Tag Nicodemus

The Dawn of a New Day in the Middle of the Night

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

John 3:1-17

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night.  Some have suggested that Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night because he didn’t want to be seen talking to Jesus.  The Gospel of John tells us that Nicodemus was a Pharisee and an archon, a leader or ruler of the people and a highly respected teacher.  He was also fairly wealthy.  He had standing in the community as a righteous man, blessed by God, so he had a reputation to protect, and he was putting all that at risk by meeting with a man who many of his fellow Pharisees regarded as a troublemaker.  

Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night because it was less risky.  Nicodemus came at night so he could avoid the crowds.   Nicodemus came at night because it would be easier to have an open and honest conversation away from the judging eyes and oppositional expectations of his fellow Pharisees.  That’s how this meeting of the minds is often framed, and, in fact, that might all be true.  But there is more going on here that we might miss if we simply accept this very practical and prosaic explanation then go charging ahead to our favorite verses later in this passage.  I’m looking at you, John 3:16.

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night.  Night, nyx in the Greek, means darkness.  Nicodemus came in darkness.  Figuratively, night can be symbolic of blindness, especially spiritual blindness. Metaphorically, night can also mean a state of incomplete or defective spiritual understanding.  But night is also a time for revelations, especially in dreams.  

The dynamic tension between light and darkness is an important recurring theme in the Gospel of John.  One of the first things this gospel says about Jesus, the Logos, is, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.” (John 1:3-4)  Later, in chapter 3, we will read that light has come into the world but people loved darkness. . . “For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light so that their deeds may not be exposed.  But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (John 3:19-21)

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night.  He came in the darkness of an incomplete or faulty understanding of God and how God works and what God was doing in the world.  No judgment there.  If we’re honest, we’re all in the dark to one degree or another.  But he came into the light of Jesus, who could illuminate and broaden his understanding.

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night… and night has yet one more meaning that might surprise us.  For the Jews, the new day begins at sunset.  That means that night is the beginning of a new day.

When Nicodemus sat down with Jesus, it was, for him, the beginning of a new day.  He was moving out of darkness and into the light.  Nicodemus reminds us that faith is a process.  He reminds us that understanding unfolds by degrees.

The first thing Nicodemus said to Jesus when they sat down to talk was, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from God.” It’s kind of sad, really, but in our time and our culture, when we see a greeting like that we think it’s just flattery, and our first impulse is to hold onto our wallets.  But Nicodemus wasn’t trying to schmooze Jesus.  He was simply stating his confusion.  It’s as if he was saying, “Look, I can see that you have a direct connection to God, but you are just so different from what we’re used to, from what we expect.”

His confusion and doubt notwithstanding, Nicodemus showed Jesus great respect. He called him rabbi and acknowledged not just the powerful things Jesus had done, but the source of his power.  Nicodemus acknowledged the relationship Jesus shared with the one he called Father, though he couldn’t possibly have understood the true nature of that relationship.

But then, who does?  Oh, we have no shortage of doctrinal formulas and illustrations now to describe that relationship—relationships, really, because the Holy Spirit is part of that eternal dance of love we call the Trinity.  But when you get right down to it, who can really understand the relationship between the Maker, the Christ and the Spirit?  Saint Augustine said that trying to understand the Trinity is like trying to pour the ocean into a seashell.  

We recite the illustrations and restate the formulas and then think that because we found some language to corral it, we understand the mystic communion of love that is God.  But our language, itself, betrays our lack of real understanding.  In naming them Father, Son, and Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer we insert a separateness between them and ascribe roles for each person which is the antithesis of their relationship, their existence, their being, their unity, where they cannot and will not be separate.    

Frederick Buechner described the Trinity as the Mystery Beyond us, the Mystery Among us, and the Mystery Within us—and it’s all one deep and eternal Mystery that gives us life, the Mystery in which we live and move and have our being.  The best we can do is enter into the Mystery and experience it—and understand that we will never completely understand.  

Right now we stand at a perilous moment in our history.  Our planet, our only home, is sick from pollution that we released into the air we breathe and the waters that sustain us.  Our economies are dominated by greed.  There are political forces at work in our country and our world that are bent on authoritarianism and oligarchy.  At the same time there are those who want to flex their moralizing muscles to invade everyone’s privacy and codify what you may or may not do with your own body, or tell you who you may or may not love, or even deciding what you may or may not be allowed to read.  Ironically, some of these power-hungry people call themselves Christian.  And let’s not forget our seemingly relentless fear of anyone who is different, a fear that endlessly reasserts itself in unreasoned hatred and violence.  And on that note, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that yesterday marked the 4th anniversary of the death of George Floyd. 

