The Good Book- N is for Nicodemus- Rev. Wendy McCormick- July 14,2024
N is for Nicodemus
Wendy McCormick
July 14, 2024
John 3:1-10, 7:45-52, 19:38-42
Like many American schoolchildren, my first exposure to the Holocaust was reading The Diary of Anne Frank. I still remember being captivated by how her diary included both the same kind of reflections on ordinary life I might have and the account of this terrifying situation in which she and her family were living. I always related most to the people that were hiding them and helping them. More recently, I loved the beautiful 2017 novel All the Light We Cannot See about two different young people, one French and one German, and how they become involved in the French resistance. I imagine few of us will forget how we were affected by seeing Stephen Spielberg’s masterpiece, Schindler’s List. I wanted to leave the theatre and sign up to help Oskar Schindler.
Invariably, I relate to the people resisting, the people helping people. I see myself with the good guys. I am inspired by the 1934 Theological Declaration of Barmen, adopted by a group of German church leaders to resist the introduction of Nazi ideology into the Protestant church. The most famous of that group, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had a chance to stay in the US teaching theology, but he returned to Germany and was martyred at the hands of the Nazis. I would have loved to meet those people. I imagine myself standing with them.
Same with stories of the underground railroad during the long period of US slavery. I loved imagining being among the helpers who hid in the woods near the Ohio River and helped people find their way to a basement or a barn and eventually freedom. To me, the stories were romantic with happy endings.
But I also know that these heroes – whether of the US period of slavery and abolition, or of Nazi Germany were a teeny tiny minority of people taking absolutely enormous risks, breaking the law and endangering their lives.
So if I’m realistic, I have to admit that I would have been much more likely to be among those who kept my head down, went about my business and tried not to get involved. I hope I would not have been among those who turned these folks in – the underground railroad participants or the ministers speaking against a popular authoritarian government or the citizens hiding Jews and helping them to escape. But if I’m honest, it’s pretty unlikely I would have been among those that history and 20/20 hindsight shows us were the heroes.
Which brings me to Nicodemus.
Perhaps you know that even though many of us learned that the Pharisees are the bad guys in the Jesus story, even though they are clearly portrayed in the gospels as opponents of Jesus, the actual Pharisees were probably a lot like me – and maybe some of you.
They were educated religious leaders, students of the scriptures, and considered “liberal” within their own tradition (in contrast to the more conservative Sadducees and the chief priests). They enjoyed a certain amount of respect and even prestige for their knowledge of the tradition, for their leadership in preserving and perpetuating the faith. Unlike me, they were leaders of a minority religion heavily dominated and restricted by the great Roman empire. The Pharisees and the other religious leaders of Jesus’ day got along with the authorities in the name of preserving and practicing the best of their faith. Pharisees were open to new ideas and fresh interpretations of scripture, but they knew where to draw the line, not to make too many waves or take too many risks, lest Rome crack down, or lest the tradition get too far off track.
Nicodemus was a Pharisee. He is something of a foil, a teaching example of those who “don’t get it.” But we see him twice more. In the words of Dr Anna Carter Florence: “Tradition has been kind to Nicodemus. He’s held up as an example of faith and a model of generosity; the Pharisee who eventually came around. But to be frank, it took a while. Which is exactly what John wants us to notice in Nicodemus’ story. Those of us with a lot to lose seem to take longer to come around. It’s not that we don’t hear Jesus’ call to discipleship. We just take our time acting on it, which has cost and consequence for those around us.”
Dr Florence invites us to tease out the nuances in Nicodemus’ story and by extension our own.
In the first episode, John introduces him this way: “Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night.” As we will consider next month when a new sermon series takes us deep into a section of John’s gospel, reading John with a literary eye is helpful. He came to Jesus by night. That’s not the same as at night. We are not just being told the hour but that he doesn’t want to be seen, that he has reasons for not approaching Jesus in broad daylight, in the many places where he can be found teaching and drawing a crowd. And if we’re paying attention, the obvious reason for that is his identification as Pharisee. He can’t have his esteemed colleagues know that he is asking these questions. Nicodemus has a lot to lose even by being seen with this upstart teacher. So he comes by night.
In the safety of invisibility, he asks his question, and it becomes clear in John’s layered, metaphoric style that Nicodemus is “in the dark”. He doesn’t get it. His response to Jesus talking about being born again is comically literal. And then he fades away as Jesus discourse continues through the rest of chapter 3.
The Nicodemus side of you and me may go back to our computer screens to read and analyze the speech on-line, perhaps developing a late-night practice of scrolling down the glowing screen after everyone else is in bed, never mentioning to anyone that there is something about this avant garde teacher that is persuasive, and not just persuasive but life-giving. But too risky. Few of us would even risk reputation, and for Nicodemus reputation was just the start of it.
Then he pops up again in chapter 7.
This chapter begins with John telling us Jesus is trying to stay in Galilee which is up north, because in the region of Judea, closer to Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders are looking for an opportunity to kill him. But Jesus is persuaded to go to a religious festival in Jerusalem, “not publicly,” says John, “but as it were in secret.” And the chapter goes on to describe the controversy surrounding Jesus as he is unable to remain in secret and even teaches in the Temple. “And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds,” John tells us. “While some were saying ‘he is a good man,’ others were saying, ‘no, he is deceiving the crowd.’ Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews” – that is, for fear of the religious leaders like the Pharisees and their colleagues, the chief priests. The drama unfolds through the chapter, and John tells us about Jesus’ teaching on the last day of the festival, leading to professions of Jesus as messiah and arguments about how a nobody from Galilee cannot be the messiah. The crowd is divided about whether Jesus should be turned in and killed.
