The Night Nicodemus Came

He came at night. John does not say why, and readers have guessed for centuries. Perhaps Nicodemus was afraid of being seen. Perhaps night was simply when a busy member of the Jewish ruling council had time for a long conversation. Whatever the reason, the detail stays in the story, and John will mention it again later when Nicodemus reappears. This was a man who first approached Jesus in the dark.

He began with a compliment. Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God, because no one could do the signs you do unless God were with him. It was a generous opening from a Pharisee, and a careful one. He had drawn a reasonable conclusion from the evidence. Jesus was a teacher sent from God. What more could be expected of a thoughtful, religious man?

Jesus did not accept the compliment or respond to it. He went straight past it to a statement that must have landed like a door closing. No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again. Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, a man who had spent his life on the law and the prophets, was being told that his qualifications did not get him in. Something had to happen to him that was as total and as unearned as birth.

He took the words literally, or pretended to. How can someone be born when they are old? Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother's womb. Jesus did not soften the demand. He explained it. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. The wind blows where it pleases; you hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. The new birth is God's work, not a technique, and it cannot be managed from the outside any more than the wind can.

Then Jesus reached back into Israel's own story. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. Nicodemus knew the story from Numbers 21. The people had been bitten by serpents and were dying, and God told Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole, and whoever looked at it lived. No treatment, no merit. Just a look of faith at the thing God had lifted up. Jesus was telling a teacher of Israel that he would be that lifted thing, and that the way in was to look.

It is here that the most quoted verse in the Bible sits. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. It is easy to hear those words as a slogan. In their setting, they are the answer to a learned man's confusion. He wanted to know how a person could be born again. The answer was that God loved, God gave, and the person believes.

The story draws out at least two things. The first is that religious knowledge, even sincere and considerable religious knowledge, is not the same as new life. Nicodemus had more of it than almost anyone, and Jesus told him it was not enough. The second is that the way to life is not complicated. Look and live. Believe and be born. What is required of us is not sophistication but the humility to admit that we need what only God can do.

John lets us see how the story ended. Nicodemus spoke up for Jesus, cautiously, before the council. And after the crucifixion, he came with Joseph of Arimathea to bury the body, bringing a great weight of spices. The man who had come at night was there in the daylight at the end, handling the body of the one who had been lifted up. It seems the wind had blown where it pleased.