The world is a mess, and it seems sometimes that all of creation is crying out to the heavens saying, “I can’t breathe!”

Fortunately for us, God’s love and grace is patient and kind and the Holy Spirit, the Breath of Life, continues to draw us into the dance of Trinity.  The Mystery Within us leads us to the Mystery Among us who forever points us to the Mystery Beyond us.  In the light of Christ our eyes are opened to see the promise of the new day, the possibility and promise of the Reign of God—the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness—becoming a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  

When the Spirit draws us into the perichoresis, the circle dance of love that is God, it’s like being born anew, being born from above, and it can happen to us at any age.  

Love can change us.  Love can change us as individuals, it can change us as a people, it can change us as a nation, and it can change the world.

When we are captivated by God’s love for the world, for all of creation.  We see each other and the world with new eyes, we hope with a hope that is greater and deeper than our practical assessments allow, and we love with a love that’s beyond our capacity.  

This is how God has loved the cosmos—the world—all of it, everything: God gave God’s unique son so that everyone who lovingly trusts him need not be destroyed or lost in the endless waves of chaos but may instead have eternal life.  God did not send Christ into the world to judge the world, but so that the world might be healed and made whole through him.  

That’s what love does.  Love heals.  Love unites.  Love makes things whole.  That’s the point.  God loves.  God loves everything God has made.  The dance of Trinity embraces all of creation and says that it is good.  

Jesus reminds us repeatedly that the Reign of God—the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness—is in reach.  It’s doable.  The Spirit, in love, is calling us to embrace God’s vision of a whole and healthy world and to join the work of making it our reality.

As the Spirit draws us to the light and love of Christ, in the middle of the night may we find the dawn of a new day.  

Pardon Our Disruption

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21

Such an intriguing story in the Book of Numbers.  The people of Israel are on the road between Mt. Hor and the Gulf of Aqaba.  They’re complaining.  Again.  This time they’re not happy with the food.  It’s always something.  Anyway, the people grumbled, so the Lord sent poisonous snakes among them, and many Israelites were bitten and died.  That’s how the Israelites tell the story.

Nobody ever tells the story from the snakes’ point of view.  I mean, look at it from their perspective. They were all just slithering around, minding their own snaky business in Snake Land when suddenly the whole nation of Israel showed up with all their arguments, grumbling and complaints and pitched camp right on top of them, driving tent pegs down into their dens, breaking their eggs, chasing them with sticks, throwing rocks at them, hacking at them with swords… So yeah, they bit a few of them.  They were just trying to defend themselves.  They weren’t trying to kill anybody.  Why would they?  The Israelites were too big to eat…at least for those kinds of snakes.  

The text tells us that Moses prayed to the Lord to make the snakes go away.  But maybe the leader of the snakes also prayed to the Lord to make the people go away.  Maybe the leader of the snakes suggested that the Lord could tell Moses to put a big bronze snake up on a pole to remind the people that they were in snake territory, and that the snakes were there first thank you very much, so they should be careful where they were poking around and pitching their tents.  

Well, that’s not the way we get the story in the Book of Numbers, but then snakes never were any good at public relations, and they don’t come off too well in the Bible as a rule.  Still, it’s interesting that in this particular instance, even in the Moses version of the story, God is using the snakes to accomplish God’s business and that includes healing cranky, ungrateful people from snakebite… which they wouldn’t have got bit in the first place if they hadn’t been cranky and ungrateful and gone poking about looking for something else to eat when there wasn’t anything kosher out there to begin with.

So, the moral of that story is be grateful for what you have, even if you’re a little tired of it.  And leave the snakes alone.  

Many, many, many, many, many years later, this story would come up again when Jesus sat down one night with a Pharisee named Nicodemus.  Jesus was trying to help Nicodemus understand some very basic things about living in the love of God.  This was difficult for Nicodemus because he was a very smart and knowledgeable person.  A teacher, in fact.  He knew the sacred writings of Israel backwards and forwards and upside down, but the things Jesus was saying mystified him.  He had a lot to unlearn.  The way he understood things got in the way of him comprehending things…if you know what I mean.  