And then it comes to the temple police, as they approach the chief priests and the Pharisees. The set up for Nicodemus is very clear: The religious leaders assure the police – the civil authorities -- that’s it’s all about the crowd, the riff-raff, “has any one of the authorities or of the pharisees believed in him,” they assure the police rhetorically. The crowd doesn’t know Jewish law like we do. Not to worry. We got this.
But it’s then that Nicodemus speaks up. It feels heroic really. The sides are drawn, the tension is high. One of his colleagues has just reassured the authorities that no Pharisee is drawn in by this Jesus, that they have everything under control.
But Nicodemus says everyone gets a fair hearing, don’t they? That’s in the law. Innocent until proven guilty. Fair trial and all that. I want to imagine that would be me. Speaking up for due process.
In 1970 a Presbyterian congregation in California appealed to the wider Presbyterian church for help. A number of their members were friends with a young political activist who had been arrested and charged with murder in connection with a prison escape. Her Presbyterian friends not only believed she was innocent, but they also believed it was going to be difficult for her to get a fair trial because she was a Marxist who identified with the communist party. And she was black. It was 1970. Perhaps like Nicodemus reminding his colleagues that everyone deserves a fair trial, the Presbyterians came through. With the endorsement of the synod, the regional group to whom the congregation appealed, the synod, the national Presbyterian church donated $10,000 to the defense fund of Angela Davis.
The blowback from Presbyterians across the country was severe, and the reverberations continued for decades, even to this day. The money was quickly replaced from private donors, but it didn’t matter. All Presbyterians like you and me heard or cared about were the headlines “communist” and “charged with murder.” The media was full of reports of what a terrible and dangerous person young Angela Davis was.
I was in 3rd grade. I didn’t even know about it. But for most of my career I’ve heard about this from Presbyterians who are still mad about that Nicodemus moment for Presbyterians, contributing to a defense fund.
When Nicodemus suggests that Jewish law does not judge people without a fair hearing, he is quickly slapped down with a sarcastic putdown asking if Nicodemus is also from that backwater Galilee.
And that’s the last we hear of Nicodemus or of a fair hearing. He never speaks again. And the gospel continues to unfold with the antagonism between Jesus and the Pharisees growing. Nicodemus probably wasn’t the leading opponent, the most vocal critic of Jesus. But he gave up, telling himself you can’t fight city hall.
In 1939, a German liner called the MS St Louis sailed to Havana, but the Cuban government refused them entry, although the passengers had visas. They were Jews fleeing the Nazis. The United States and Canada also blocked them, denying the passengers safe haven and forcing the ship’s return to Europe.
Even though I want to believe I would stand with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Oskar Schindler, even though I love to read about the resistance to the Nazis, I imagine that I would have given less than five minutes attention to that 1939 news story about a ship carrying Jews being sent back to Europe.
Immigration is so complicated, I might say, as I changed the channel. I get confused about what asylum means. And they’re Europeans, after all. Someone will figure it out.
I imagine many of you know that 254 passengers on that ship were later killed in concentration camps.
In chapter 19 we see Nicodemus for the last time as he joins Joseph of Arimathea to bury the body of the humiliated, convicted and brutally executed Jesus from Galilee. The value of the spices Nicodemus provides is over the top. It would be like providing a $50,000 casket for one of those Jews turned back.
Was it a good and generous thing to do? Sure. Did it show that he finally realized? Probably. Was it too little too late? Maybe.
Nicodemus is complicated. Like so many of us. We don’t know what happened after that. Did he change? Did he become one of those who joined the Jesus movement in the wake of the resurrection? Did he go back to work, feeling like he had done all he could by seeing that Jesus got a good burial?
We don’t know. His story ends there.
But the Jesus story continues, and so does ours. The fact is following Jesus isn’t just a warm feeling in your heart and a ticket to heaven. The call to follow Jesus in unpopular ways is always before us – whether it is speaking up in circles where we might be judged unfavorably, whether it is opening our hearts and our policies to refugees and asylum seekers or pushing beyond partisan immigration hysteria to insist our leaders address the root causes of why there are more people on the move around the globe than ever before in human history. Or any of a thousand other examples of how standing with the one who stood with the poor, the marginalized and the forgotten gets you into trouble.
The opportunity to follow Jesus, to stand up for Jesus, to go all-in with the ways of Jesus, to come out from the shadows and into the light, trusting God and fearless of the worldly consequences – that opportunity is ever before us. We get a new chance every day until our last day. The Nicodemus story may be a cautionary tale, or, like the stories of the heroes of the French resistance or the underground railroad, a kind of inspiration to speak up, stand up, take risks. What Nicodemus failed to understand is that these powers we fear – of reputation, social standing and even safety and security are nothing compared to the power of that light shining in the darkness, the light of the world. Nothing the world can do can extinguish the light of the world or separate us from the abundant life that comes with living in and for that light. Each day we get the chance to live like we really believe that. Amen.
Chapters in “A is for Alabaster," by Anna Carter Florence, published in 2023 by Westminster John Knox, provide the source and inspiration for this sermon series.
