Second Sunday in Lent

I can still hear it. I can hear it with all the appropriate cadence and inflection. The funny thing is that my Mom and Dad both said it the same way, usually when they were getting fed up with us kids complaining about somebody else: “If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.” It’s a not-so-subtle reminder that gossip wreaks all sorts of damage and that it’s not our job to judge the sins of another. It’s a tidbit bit of moral guidance that has its uses. But if it serves to prevent us from discerning the motives and means of the people around us, the advice to “say something nice or nothing at all” can an end up hurting people just as surely as malicious gossip or slander. 

Case in point: Nicodemus. Over the centuries, his early interaction with Jesus has been caricatured as timidity, lacking in faith, and just plain cowardice. All of these less than admirable characteristics are ascribed to Nicodemus because of this morning’s Gospel story, when Nicodemus pays a secret visit to Jesus over the cover of a night. His opening question does not help, either, since it can seem like he’s doing a bit of sucking up to a possibly annoyed Jesus. I mean, it’s night-time. It’s time for resting not conversations with rattled rich men. And Nicodemus was rich man and a well-connected. This nighttime visit is clearly a matter of Nicodemus hiding his interest in Jesus from others of his own class. But is that cowardice, or wisdom?

We need to at least grant the possibility that Nicodemus’ nighttime visit to the itinerant Rabbi was cautionary and not cowardly. Jesus’ preaching and healing has attracted attention because God clearly works through Him. Crowds of people follow Him, crowds of hundreds and thousands, and the size of His following is terrifying for the leaders of both the Temple and Judea. Not just because Jesus’ preaching and teaching draw attention to their abuse of power but also because it makes their foreign oppressors nervous. Remember, Judea is governed not only by its own small-time kings but also the armies and the administrators of Rome, the most powerful Empire the world had ever known in that day. Nicodemus is a player in a world full of players, all rich and influential men. He’s been heard their panicked speculation about Jesus. He’s also heard their willingness to put an end to this problem of theirs once and for all. It makes sense, then, for a man not blinded by the wealth and power of Jesus’ enemies, to find a way to speak with Jesus privately. He wants to see and hear for himself what kind of person this Jesus guy is. Because of the social and political environment of the day and Nicodemus’ own position within it, it makes sense that he meets with Jesus when the meeting cannot be seen by the gossips.

Not that Nicodemus necessarily returns to his own home that night knowing what he needs to know for a path through the quagmire that was life in Jerusalem at that time. It was, in fact, a most confusing talk, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But as confusing as that talk was, Nicodemus did not walk entirely away from Jesus. He gave Him his support, and we know that because there are two more instances in the Gospel of John when Nicodemus has a role in Jesus’ life and His ministry. The second time the Bible records Nicodemus’ role in Jesus’ affairs is found towards the end of the seventh chapter. The Pharisees and other leaders have moved by this time from merely thinking about killing Jesus to actively planning His death. In fact, they send soldiers to arrest Jesus, but the soldiers, after listening to Jesus preach, refuse to arrest Him. The leaders who sent the soldiers angrily accuse them and the crowds around Jesus of being deceived by this radical Galilean because they’re simply ignorant of the law and cursed by God for it. Clearly, that is not the way God saw it, nor did Nicodemus see it that way. He asked those who sent the soldiers to arrest Jesus, “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” And those with whom Nicodemus dined and who depended on his funds and his power to further their causes turned on Nicodemus, and accused him of being one of those dumb, provincial Galileans, too. Nicodemus clearly put himself in a dangerous situation with the powerbase of Judean politicians and priests, and he does so again at the end of John’s Gospel, chapter nineteen, when, again in secret, he takes an unbelievable 75 pounds of expensive myrrh and aloes, spices, in other words, to the place where Arimathea received Jesus’ body after getting permission from Pilate to take Him down from the cross. Together, the two men do what they can to prepare Jesus’ body for burial given that it is almost time for the Passover, and they bury Him in an unused tomb.

