“Born again Christian” is so ingrained into our lexicon that we (at least I) do not really think twice about what a powerful analogy it is. Nicodemus had the honor of being present to hear Jesus coin this phrase (John 3:3) but the disadvantage of having to be the first to think it through. In John 3:4 he seems a little slow on the uptake, so Jesus walks him through it, using repetition to emphasize the contrast.
In my reading and interpretation of John 3, verses 1-21 simply are not talking about baptism at all except in the sense that any passage about salvation is relevant to the concept of spiritual baptism. By contrast, verses 22-36 (separated by the transitional phrase “after this” concluding the teaching session with Nicodemus), provide the most explicit of examples of physical baptism in v. 22-23: “After this, Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized. Now John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because there was plenty of water, and people were coming and being baptized.”
Now, it crossed my mind that this could be saying that Jesus spiritually baptized converts without water while John was still using water, but this seems unlikely. We would not use a homonym for two uses so close together and cannot expect less of the Bible. The last noun in verse 25 is translated in NIV as “ceremonial washing,” which made me think that maybe Jesus was doing something different physically than John, but the Greek word “katharismos” has the first definition “cleansing” and definitely need not involve water, for example as used in 2 Peter 1:9. Possibly a poor word choice by the translator; NASV and KJV both say “purification.”
So, I think we will agree that in the second half of John 3, Jesus is physically performing water baptisms. This reinforces the belief I already had, that it is perfectly acceptable to perform the physical sacrament of baptism.
