Lent is a season of movement.
We sometimes imagine it as stillness – giving things up, stripping life back, sitting quietly with ashes and penitence. But the readings for this Sunday are anything but static. They are full of journey, promise, risk, and new birth.
Abram is told to leave. The psalmist lifts his eyes to the hills. Paul speaks of faith that steps into the impossible. Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the night and is told he must be born from above.
This is a Sunday about trust. The kind that requires movement before certainty.
In Genesis 12, the story begins abruptly: ‘The Lord said to Abram, “Go.”‘ No preamble. No explanation of why Abram was chosen. Just a command and a promise. ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’
Notice what is missing. God does not give Abram a map. God does not explain the timetable. God does not even name the destination. ‘The land that I will show you.’ Future tense. Revelation will come later. And yet attached to the command is an extraordinary promise: ‘I will make of you a great nation… in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’
Abram is asked to step away from everything familiar on the strength of a promise he cannot yet see fulfilled. And the text says simply: ‘So Abram went.’ That quiet obedience is the beginning of salvation history.
Journey
Psalm 121 picks up the same atmosphere of journey. ‘I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where is my help to come?’ These are pilgrimage words. Perhaps spoken on the road up to Jerusalem. The hills could represent danger – bandits, uncertainty – or they could represent the holy city itself. Either way, the psalmist’s confidence is clear: ‘My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.’
The God who calls Abram to walk into the unknown is also the God who ‘will not let your foot be moved.’ The journey may be uncertain, but it is not unaccompanied.
Then Paul, in Romans 4, looks back at Abram – now Abraham – and asks: what made him righteous? Was it achievement? Was it obedience to law? No. ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’
Paul is writing to a divided church, wrestling with identity and belonging. And he points them back to Abraham to make a radical claim: the promise rests on faith, not performance. It rests on trusting the God ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.’
Cautious, curious and conflicted
That phrase sets us up for the Gospel. Because in John 3, we meet Nicodemus – a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews – who comes to Jesus by night. He is cautious. Curious. Conflicted. ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.’ It is a polite opening, careful and respectful.
Jesus responds not with small talk but with a challenge: ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’
Nicodemus, practical and literal, stumbles over the image. ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old?’ He is a teacher of Israel, grounded in Scripture and tradition, and yet Jesus is speaking of something beyond his understanding. Born of water and Spirit. Born from above. Born anew.
Abram is told to leave his old life behind. Nicodemus is told that even his religious certainty is not enough. Something radically new must happen.
Lent places us in that same space. It asks: what must we leave? What must be born? Or reborn?
Leaving behind
Abram’s call required him to loosen his grip on what he would have considered important – land, family and security. For us, the leaving may not be geographical. It may be interior. Leaving behind patterns of self-reliance. Leaving behind the illusion that we can secure our own future. Leaving behind the belief that righteousness is something we earn.
Nicodemus comes by night. John often uses night symbolically – a space of misunderstanding, hesitation, partial vision. And perhaps that is where many of us find ourselves in Lent. We come with faith, yes – but also with questions. With half-formed understanding. With fears about what new birth might cost.
Jesus does not scold Nicodemus for coming at night. He meets him there. But he does not let him stay there.
‘To be born from above’ is not self-improvement. It is not religious fine-tuning. It is transformation initiated by the Spirit – as uncontrollable as the wind. ‘The wind blows where it chooses… you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.’ That sounds very much like Abram’s journey. Called to go, not knowing where.
Trust
Faith, in all these readings, is not certainty about outcomes. It is trust in the character of God. Abram trusts the God who promises blessing beyond imagination. The psalmist trusts the God who keeps watch. Abraham, Paul says, trusts the God who brings life from barrenness. Nicodemus is invited to trust the God who so loves the world that he gives his Son.
And here we reach the heart of the Gospel reading: ‘For God so loved the world…’ This is not a narrow love. Not love for the deserving. Not love for the already righteous. In Greek, the word we have translated here as ‘world’ is kosmos – the whole created order, in all its confusion and brokenness. For God so loved the kosmos that he gave his only Son.
God’s movement toward the world is mirrored by Abram’s movement toward the unknown. God goes first. God gives first. God loves first. ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’
Response not initiative
In Lent, we often focus on repentance – and rightly so. But this reading reminds us that repentance is response, not initiative. It is response to love already given.
Abram does not earn the promise. It is spoken before he moves. Abraham’s faith is reckoned as righteousness before the law exists. Nicodemus is invited into new birth not because he has mastered theology, but because God’s love is already at work. So, what does this mean for us, partway through Lent?
It may mean asking: where is God saying ‘Go’? Not necessarily to a new country, but perhaps to a new depth of trust. Perhaps to reconciliation long avoided. Perhaps to generosity that feels risky. Perhaps to prayer that opens us to being changed.
And it may mean asking: what in us needs to be born from above? Sometimes we settle for inherited faith – faith of family, culture, habit. But Jesus speaks of something more intimate and more unsettling. A birth that is God’s work within us. A re-creation. The image of birth reminds us that this is not something we control. Birth is vulnerability. It is dependence. It is the beginning of a growth we cannot yet imagine.
Slowly grows
Abraham and Sarah will wait years for the promise. They will stumble, doubt, try to force outcomes. Faith is not a straight line.
Nicodemus, interestingly, fades from this scene still questioning. But he appears again later in John’s Gospel – defending Jesus cautiously, and finally bringing spices to his burial. The seed planted in the night slowly grows.
Perhaps that is how new birth often happens – not in a flash of certainty, but in slow turning toward the light. Psalm 121 assures us that in all this movement, God keeps watch. ‘The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in.’ That phrase holds Abram’s journey, Nicodemus’s searching, and our own Lenten pilgrimage.
Calling us deeper
We are not told that the road will be easy. Abram will face famine, conflict, delay. Nicodemus will face misunderstanding and risk. But the promise holds. The God who calls is the God who keeps.
The God who asks us to be born anew is the God who loves the world enough to enter it. And perhaps the deepest connection between these readings is this: faith is stepping into a future shaped by God’s promise rather than our fear.
Abram steps out of Haran. The pilgrim lifts eyes to the hills. Abraham trusts in life from barrenness. Nicodemus listens in the dark to talk of wind and Spirit. And we, in Lent, are invited to take one step – just one – further into trust.
We may not see the whole land that God will show us. We may not fully understand how new birth happens. We may not yet feel the fulfillment of promise. But the One who calls is faithful. The One who watches does not sleep. The One who loves does not condemn. And the Spirit still blows where it chooses – calling us onward, calling us deeper, calling us into life. Amen.
‘Blows where it chooses’ was delivered by Ian Banks at St John with St Mark for an impromptu Joint Service on the second Sunday of Lent, 1st March 2026. It was based on Genesis 12:1–4a, Psalm 121, Romans 4:1–5, 13–17 and John 3:1–17.