Despite the secrecy involved in two of these three occasions where Jesus and Nicodemus cross paths, Nicodemus reveal himself to be cautious, yes, but not timid or cowardly. Nicodemus is an honest seeker after God, willing to risk himself if he absolutely must, to seek the truth about Jesus. Nicodemus’ first remarks to Jesus reveal that he sees a difference between the leaders of Israel perceptions of Jesus and what Jesus is actually doing. He says to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” Interesting that Nicodemus calls Jesus’ healing the sick and dying a sign and not a miracle. But that’s the Gospel of John for you, consistently speaking of signs pointing to Jesus as the incarnate Son of God, born to die to accomplish what we cannot, our redemption from sin and death. Jesus’ ministry reveals His nature and His work through these signs, which Nicodemus is slow to understand. Remember only hindsight is 20/20. Nicodemus does not know how all this ends, like we do. Jesus’ response kind of out of left field, until we realize that he’s answering the question Nicodemus has left unasked. What Nicodemus is really asking Jesus is if He is the one whom those signs declare Him to be, the Messiah, the Savior of the world. Jesus’ answer comes in the form of a glorious sort of “yes, but” as He says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “Huh?” responds a confused Nicodemus. The Greek word at the center of Jesus’ response is anaothen, which can mean again, anew, or from above. Weirdly enough, our Bible translation utilizes the word “again”, which is clearly how Nicodemus interprets it, literally, for his response gives us this bizarre image of an old man trying to climb back into his even older mother’s womb. But the rest of the conversation shows us that Jesus means anaothen to mean “from above”, because the spirit is from the kingdom of heaven, which is from above while the flesh is of this world only. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” The writer of John’s Gospel has Jesus point to Baptism. The spirit of God imparted to each of us by God goes and does what the Spirit will. Nicodemus remains terribly confused by what Jesus says, and when he asks, “How can this be,” Jesus pokes a bit at him, telling him that he would understand this already if he, Nicodemus, was truly born of the spirit, or born anew from above.

This reading, of course, contains that famous verse memorialized on cardboard signs at football games and parades, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life,” and verse 17, never cited on those bits of cardboard held up for the benefit of camera but every bit as important as verse 16, “For God did not send His Son into the world in order to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved  through Him.” Jesus’ enemies, those powerful companions of Nicodemus, do indeed see their desire fulfilled; Jesus is raised up on a Roman cross and dies horribly, but their intent is thwarted even so, for in His dying are we all saved. Nicodemus cautious willingness to let Jesus speak for Himself and God’s intent is rewarded with faith and a hope that is eternal.

You don’t have to look very far to see people who say that they do not believe that Jesus died on the cross or even that Jesus lived. The great treasure that God has set before them goes unopened. But we really don’t have the luxury of pointing fingers. We ourselves don’t treasure our Bibles as we should. We’re too busy for it, or we don’t understand it, or it pales in comparison, we think, to the latest episode of Yellowstone, or the NBA, or our favorite blog that keeps our eyes glued not to the Light that has come into the world but to a tiny little phone screen. We think we’re somehow better than the Nicodemus types of the world: smarter, wiser as we are in the 21st century, rather than the first century, and because of all the progress the world has made in technology, and social reform, and law. And yet while humanity’s knowledge and technology has advanced, our nature has not. We are every bit as great a group of sinners as those who came before us, we just live more comfortable lives.

In closing, I would encourage you: Open that treasure God gave us that resides in your Bible. Allow it to do what it does so well: Allow it to challenge you in your understanding of who and what Jesus is. Because when we become too sure of what we know about Jesus, when we believe that we have grasped him at last, that is when we can expect to be undone like Nicodemus. That undoing — that overturning of our certainty — can be a very good thing because it allows us to experience once again the miracle of our birth from above into eternal life, which has nothing to do with what we know or what we are (any more than our birth from our mother’s womb did). It’s a gift of life from the heart of the Father, breathing the Spirit wind over us and through us, and opening our infant eyes to the Son, our Teacher, lifted up to draw all people to himself and his lesson of love.

AMEN