II Lent – March 20, 2011 – Year A
In the Gospel lesson we just heard we meet a man named Nicodemus.
Who was he?
What do we know about him?
The writer of the Gospel according to John describes him as a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, who came to Jesus, after hours, so to speak, with a question, only he never got a chance to ask it.
We can only guess what the question might have been.
By the time that Nicodemus gets through his long preamble, which begins: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God…”, Jesus has launched into a kind of lecture about “being born again” or “being born from above”, and the only questions that Nicodemus gets to ask are argumentative questions like: “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” and “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” and “How can these things be?”
By the time Jesus has confronted him with the question: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”, Nicodemus is not looking all that good.
Then Jesus gets to wrap things up with what has become for all time for all Christians a monumental pronouncement: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”, but the writer of John’s Gospel doesn’t tell us what Nicodemus may have said in response to Jesus’ pronouncement.
It’s as if Nicodemus simply fades out of the picture, never to be seen again.
Well, not exactly.
Nicodemus does turn up again in John’s Gospel (and only in John’s Gospel, for that matter)—he turns up two more times, in fact—and by then he’s starting to look a lot better.
The next time that Nicodemus is mentioned is in the seventh chapter of John’s Gospel, where he stands up to some fellow Pharisees who have begun to look for a way to put Jesus to death.
Nicodemus attempts to dissuade them by appealing to their sense of decency and puts himself in a precarious position: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” he asks, but all he gets for his trouble is the stinging retort: “…you are not also from Galilee, are you?”—which may be a veiled accusation and an implied threat: “You aren’t one of his disciples, by any chance?”
The third and final time we encounter Nicodemus is in Chapter Nineteen, where Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple of Jesus, receives Pilate’s permission to take the body of Jesus down from the cross: “…so [Joseph of Arimathea] came and removed [the] body. Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb…. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.”
The Gospel writer does not state it explicitly, but by the time we see him for the last time, Nicodemus, like Joseph of Arimathea, has become a disciple.
Knowing the rest of Nicodemus’ story helps us to appreciate a little better what is going on in today’s Gospel lesson.
This was not a casual visit that Nicodemus was making on behalf of some curious Pharisees—some sort of fact-finding mission, even though his opening words: “We know that you are a teacher who has come from God…” sound as if he were speaking for some group.
No, Nicodemus had not come under cover of darkness to make discreet inquiries about Jesus for some friends.
He had reached a crisis point in his life; the privileges enjoyed by an elite social class like the Pharisees no longer had the appeal they once had; something vital was missing in his life, and he knew it; he was rapidly becoming aware of what students of spirituality have called “a God-shaped hole”, a painfully empty space in his life that nothing but a deeper, closer relationship with God could ever fill.
Either he had heard Jesus teach in the temple or he had heard about what Jesus was doing, and he wanted to know more.
But now it was hardly a matter of idle curiosity; it was much more than that.
He could not help himself; he felt inexorably drawn toward something he could not fathom, pulled by a magnetic force he could not withstand.
And he had come to Jesus under cover of darkness precisely because he didn’t want his so-called “friends” to know what he was up to and, probably, because he couldn’t wait any longer; maybe at that point he couldn’t sleep!
Had Nicodemus been able to dispense with his well-rehearsed preamble: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher…”, he probably would have just blurted out: “I don’t exactly know why I’m here…”.
It’s possible that Nicodemus felt a little like Abraham must have felt when he found himself leaving his father’s home in Haran for the land of Canaan.
Abraham wasn’t exactly sure why he was doing what he was doing, and he wasn’t exactly sure what he would find when he got there (or even where it was that he was going, for that matter).
True, he had the promise of God’s blessing, as well as the promise that he, Abraham, would be a source of blessing to “all the families of the earth”.
Still, as St. Paul would hasten to point out, all Abraham finally had to go on was nothing more than his absolute trust in a loving and faithful God.
Of course, Jesus knew that Nicodemus’ opening line was a throw-away, so he obliged by throwing it away and getting right to the issue at hand: “Very truly, I tell you,” is what Jesus said to him, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Naturally, it did not help that the phrase Jesus used is a sort of a pun; the phrase that Jesus used can also be taken to mean “you must be born again”.
No matter; obviously, all Nicodemus heard was the word “born”, and he took it literally.
Under more ordinary circumstances he might not have made this mistake, but these were not ordinary circumstances—far from it, in fact.
By this time Nicodemus had become very upset.
He was so upset that he didn’t realize that Jesus had just put a name to what it was that was happening to him.
Jesus was not recommending that Nicodemus investigate a possibility in the abstract; Jesus was describing what Nicodemus was experiencing—what he was going through at that very moment: Nicodemus was indeed in the process of being “born” a second time; Nicodemus was indeed in the process of being “born from above”.
Needless to say, Nicodemus was not able to think of the spiritual turmoil he was experiencing in terms of birth pangs; that Nicodemus himself was giving birth, as it were, to the new spiritual self that God had called into existence simply did not occur to him; he was too close to the process to understand what was happening to him.
But Jesus understood what was happening, and, even more important, Jesus understood what Nicodemus needed from him: encouragement, but encouragement of a special sort: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can I tell you about heavenly things?”
Relentlessly, knowing that the spiritual labor which had begun could not be interrupted, Jesus did not let up on Nicodemus.
Presumably, though again the Gospel writer does not explicitly say, Nicodemus went away with a lot to think about.
If at first he had the feeling that he had come to the wrong place and gotten the wrong answer, Nicodemus would eventually come to the realization that he had indeed come to the right place, that he had indeed come to the right person after all because his “re-birth from above” had in fact been accomplished.
Through a process he probably never quite understood Nicodemus not only became a disciple, but he also became one of the few disciples that would remain loyal to Jesus until the very end.
Being “born again”, of course, has always been a metaphor for Christian conversion, and although some denominations prefer to emphasize the suddenness and the particularity of a one-time event, the experience of Nicodemus reminds us that “being born again” or “being born from above” can often be a long, drawn-out process.
If the process of “being born again” can be said to begin at our baptism, by no means does it end there.
True, the celebrant asks us (or our sponsors speaking on our behalf): “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your savior?”, and the answer is “I do”.
But experience tells us that turning ourselves to Christ takes a lifetime.
Nicodemus may have been mistaken when he concluded that “being born again” was an impossible process; it is hardly impossible, but it is truly mysterious in every sense of the word.
“The wind blows where it chooses,” is what Jesus told Nicodemus, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Nicodemus had no idea that he would eventually become a follower of Jesus Christ, nor could he begin to imagine in what capacity he would be called to serve his Lord and Savior.
For us, who, by our baptism into the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, can claim that we, too, have begun the process of being “born from above”, the power of God’s Holy Spirit opens up a life of infinite possibilities, reminding us of why we have been given life in the first place: Our God is a loving and faithful God, and the same God who is getting the Kingdom ready for us is getting us ready for the Kingdom.
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