, we are meant to take our newfound knowledge and allow it to transform the way we understand and experience God: in our personal prayer and meditation, in the natural world around us, in our day-to-day interactions, and through the intimate spiritual communities that we call the Church.
To discover the multitude of deeper meanings found in the Bible, we will need to trust the Holy Spirit to guide us down, way down, far below our top-level, intellectual, academic knowledge of God. We have to look past the facts and listen to the sounds of the wind blowing through the tree of life; we must breathe deeply the life-giving exhale of our creator; we must learn to linger, to simply “be” in the presence of the permeating spirit of God.
Let’s practice that by reading what Jesus says in response, after Nicodemus says, “Your miraculous signs are evidence that God is with you,” but in this case, every time the Greek word πνεῦμα would normally be translated into the English words “spirit” or “wind,” I’ve switched the language back to the original Greek by using the English transliteration pneuma (or its variation, pneumatos).
“I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and pneumatos. Humans can reproduce only human life, but pneuma gives birth to pneumatos. So don’t be surprised when I say, ‘You must be born again.’ Pneuma blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear [it] but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of pneumatos.”
John 3:5-8 (taken from the NLT, with added transliterations)
“How are these things possible?” replies Nicodemus. And the followers of Christ have been asking and answering that question for two thousand years.
Nicodemus is not only a curious man in a Gospel story, however. He represents all of us when we are in a place where we are willing to admit that God is obviously up to something in our lives, but our natural understanding of our own hearts no longer serves to explain what is going on. Like a child standing over a patch of soil, where a seed she planted weeks before has finally sprouted, we often see what is happening on the surface–the new life, the growth–but we cannot fathom what takes place in the dark, where the waiting happens.
The apostle Paul spoke about this in his first letter to the church in Corinth.
But people who aren’t spiritual can’t receive these truths from God’s Spirit. It all sounds foolish to them and they can’t understand it, for only those who are spiritual can understand what the Spirit means.
1 Corinthians 2:14 (NLT)
Or, as it is translated in the NASB,6
But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.
Isolated from the rest of the passage, the above verse might tempt us to despair. Oh no! I’ll never be able to understand what God is trying to do in my life! But when read in context, we have nothing to worry about. Only a few verses before, Paul says, “[God’s] pneuma searches out everything and shows us God’s deep secrets.” (v. 10, NLT) The wind of God blows into all of the cracks and crevices of the cosmos, not so God can learn new things, but so He can bring us constant revelation as fresh as the fragrance of zephyrs blowing spring blossoms from forest to field.
The Christian scriptures are full of words that, in the original languages, mean above and beyond and so much more than what is capable of being expressed through the use of a single, English word. Let’s read again one of the things Christ says in the story of Nicodemus. We will read the same statement three times, and each time we read it we will focus on one of the different ways the word pneuma can be rendered in English.
No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit.
Pneuma…
No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and wind.
Pneuma…
No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and breath.
This may seem to you like an awkward way of reading scripture, but if we can prayerfully and deliberately hold this passage out in front of us with open hands, we can see the picture Christ is painting for Nicodemus–the multi-layered work of the Spirit of God, the Wind of God, the Breath of God. We can sense the pneuma of Christ expanding outward, and expanding our hearts and minds along the way.
I’ll have lots more to say about pneuma in future posts. For now, I’d like to leave you with a song. I encourage you to make it your prayer.
Breathe on me breath of God
My spirit yearns for You
Hide me in Your fathering arms
Fill up my longing soul
For more on the topic, see this article.
John 11:35, the shortest verse in the Bible.
Tyndale House Publishers, Holy Bible: New Living Translation (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2015)
Jesus would most likely have been speaking in Aramaic during this conversation, perhaps during all of his conversations on. earth, but the New Testament, including the Gospel of John, was written in Greek. Instead of Pneuma, Jesus would likely have used the Aramaic word Ruhah, descended from the Hebrew word Ruach. Regardless, whether Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, the words all mean the same.
For the record, with all my heart, I love “Aha!” moments, both experiencing them and being the catalyst for them in the hearts and minds of others.
New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995)
Thanks for sharing your post. Gives a fresh perspective on understanding how we live, literally. ❤️🙏