I decided to take a break this week. I am getting ready to retire, and so I  invited a guest blogger. It took some doing, but I was able to get Nicodemus to give his testimony!

My name is Nicodemus. I have been asked to come and visit with you today so that you can hear firsthand my personal experience of Jesus. By your standards, I am not an old man. But,  by the standards of my day, when life spans were shorter, I was an “elder,” a respected leader of my people, a man in my prime when I met Jesus.

In Scripture, I am described as a “Pharisee and a Ruler of the Jews” (v. 1). In my day, there were two major parties in my country: the “Sadducees,” who tended to be from wealthy families allied with the priestly class, and the “Pharisees,” of which I am a member. We Pharisees were very scrupulous in matters of faith and morals. I studied the holy books of my faith and the writings of the Rabbi’s until I became a skilled interpreter of the law of Moses. Furthermore, I did not just study the laws of my people, I was diligent in applying them to my life.

Your Webster’s Dictionary defines the term Pharisee as “someone who is extremely self-righteous.” There is some truth to that charge, but it is basically unfair. We Pharisees, like you Presbyterians, were a people who understood that God is holy and just, and we tried to live as the Holy God of Israel commands in the Laws and in the Prophets.

As to what we believed, we were a lot like you Presbyterians. We believed in one God who is the creator of the heavens and the earth and the deliverer of his people. We believed that God is all powerful and in control of the destiny of men and nations. We believed in angels and in demons. We believed that human beings have immortal souls and will be resurrected from the dead at the last day.

Like you Presbyterians, we were known to be hard-working, successful, and generally honest people. Unfortunately, that also meant that we often put too much faith in ourselves and in our own righteousness and not enough faith in God.

I am also described in your Bible as a “Ruler of the Jews,” meaning that I was a member of the ruling council, the “Sanhedrin”. The Sanhedrin was made up of seventy-one of the most important leaders of our people. It was as a member of this elite group of people that I first became aware of my great need for God.

Good News for the World Weary.

1. The Dead End of Self Sufficiency. To tell you the truth, my success was my undoing. I managed to work my way to the top. becoming a leader of my profession as well as of my country. Along the way, I made a lot of compromises. Being a lawyer, I have an ability to parse the law carefully, and in my personal life I was able to do the same. My friends used to speak of me as a “righteous man;” but, after a time, I found it difficult to think of myself in that way. If others saw how good I was in comparison to them, I saw how bad I was in comparison to God. Worse, I knew how little love, joy, peace, patience, kindness and self-control I enjoyed when no one was looking.

By the time I heard about Jesus Bar Joseph, a reputed worker of miracles and teacher, my life was no more than going through the motions. When I heard of his mighty deeds of power and about his teachings that the kingdom of God was near at hand, I determined to meet him to see if he was a fraud or a true religious leader. But, being a careful man, I determined to go at night when I would not be seen. I did not want to undermine my position in the council, and I did not want my presence to give this Jesus any more popularity with the people than necessary for fear that he would create an uprising.

Some of you may be in the same situation that I was in when I met Jesus. You aren’t a particularly bad person. You try to do your best to act in a moral way. But, two things disturb you: (i) you aren’t as good as you pretend to be and (ii) your religion has become dry legalism, and you know it. If so, you are like me. So far as my spiritual life was concerned, I had reached a dead end.

2. The Necessity of New Birth. I tried to be as diplomatic as possible with Jesus when we met. I acknowledged that he was a good man and that he had proven his status as an anointed teacher by his wise teachings. I felt that a compliment would set his mind at ease that I was not an enemy or hostile as so many of the religious leaders of our people tended to be

I expected him to return the compliment, or at least be flattered by my attention. Instead, he did the most extraordinary thing. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I tell you the truth: “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born again” (v. 4). Well, I was completely taken aback. Here I was, a Jew among Jews, and this country preacher was telling me something that I could not understand.

Perhaps I was subconsciously trying to deflect his point, but I responded in what I can see was a foolish way by saying, “How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb a second time?”  Of course, I did not mean this literally. What I meant to say was that I could not understand how a person of my age and accomplishments could possibly begin all over again. I did not think I needed to “start over.” I thought I just needed to do better.  I was after new ideas about how to become more righteous. The idea of needing to be born again never crossed my mind.

Jesus looked me straight in the eye and replied, “I tell you the truth, no-one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit” (v. 5-6). Jesus was telling me that my works and the self-righteousness that came from my works was not saving me. It was keeping me from God. What I needed was for God to give me a new life by the Holy Spirit.

At the time, I could hardly understand what Jesus was saying. Now, I realize that Jesus was telling me that human beings are more than blood and sinew, physical beings. We are physical beings, but we have the capacity to be more than merely physical beings. We have the capacity to have a spiritual life as we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives.

In my case, I knew the law, and I had the natural ability to obey a great deal of it, but I lacked the spiritual life that God and God alone can give. I knew about God, but I did not know God personally. Jesus was offering me a tremendous gift – the gift of the Spirit and the New Life the Spirit of God brings.