Jesus was trying to help Nicodemus learn how to see and enter and experience the kingdom of God.  The Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness.  Nicodemus was trying hard to get his head around it, but what he really needed to do was to put his whole heart into it.  

Nicodemus needed another pathway into the mystery.

“It’s like this,” said Jesus.  “Remember when Moses lifted up that bronze snake in the wilderness?  It’s like that, Nicodemus.  The Human One will also be lifted up.  And in the same way that people were healed when they looked to that bronze snake gleaming in the sun, they’ll be healed when they look to the Human One, only they’ll be healed of something much more deadly than snake venom.

“Have you ever wondered, Nicodemus, what kind of magic was at work in that bronze snake on that pole in the desert.  It was a powerful magic, stronger than any other kind of magic.  When people looked at that snake on the pole, the light flashing off of it pierced their hearts and reminded them that they had complained against Moses and against God.  They had been in a desert, in a land of no food and no water, and God had provided for them!  But they were ungrateful.  There was poison in their hearts and it came out in their words.  The snakes biting them was a kind of metaphor for the way they had been treating each other.  And Moses.  And God.

“When they looked at that bronze snake glinting in the desert sun, they could see a very unflattering image of themselves.  They could taste the bitterness of their ingratitude and the venom of their complaining.  It made them stop and think.  It made them remember all the ways that God had been taking care of them.  They repented.  And they were healed, because they also saw that God loved them enough to put up with them long enough to transform them.  They could stop being snakes, metaphorical or otherwise.  The magic, the power that flowed from that snake on the pole was God’s forgiveness and God’s love and God’s vision of a better way to be. 

“But people forget, Nicodemus.  The lessons they’ve learned don’t always carry over from one generation to the next even when they’re written down and kept in the book of memories. 

“And now the whole world is snakebit, Nicodemus.  People believe they are walking always and everywhere under the dark night of God’s judgment.  They don’t see that they have been always and everywhere in the bright light of God’s love.  They’re perishing.  Their souls are dying because they can’t let themselves believe they are loved.

“Listen, Nicodemus.  God loves the world so much that God has given God’s unique Son so that whoever trusts and follows him won’t perish, won’t fade into an everlasting death and nothingness, but will instead live forever in the light of God’s love.  

“You think God is about judgment, Nicodemus?   I’ll tell you about judgment.  God wants to bring everyone and everything, even the snakes, into the light of God’s love.  But some don’t want to come.  Some want to stay in the dark.  Some want to keep living in the deep shadows of hatred and fear, and us versus them.  Some have a greedy hunger in them that wouldn’t be satisfied if they swallowed the whole world.  Some think they are the whole world and don’t have room in their hearts for anyone or anything else.  They think they’re all that and a bag of chips.  Some, Nicodemus, many really, want to keep judging others, because it’s the only way they can make themselves feel like they have any value, so they just keep living in the shadow of judgment…and the shadow of their own fears.

“But the Son of God is not here to judge, Nicodemus.  The Son is here to make people whole.  To save them from self-destruction.  To lead people out of the shadows.

“The world has forgotten how lovely it is, Nicodemus.  The Son of God has come to help the world remember, to relearn its beauty and its kindness.  

“The world has forgotten that when God created everything God said it was good.  All of it.  Everyone.  Even the snakes.

“The Son of God has come to help people remember Original Goodness.[1]

“When they see the Human One lifted up, Nicodemus, they will be reminded of all the ugly things that happen in a snakebit world.  They will be reminded of how the venom in their own hearts and souls can wound and kill.  And then they will remember they weren’t made that way.  Then they will see the love of God.  They will see that the Son came out of love, not out of need.  And the love of God will transform them.  They will step back into the light of God’s love.”

All of that is what Jesus was trying to get Nicodemus to  understand.  And us.  It’s what he would like us to understand, too.

When you think about it, all of this is about disruption. 

The Israelites disrupted the generally sleepy life of the snakes when they pitched camp in their territory. The snakes disrupted the grumbly and quarrelsome life of the Israelites when they started biting them.  God and Moses disrupted the poisonous dynamics of fear and dissatisfaction when they set up the snake on a pole.  Nicodemus disrupted Jesus’ quiet evening when he dropped by at night for a private interview.  In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus disrupted our understanding of theology and the scriptures, especially our understanding of how judgment works.  Or doesn’t.

God works through disruptions to transform things and people. 

Sometimes life is disrupted by things that are completely beyond our control.

