Good News: Something Good, Something New by Desiree Snyman 1st March 2026
The Christian life promises good news. Something good. Something new. We love the idea of good. We pray for good outcomes, good health, good community, good endings. But we are less certain about new. New requires change. Human beings do not easily embrace change.
D.H. Lawrence observed that the world fears a new experience more than anything else. A new idea can be analysed, debated, and filed into neat categories. A genuinely new experience cannot be controlled or pigeonholed. And that is precisely our challenge.
Christianity is not fundamentally a new idea; it is a new experience. The makeup of who we are as humans will resist that. We are given a four Gospel journey to help us on the way.
The Gospels Lead Us into Experience
The Four Gospels gently, persistently lead us toward that new experience.
· Matthew asks: how do we embrace change?
· Mark asks: how do we move through suffering? How do we follow Christ when the road leads through loss?
· John asks something deeper still: will you consent to union? Will you allow yourself to be drawn into life with God, in God, through God?
· Luke-Acts ask: how do we mature through service?
These journeys are not once only. They repeat throughout a lifetime. We are in John today. John is about celebrating joy in union.
John: A Garden of Union
The landscape of John’s Gospel is a garden. It asks how we celebrate joy in union. It is dedicated to this good news, something good and something new. We live with fear, with worry, with the distress of the news of war in Iran. People are bombing each other again. It is not breaking news, is it? It is the same story on repeat, and it leads us nowhere.
We thirst for good news. We thirst for something good and something new, because the old story is no longer working. Before we can receive joy in union, there is a necessary breaking open. Embracing change and moving through suffering breaks off the hard layers of who we are and prepares the soil of the soul for a new experience of the Spirit.
There is one more step and that is letting go of the old traditions, anything that brought us to this moment in time. John tells us this newness is so radical it can only be described as rebirth.
Nicodemus
Enter Nicodemus, a beautiful man, he represents the very best that any religious tradition has to offer. Mature in so many ways, and loving. Many of us would like to be a Nicodemus.
We know little about him. He appears only in John, and only three times.
He appears here, in conversation with Jesus at night. He appears again in John 7, when the Pharisees want to get rid of Jesus and Nicodemus insists on due process. Nicodemus appears finally in John 19, working with Joseph of Arimathea, bringing an abundant measure of spices, lovingly preparing Jesus’ body for burial. In those three glimpses we see a human life that faces change, moves through suffering, and comes out the other side quite different.
Nicodemus represents any tradition that has brought us to this moment. Some of us grew up through Sunday school, and it was good, and it was given in love. But Sunday school faith will not carry us through the mature stages of your life. At some point, we have to let it go.
We sometimes call this “higher” faith, not as a judgement, but as a wider embrace. A more spacious perspective that transcends and includes what came before, like the way a mature adult can hold more of a wider perspective than a small child can.
Nicodemus can also represent our parents, and the tapes we still carry. The voices in our heads that once helped us, that were often spoken in love, but that we now need to outgrow.
And in our context, Nicodemus can also represent a church tradition stuck in its own solidity, battling to let go of the glories of yesterday for the new wonders of what the Spirit might be bringing today and tomorrow.
Born Anōthen: From Above, From Beyond
“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born anōthen.”
Born from above. Born again. Born from beyond. Nicodemus stumbles over the word, as we do. He tries to interpret it logically and safely. How can anyone enter a second time into the womb? How can this be managed, controlled, understood? But Jesus is not speaking about improvement. He is speaking about transformation. The life of God is not an upgrade to your existing system. It is not spiritual self-improvement. It is not a moral tidy up. It is an entirely new way of being. To be born of the Spirit is to undergo the quiet death of the old self and the birth of something freer, wider, more spacious. To be born from above invites us into a deeper level of consciousness beyond the “nous”. From a broad cultural perspective, the Greek language in which John was written understood at least four levels of consciousness:
1. Soma – the body
Physical existence, sensation, instinct.
2. Psyche – the soul
Personal identity, emotion, memory, desire. What we would call the ego-self.
3. Nous – the higher mind
Intuitive, contemplative awareness. The faculty that perceives truth and unity directly.
4. Participation in the Divine (often linked with Logos or Pneuma)
The highest level, where the human nous shares in or reflects divine reality.
John’s Gospel adopts this language but transforms it. To be born from above, from beyond or born again is not merely intellectual ascent through nous, but Spirit-filled participation in God’s life.
Meeting Christ in the Dark
Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. Some think the dark symbolises ignorance. But we say things in the dark we do not say in daylight. The dark can be safer. The dark allows us to be more vulnerable, more honest. Darkness is also a womb of new birth. Darkness is the soil where new beginnings happen. Seeds split open in dark soil. A child grows in the hidden darkness of the womb. A caterpillar dissolves inside the darkness of a cocoon before it becomes a butterfly.
Nicodemus is worried about being born again, but the irony is that he is, at that very moment, meeting Christ in the dark, being born again. He is right in the womb of transformation.
Part of the travail of this new birth is questioning his old tradition in the light of the new experience he sees in Christ. What must Nicodemus let go of? Certainty. Certainty looks like the Ten Commandments, the catechism, the creed. None of our religious certainties are bad, they are healthy and holy, they are a necessary scaffolding for a season. But scaffolding is not the house.
Certainty will not carry him into the more expansive life of the Spirit, so we let go of knowing to embrace mystery and unknowing, a richer experience of life in the spirit.
Jesus says the Spirit is like the wind. You cannot see it. You see only its effects.
And what are the effects?
If we read to the end of John’s Gospel, the answer is clear. Love. Not sentimentality. Not politeness. But costly, self-giving, boundary crossing love. Notice how this conversation sits within John’s wider story. Just before John 3, at Cana, water is turned into wine. Six large jars set aside for purification become abundant wine. The six jars are a pointer to the six days of creation. Judaism is not discarded. It is transformed. Water becomes wine. Obligation becomes joy.
Then the Temple is cleansed. The dwelling place of God is no longer stone. It is living flesh.
Water and wine. Temple and body. Flesh and Spirit. The life of the flesh is water. Necessary. Ordinary. Good. The life of the Spirit is wine. Abundant. Joyful. Overflowing.
We are invited from water into wine.
And yet this invitation unsettles us. Because to move from water to wine means letting the water jars be emptied. It means releasing what we thought was sufficient.
Jesus calls for trust, not comprehension.
Holding the Opposites
This trust becomes more paradoxical when we remember the story from Numbers. A people bitten by serpents. A bronze serpent lifted up for healing. A killing snake and a saving snake.
In the early stages of faith, we divide the world neatly. Light and dark. Holy and profane. Saved and lost. But as faith matures, when we embrace the wider experience of spirit, we begin to hold opposites together.
The cross itself is the great holding together. Heaven and earth. Life and death. Failure and glory. Divine and human.Doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is the energy that carries faith deeper. It loosens our grip on certainty and opens us to mystery.
Perhaps being born again is not about acquiring certainty. Perhaps it is about surrender, consenting to the mystery of a God who cannot be contained.
The Invitation
Good news. Something good. Something new. To be born anōthen is to discover that the Beauty who is ever ancient and also ever new. The God we thought we understood cannot be contained in our old categories. Faith is not a static possession, but a living participation.
The Spirit moves like wind through branches. You cannot see it. But you can see love where once there was fear. Courage where once there was caution. Generosity where once there was self-protection.
So perhaps today the invitation is gentle.
Where are you being nudged toward something new?
Where are you being invited to let the old self soften and release?
Where are you being asked to trust in the dark soil of unknowing?
Good news.
Something good.
Something new.
May we have the courage to be born from above.