Why we have to be born again

That’s what Christ told Nicodemus, a Pharisee and ruler of the Jews, an exception of the group since he believed that Christ was a teacher who came from God. “Unless one is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God,” Christ told him. To which, Nicodemus, not knowing what to think about Christ’s words, asked, “How can a man once grown old be born again?”

This thing about being “born again” or being “born from above” is Christ’s way of telling us that we, as human persons, are not just a matter of genes or of some other natural and earthly elements that may define or identify us.

Our real identity is to be like Christ who is the Son of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, and as such, is the perfect image God has of his own self. And since God created us in his image and likeness, then we can say that we have been patterned after the Son who became man to save us, to recover us, to show us the way of how we can be that image and likeness of God.

And since Christ is both God and man, we have to understand then that our humanity would be not be complete unless it is also hinged to the divinity of Christ. This “hinging” of ourselves to the divinity of Christ is what is involved in our being “born again.” In other words, there is something divine also in our humanity, if our humanity has to have its fullness, completion, or perfection.

That is to say that we need to be born again in Christ. We have to remember that since we have been conceived and born with original sin, which is a sin that we inherit from our first parents who lost their state of original justice with their sin, we come into this world simply as a natural creature, defined only by our genes and other natural elements.

That’s what Christ meant when he said, “What is born of the flesh is flesh. What is born of the Spirit is spirit.” God meant us to be in the state of grace so we can be true image and likeness of him and sharers of his divine life as he wants us to be. He did this in the beginning when he created our first parents in the state of original justice.

With the sin of our first parents, we lost our being image and likeness of God. We have to recover it, this time with the Son of God, the pattern of our humanity, becoming man and assuming all our sins and conquering them with his own passion, death, and resurrection.

For this, we just have to try our best to unite ourselves with Christ, following his teaching and example. We are enabled to do this with our baptism where the process of being “born again” in Christ “of water and Spirit” takes place. With our baptism, our life is once again reconnected with the life of Christ who with his divinity attached to his humanity, enables us to enter and share in the supernatural life of God.

On our own, without Christ, we cannot be image and likeness of God, sharers of his life. We need Christ for that. This is what is meant by what St. Paul said: “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.” (Phil 1,6)