March 10, is the anniversary of the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, a disruption that killed 115 to 120 people and caused an estimated $40 million in damage.  That would be more than $800 million today.  Two hundred thirty school buildings were either destroyed or declared unsafe for use.  Out of that disruption, though, came new standards for building safety, including specific codes for school buildings.  New methods of government assistance for disaster response and reconstruction were instituted, too, as people realized that these kinds of resources were needed when damage was too widespread or extensive to expect a city to be able to recover and rebuild on its own.  Essentially, we found new ways to take care of each other.  To love each other.

That disruption has faded into the history books, but there is another disruption that we’re all too aware of, one that is still disrupting our lives in some ways.  

Four years ago this previous week was our last week of “normal” life as our lives were disrupted by the devastating pandemic of Covid 19.

For more than a year we lived in isolation, unable to worship in church together, unable to gather in our sanctuaries.  Our buildings.  But we never stopped being church.  The disruption of the pandemic made being church more difficult in some ways, but it also transformed us in some important ways, too.  Like all disruptions, it taught us more about who we are and invited us to think about who we want to be, who we are called to be, as we move forward.

The Israelites weren’t the same people when they left the land of the snakes.  They complained less and were more grateful.  Life-as-usual had been disrupted.

Nicodemus wasn’t the same person when the sun rose the next morning as he was when he had sat down with Jesus in the dark of night before.  He had begun to understand both God’s love and God’s judgment differently.  Everything he knew, everything he understood had been disrupted. You might say he was being reborn.

We aren’t the same people we were four years ago.  All the patterns of our lives have been disrupted.  In a time when need and circumstances required us to stay physically apart you would think we would have made every effort to find ways to pull together, but all too often, as a nation at least, we let the polarity of our dysfunctional politics pull us farther apart.  We have seen the damage caused by the venom of our fears and anger.  But we have also heard the voice of Christ calling us together and helping us relearn our loveliness,  reminding us of our Original Goodness. 

We have seen the serpent lifted up in the desert.  But also the cross lifted at calvary.  Through earthquake or pandemic, climate disruption or politics…even snakes…  God’s love still flows to carry us through it all.  Together.  The only question is this: will we let ourselves be healed and transformed so we can build something new, or will we just keep biting each other?

In Jesus’ name.

[1] Genesis 1:31

Dear Nicodemus

Steve Beckham 3 Comments

John 3:1-17

Dear Nicodemus,

I owe you an apology.  I confess that I have not always held you in very high esteem.  The fact is, in the past I thought you were—how to say this?—too cautious and, well, more than a little timid—and, if I’m being really honest, I sometimes thought that you were not the sharpest quill in the inkwell.  I’m sorry I was so quick to judge you.  I confess I hadn’t really read the story from your point of view. 

I realize now, Nicodemus, that it was actually very brave of you to seek out Jesus that night when you two sat down to talk.  Nothing timid about it.  Some people think you came at night just because you didn’t want to be seen talking to the “enemy.”   That’s the frame a lot of people put around your meeting with Jesus.  They see the antagonism and contempt that some of your fellow Pharisees had for Jesus—but to be fair, he gave as good as he got, better really—anyway, people see that enmity in his back-and-forth with your fellow Pharisees, so they assume that you came to that meeting that night with a little malice and a big agenda.   

I hadn’t really thought about it before, Nicodemus, but I can see now how much was at stake for you.  John says that you were an archon, a leader or ruler of the people.  And the language he uses indicates that you were a most highly respected teacher among your people.  Plus you were wealthy.  You had standing in your community as a righteous man, blessed by God.  You had a big reputation to protect, and you were putting all that at risk in order to have a meeting of the minds with a man who many of your community regarded as a troublemaker.  That could have badly tarnished your reputation, and I admire you for putting that concern aside so you could have an honest, personal discussion with Jesus, rabbi to rabbi.

Having said all that, I realize now that you probably came at night simply to avoid the crowds.  I see now that what you wanted was a real conversation with someone who cared deeply about the same things you cared about.

Some have said that your coming at night was symbolic.  They see you as a caricature of  “those who walk in darkness.”  That idea makes a certain kind of sense based on the ways that John’s gospel uses the themes of light and darkness.  But since you came to Jesus, who later calls himself “the light of the world,”  wouldn’t it make more sense to see you as someone who was moving out of darkness and into the light?  You remind us that faith is a process.  Understanding unfolds by degrees.  Too often we forget that.

