Nicodemus and Redeeming Grace
Lent 2A | John 3:1-17
How does he get there? In the big city, at night, visiting the traveling rabbi with a small host of disciples. One who just showed up to the Temple earlier that week and made a great scene; whose signs of wonder at the Passover festival attracted so many. What compelled him? Not to join the throngs during the day, but to still seek him out?
I don’t know, it doesn’t say. But we can imagine, can’t we?
There’s one version of this that runs through my mind. I start with a parking lot — it wouldn’t be a street corner, too public — a parking lot, with spaced lighting. More, outside a bar around midnight than parking garage meeting with Deep Throat with secrets about Watergate. The kind of place that people like them aren’t supposed to be. And the sort of place that people who know this isn’t where they’re supposed to be also aren’t supposed to be. Like Southern Baptists meeting each other in the liquor store. Nobody’s looking at them. Not there, then.
And in my version, there are trench coats, I suppose, and they make sure not to be under the streetlights. Even if nobody’s looking, there’s still something to not being seen, right? In drawing up this image of a secret meeting, I find it embellishes the parts of the story I most want to imagine are central — the secrecy, the nighttime — because it helps me make the conclusions I want to draw — that Nicodemus doesn’t want to be seen. And I take this as essential and true, final. And yet . . . it doesn’t say this.
The Night Meeting Scenario
Other parts of the story go unaddressed in the secret night meeting scenario. Like, do the crowds leave him alone after dinner? As if they look at each other and go, same time tomorrow? And wander off? Don’t people camp outside celebrity hotels? How is Jesus alone here? And when I reread the text I realize it doesn’t ever say he is.
What my vision of this story has always relied on wasn’t just the facts of the story, but a theme that is consistent within Jesus’s teachings and the gospel narrative. That Jesus is the light in the darkness. That’s a metaphor, right? And the use of light and dark as imagery becomes a motif, a theme, that evokes common ideas about everything: from the people to theology. It evokes good and evil, truth and deception, knowing and ignorance. And so when I read a story about a man coming to Jesus at night, the themes all engage and we read them as much as we read the text itself.
This is how we read stories of all kinds. The pattern-matching machine that is our brain interprets the sequence of events and draws in literal and metaphorical data and fills in the gaps. We assume things. Like, meeting in secret means Nicodemus is afraid of being seen. And as intuitive leaps go, I think this is probably a 75-80% confidence one. The kind of choice I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to make. Even though Jesus hasn’t made any enemies yet. He has courted controversy, but we shouldn’t assume that, because Nicodemus is a Pharisee, that the animosity from the Pharisees is a thing in the story yet. It isn’t. There’s a better explanation.
The Matter of Ego
The text makes two telling references to Nicodemus’s station. The first is the evangelist’s introduction of him as a religious leader. This sets us up to know that he has a station that requires both leadership skill and subject knowledge. He needs to know things about God to be able to lead people in the way of God. The other is from Jesus himself, at the end of their dialogue when he says “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”
If we set aside their conversation for a moment, we can see a deeper reason for secrecy: ego in leadership. It isn’t that Nicodemus might be seen going to this particular rabbi, but that he’d be found receiving counsel from any rabbi.
This is the kind of hubris engendered by a culture of self-reliant hierarchies which can be found all over the world. They come in different forms and will articulate the reasoning differently, but they will, in the end, say that teachers can’t have teachers because it undermines their authority. The way a therapist isn’t allowed to have a therapist or a priest shouldn’t have a priest. It exposes weakness and the expectation is perfection. The best we can get.
Of course, the best advice I ever got from my friends who studied psychology: never go to a therapist who doesn’t have a therapist. These are the ones who know they don’t know everything.
Knowledge and the Leader
This nighttime encounter is all the more curious because of this strange dialogue about the nature of authority and being born from above. And much like my own effort to dig into the scene so I can stage it for myself and open up what is happening in it, Jesus wants to defy a kind of literalism that wants to ignore the metaphor, the theme. That wishes to set that very part aside, as if life can be separated from meaning, like marriage can be separated from a sense of love.
Let’s recognize just how instinctive such a move is, especially in our 21st century US context. How much we want to not only pull the things apart to look at them, but to do so with the intention of ignoring some of them. Because we don’t value the theme as much as the action. We think one is real and the other is something ineffable. And it is this move that is all the more dangerous. Because it renders the essential as extraneous and outside the calculus. This is how we tolerate poverty in our community and genocide in our world. Because it is all so complicated. And our moral convictions are just something we can set aside for realpolitik. It is how human rights become expendible and torture becomes enhanced interrogations.
Nicodemus himself says that he knows where Jesus comes from because it is otherwise impossible. He knows God is at work here. But then his mind goes literal about the physical birth process — what he would have learned in his 9th grade biology class if this were happening now. He resists, like countless modernists and skeptics today, the holistic character of faith which holds everything together and refuses to separate them.
Jesus is born from above. And so is Nicodemus. That is dope. The best news we can hear today.
The Third Version of the Story
There’s a third version of the story. And it is one that doesn’t start in the encounter, but before it. About what compels Nicodemus. That doesn’t use the time and location to judge Nicodemus but to enlighten what it is that he is experiencing: a moment of revelation.
Imagine that he is in the Temple, the massive, echoing walls, the throng of people, and the whispers that reach him, about this man and what he is doing. And he sees things he can’t explain (outside of the obvious — but we all know to be skeptical) and he’s watching these events unfold and he’s not so much excited as compelled by them. They hold his attention. And he goes home at the end of the day. He makes dinner, sits down by candle light, perhaps at study because he can’t go to bed yet, or maybe he’s in bed tossing and turning and his mind won’t let him stop.
What is he thinking? But about the rabbi from the north. He doesn’t have a question for him exactly yet. Just a feeling. Like he needs to be close to him. He’ll come up with something when he gets there. He throws on his coat, slips his feet into his sandals and is out the door before he can even assess what it is he’s doing. And he searches and searches for where the rabbi is, where he and his people are staying, and somehow he tracks them down, it doesn’t really matter how, because at this moment he’d do anything to make this happen.
That’s what Nicodemus is doing there in the middle of the night. He’s the woman with the lost coin. He’s searching for the Kin-dom. And to the rational, it doesn’t make sense and to the faithful, this is normal platitude, but to the person who lives with it all together, it is a kind of madness that only makes sense when we see the whole picture.
God of Grace
This encounter with Nicodemus so often plays second fiddle to the ballyhooed verse about God’s love for the world. But it couldn’t be more instructive of it. Of God’s love and sacrifice — not for condemnation or for appeasement to human cruelty — but for redemption.
Redemption that comes at weird times, man. Like the middle of the night. Or when we’ve bottomed out. Or when we are chilling with the coolest person we’ve ever met who is so not like us.
It’s like acknowledging our whole selves. Including (especially!) the stuff that doesn’t make sense. Or we’re prone to ignore. The other stuff, rational or fluffy. Maybe it doesn’t make intuitive sense or we’re taught to not include in our precious evaluations. Stuff like a person’s humanness when they’ve done something wrong. The kind of thing that is key to mercy. Or the part of faith that requires us to question authority, even the authority of God! Or what it means to be a neighbor. What it means to love our neighbor.
The story isn’t punishment, it’s redemption. And that isn’t cheap grace, either — with a kind of proactive forgiveness of all things. We hold all of it knowing that God is a God of love and redemption and in the end, we will all be brought into his loving embrace.
This is generous, love, hope. That we are good enough. That nothing can get between us and God. All of us. Including the apostle, Nicodemus. So there’s hope yet for us, friends.