Let me give you an example from the life of my colleague in the Sanhedrin, Saul of Tarsus. I knew Saul, or St. Paul as you call him, before he became a follower of the Way. He was a brilliant scholar and Pharisee. Yet, even then I could see that he was a deeply unhappy person. He tried hard to obey the law. In fact, he was a fanatic. He hated the Christians, followers of Jesus and the Way of Grace. One day, he came to the Sanhedrin and asked for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that he might go and persecute the church there. You could see that there was a deep struggle going on in the soul of Saul. That is why he was so opposed to Christianity: He sensed that the followers of the Way knew God in a way he knew was impossible by merely following the law.

As Paul later described it, God came to him on the road and revealed  that Jesus was in fact the Messiah, the Christ, the son of the living God and that, by Grace through faith, he could have a new life. The inner conflict he felt, and his sense that he could not know God by the means he was using, was resolved when God took the initiative and revealed himself to Saul. [1]

That is the idea of the experience of being born again. The New Life we receive in Christ is not something we do, just as our human birth is not something that we do. It is something that God bestows upon us, it is a new birth given to us as we open ourselves to God. The Holy Spirit is like the wind: it cannot be controlled by human power, although it has a powerful impact on human life (John 3:5-6). At the end of this service we always give people an opportunity to receive the New Life Christ can bring.

3. The Grace of God in Christ. Jesus went on a little later in our conversation to explain what this grace of God was all about. He said, “For 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” (v. 16). You are Christians, and many of you grew up in Christian homes. This verse is very familiar to you, and perhaps that is not all together a good thing. To me, this verse represents the most inconceivable thing about Jesus.

First, I am a Jew, and I can tell you that what Jesus said was revolutionary! As a Pharisee, my primary idea of who God is had to do with the law. To me, God was primarily the God of justice who judges sin and who gave his Torah, his divine commands, with the expectation that his instructions would be followed or there would be consequences. Perhaps some of you feel this way. God is primarily the Great Rule Maker and the idea that God is primarily a lover who loves the world with a disinterested love is totally revolutionary.

My God was a god of judgment. Deep in the way my people thought of God was the idea of God as a judge. Later in in our conversation, Jesus described his idea of judgment. He said that the judgment is that God sent his Son, the Messiah, to save the world, and that the way that people are judged was by whether they accept or reject God’s loving gift of the forgiveness of sins by faith (v. 18). Instead of righteous works being the way a person comes into fellowship with God, good works are the result of what God does in the life of a believer. What a mystery!!

Second, the idea that God was the giver of a sacrifice for my sins was revolutionary. I lived in Jerusalem, and daily I went by the temple where the people brought their sacrifices for sin. In my religion, God did not do the sacrificing. We did. If I sinned, I gave a sacrifice. The idea that God, motivated by love, determined to undo the effects of my sin was beyond anything I had ever dreamed.

My idea of the Messiah was that he would be a political leader who would retain the law and the sacrificial code of Israel. Jesus had a completely different idea. Jesus’ idea was that as the Messiah he would love Israel and give himself for Israel. Jesus was the Lamb of God by which God demonstrates his unfailing love for his people by rescuing them from their sins.

I was weary because I had taken on my back the responsibility for my own salvation and for the works of righteousness that I knew that God wanted of me. Jesus’ idea was that God did the work. I could see that, if this was true, the solution to my spiritual weariness was at hand. I did not have to do anything more! God would do it for me! I could relax and let God do the work of giving me his Divine Life.

Conclusion.

I am sure that you are asking, “What happened to Nicodemus?” When Jesus was condemned, John records that I protested the unfair treatment of the Galilean early in his ministry (John 7:50-52). When Jesus was killed, I took spices for his anointing (John 19:40). Unfortunately, I never publicly declared my faith in such a way that the writers of your Gospel recorded my faith. As I said, I am a careful man, perhaps too careful.

The Gospel of John does not say whether I became a follower of the Way of Jesus, and I am not going to tell you today. [2] It is better the way that John leaves the story. For, during my life, I had to struggle with faith and with whether Jesus was the messiah, and so will you. I had to make my decision concerning whether to accept Christ and become his disciple, and you must make yours.

Each of you must ask yourselves the very same thing I had to ask myself: Am I willing to become like a child again and in humility and repentance ask God to do for me what I cannot do for myself? What you call, “Good News” is good news precisely because God has done something for us we could never do for ourselves. God has given each of us a way to have a new life and a new kind of life. The only question is, “Will we accept it?”

Amen.

Copyright 2017, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] The ideas behind this interpretation of what happened to Paul come from James Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers & Howard, 1989), 21ff. This is one of my favorite books and well worth reading. It has shaped my ministry since I first read it during seminary.

[2] “Nicodemus” in New Bible Dictionary Second Ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1962, 1993), 834, There are many legends regarding what happened to Nicodemus. Personally, I think he did become a follower of Jesus. His participation in the anointing of Jesus is strong evidence. Nevertheless, the historical record is unclear.