I’ve also been thinking, Nicodemus, about that first thing you said to Jesus when you sat down to talk:  “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  It’s kind of sad, really, but in our time and our culture, when someone greets you with flattery like that, our first impulse is to hold onto our wallets.  But I’ve come to think you were really in earnest when you said it.  You showed him such respect, calling him rabbi and acknowledging not just the powerful things he had done, but the source of that power.  You acknowledged his relationship with the one he called Father, though you couldn’t possibly have understood the true nature of that relationship.  

But then, who does?  Oh, we have no shortage of doctrinal formulas and illustrations to describe that relationship—relationships, really, because the Holy Spirit is part of that eternal dance of love we call the Trinity.  But when you get right down to it, who can really understand the relationship between the Maker, the Christ and the Spirit?  We recite the illustrations and restate the formulas and then think that because we found some language to corral it, we understand that mystic communion of love that is God.  Our language, itself, betrays our lack of real understanding.  In naming them Father, Son, and Spirit, we insert a separateness between them and ascribe roles. That is the antithesis of their relationship, their existence, their being, where they cannot and will not be separate.  As Frederick Buechner said, they are the Mystery beyond us, the Mystery within us, and the Mystery among us—and it’s all one deep and eternal Mystery that gives us life.  The best we can do is enter the Mystery and experience it—and understand that we will never completely understand.  Saint Augustine said that it’s like trying to pour the ocean into a seashell.  

Speaking of understanding, I now understand that I have greatly misunderstood your conversation with Jesus.  When I dug a little deeper, did a little more homework, I came to realize that the dialogue between you two was typical of the way rabbis talked to each other and mulled over ideas in your time.  I didn’t realize before that you were actually inviting Jesus to elaborate more on “being born from above” when you asked, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”  You gave the obvious “dunce” response to Jesus so that he had a reason to go deeper into what he was teaching.  It was a rhetorical device.  You are far from a dunce, Nicodemus.  I may be wrong, but your dialogue with Jesus now sounds to me like you and he were using a familiar and respected rabbinic method to engage in a kind of team teaching for the disciples.  And you, with grace and humility, played the role of the “not so bright” student.  

Even when Jesus says, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things,”  it reads to me now as if he’s using you as a foil, and you great teacher that you are, you graciously play along.  You help him make the point to those gathered around and listening, that these are not simple, easy concepts to grasp, these things that you two are discussing.  Even a “great teacher of Israel” has to wrestle these ideas.  You help him spur the other listeners into thinking more deeply and opening their minds and hearts more fully to the Mystery of God in, with, under and around them.  You give them permission to have questions.

If you’re wondering why I’ve reassessed my opinion of you, Nicodemus, it’s because I took a good look at the two other times you are mentioned in John’s gospel, particularly that time in chapter 7 when the other Pharisees in the Sanhedrin are upset with the temple police for not arresting Jesus.  They throw shade on him because he’s from Galilee, which is just pure prejudice.  They say he should be arrested for misleading the people because “he does not know the law.”  But you stood up for him, and with perfect irony said, “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?”  That one cost you, I know.  Somebody in that group tried to throw shade on you, too, when he said, “Oh are you from Galilee, too?  Nobody’s ever heard of a prophet coming from Galilee.”  But I think you were maybe beginning to suspect that he really was a prophet, and maybe something more than a prophet.  Even if he was from Galilee.

And then there’s that other thing you did—that beautiful, generous, heart breaking thing.  You were there when he was crucified.  When his disciples had deserted him, you stayed.  Right there at the foot of the cross.  And when you and Joseph of Arimathea took his body down from the cross, you brought a mixture of myrrh and spices—a hundred pounds of myrrh and spices—to prepare his body for a decent burial even though the scriptures said he was cursed for hanging on a tree.  Some have said that in preparing his body you were betraying that you didn’t really believe what he had said about resurrection.  Well if that’s the case it’s no shame on you.  Nobody else believed it either.  Not then, anyway.

No…that was an extravagant act of deep respect, one teacher for another.  That was an act of love.  And that is why, Nicodemus, I have had to revisit what I thought about you.  I realized that you were a person of profound integrity and generosity of spirit.  I realized that you were a righteous man.  I realized that I had no right to judge you to begin with.  

So please forgive me, Nicodemus.  And please know, teacher of Israel, that you have taught me a great deal.