We continue with our backtrack loop of Jesus attending Passover in Jerusalem before going into full time ministry up in Galilee. After a day of cleansing the Temple and performing miracles on the crowd visiting the city, Jesus receives a visitor from the Sanhedrin. While we could speculate on any number of different reasons why Nicodemus came at night, the most obvious reason is that he hunted Jesus down after He was finished with all this public activity.
We have to trust that John’s translation of an Aramaic conversation has been rendered properly into Greek. We should rightly have some small doubts about how it was further rendered in English. There’s a whole library of discussion about what this conversation would have sounded like in the native language of Jews at the time, but in the end, it’s just speculation.
Nicodemus had a question on his mind. He stated immediately the nature of the conflict: The Pharisees could see clearly that the nature and results of the miracles were the hand of God. The unspoken question was obvious: Why was Jesus’ teaching so very different from that of either the Pharisees or Sadducees? It was a genuine question. Nicodemus had studied the Covenant his whole life, and revered his teachers. He was utterly convinced that what he knew was God’s revelation, yet Jesus flatly contradicted much of it. How could God provide backing for something contrary to His own revelation?
Without waiting for Nicodemus to lay out this conflict, Jesus abruptly jumps to the real issue: You cannot understand God’s Word and His purpose without spiritual birth. If all you have is your fleshly capabilities, you’ll never recover what was lost in the Fall. The implication is that Nicodemus was operating in the flesh, not the Spirit.
Here I’ll depart from the mainstream. I take the position that Nicodemus wasn’t stupid about the meaning of whatever Aramaic words Jesus used to mention spiritual birth. He likely had quite the brilliant mind. Rather, his instinct was to reject the message behind Jesus’ words. His question about crawling back into a mother’s womb was typical of Jewish sarcasm. Nicodemus was insisting that being born Jewish was all the qualification necessary for being welcomed into the coming Messianic Kingdom of God. His rabbinical traditions (now collected within the Talmud) put him in a far better position than average to have a clear grasp of what God said and what it meant. Nicodemus was among the Jewish elite.
Jesus goes on to reassert His position: If you don’t have a spiritual identity, you cannot even understand God, much less enter into His divine realm. Implicit here is that the Messianic Kingdom would not be political, but spiritual. The Covenant promises were primarily a matter of Spirit, not mere physical reality. The whole issue was the Pharisaical insistence that Jewish political independence, and furthermore their political dominance, was a divine necessity. But the goal of the Covenant had always been a change in human nature, not a change in the human condition in this world. You cannot deal with God as a Spirit unless you are born into that higher realm. It’s like trying to catch the wind.
To this Nicodemus replied in essence that this was against everything he had been taught, and everything he himself taught. Jesus noted this was not a good situation, since Nicodemus was one of the instructors of Israel. How can Israel come to their intended destiny if the highest ranking teachers of the nation cannot grasp the ultimate spiritual nature of things?
Jesus elaborates. He and His disciples were simply telling what they had experienced directly. Yet, without having walked in their sandals, the Sanhedrin rejected this testimony of things these men had walked through. “It didn’t happen!” Jesus and His disciples had kept it pretty simple, without any speculation or extrapolation; it was a simple matter of, “This is what God has done for us.” If the Sanhedrin dismissed what these men had experienced directly, what would be the point of trying to explain what’s behind their experience?
Then Jesus adds, by the way, His credentials. None of the Sanhedrin, nor any other human they could find, had been to the visit the Spirit Realm. Yet here was Jesus, a regular human for all to see, who was saying that He had come down from Heaven, where He had held the position of the Divine Heir. You doubt that? How about those miracles, which none of the Sanhedrin could do, with all their expertise?
Surely Nicodemus could recall the Exodus, in the part where they encountered the fiery serpents? Moses had to put a model of the serpents on a pole so that everyone could see it from a distance. Then they could turn in faith and be healed. So it would be with Jesus the human. He would be exalted by some means so that anyone could turn to look upon His message in faith and be healed.
It’s hard to be sure what follows starting with verse 16 is Jesus still talking or John editorializing. I take the position that it was John echoing things his cousin Jesus had said during their time together. However, we can bet Jesus said something approximating this to Nicodemus.
God had compassion on everyone, so that He was willing to sacrifice His only Son so that everyone could find their way back to Him. What Jesus taught didn’t just reaffirm the Covenant, it clarified it in a way mere words could not. The Jews made it a tenet that the world was worthy of death just because it wasn’t born Jewish, but God had always intended to offer redemption to the world. Israel was supposed to convey that redemption, but never quite got around to it.
Well, it turns out that the basis for God’s wrath was not a matter of DNA, but faith. Refusing to bow the knee to Him in feudal commitment is the only ticket to Hell, and everyone was born with that ticket. God revealed the whole procedure for redemption and acceptance into His household, but even Jews got too deeply involved in what they could do to make themselves happy. That shining light of revelation embarrassed them, so they hid in the darkness. They were unwilling to sacrifice their human desires for redemption’s privilege.
But there would always be some drawn to the light of revelation, and they willingly confess their sins. Then they go on to walk in that light and proudly display their privilege for all the world to see. That’s what Israel was supposed to do, not grovel in darkness. Jesus came to renew that light and that calling, and it wouldn’t result in a political kingdom.
