TV doctor Gregory House is one of the most cleverly written characters going. You want to crown the boor with his own cane, then you see a flash of humanity and illumination. There’s more than meets the eye. The tiny hand of an unborn child grasps his finger during neonatal surgery (Season 3, “Fetal Position”). House’s eyes unmask him: his own aspirations for relationship mock his pretense at believing we are nothing more than parts that have somehow been randomly, if complicatedly, assembled. House will never admit it, but he doesn’t have to. You know he now knows what Dylan (and then Hendrix) knows:

There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate

In John’s gospel Nicodemus also takes up a Dylanesque watchtower song. Liberal commentators treat Nicodemus, “a man of the Pharisees … a ruler of the Jews” (John 3:1) as a figment of the gospel writer’s imagination. Conservatives dismiss him as a dull blade (as if any of us would have been a fig more astute ourselves in theological dialogue with Jesus).

As to the former commentators: If the sun is still shining 2,000 years from now and my life receives brief mention in but one source, I hope, first, that the mention is true, second, that the mention likewise presents me as a platform for my Master Teacher’s voice, and third, that the mention is allowed its say. As to the latter commentators: true, Nicodemus slinks in at night; true, he shows himself no match for theological repartee with Jesus. But his glory lies in these facts: one, he shows up, and two, he knows enough to shut up. I hope I’m that wise.

My Alter Ego

Of all the characters Jesus comes across in John’s gospel, it’s Nicodemus with whom I think I most identify. He is the sum of some of my deepest fears: an Ausländer educated beyond his capacity to understand, and promoted to a prominence where his ignorance becomes painfully evident.

A Pharisee on the Sadducee-dominated Sanhedrin, Nicodemus is a minoritarian. His name is Greek, not Jewish (“Nicodemus” means “Victory of the People”), though we’re never told whether he was of pagan origin himself or simply bore the Seleucid oppressors’ version of the Hebrew name Naqdimon. Perhaps his name “Victory of the People” has a special bite. Not only does his party oppose its adveraries theologically (Pharisees affirm resurrection, Sadducces deny it), but Pharisees are non-aristocratic teachers “of the people,” while Sadducees are the aristocratic power-elite. If you will, his is a lonely Democratic voice in an assembly run by Republicans.

Nonetheless, Nicodemus has become, by means not disclosed to us, an “insider.” Jesus refers to him, in fact, as The preeminent Teacher of Israel (despite the translations, in the Greek there’s an emphatic definite article in front of the title “Teacher” in v. 10). One wonders if it is because of his undeniable strength as “The Teacher” that Sadducees have grudgingly made room for him on the Council. The fact that he comes to Jesus at night suggests he does not feel his “insider” status is secure.

Why do I relate to Nicodemus? Easy. As far as I have been able to ascertain, my mother and my father were the first in their respective families to go to college. My mother is from the Mississippi delta and her parents were sharecroppers. My dad’s parents were small farmers in East Tennessee. I sit around a faculty table at a theological seminary and go: “Who let me in? And when will they figure out what a hick I am?”

Nicodemus Shows Up

Something has happened in Jesus’s early “signs” to trigger Nicodemus’s sense that he doesn’t have everything figured out. What I love is that Nicodemus knows to whom to bring his ignorance. John surely expects us to assume that the “signs” that Nicodemus has come to ask about include the Turning of Water into Wine (John 2:1-11 = “the first sign”) and the Temple Cleansing (John 2:13-25 … “What sign do you show?”, Jesus is asked). Nicodemus isn’t a clever enough reader of Scripture to see in the Cana miracle the promise of God’s having saved his best wine for the age of the Spirit that is about to dawn (see Ezk 36:25-27). That is, until Jesus starts talking about being “born again/from above” (the Greek word anothen at John 3:3,7 is a double entendre). I’m not smart enough to figure that out either. Which, of course, is the point — otherwise we wouldn’t need the rebirth.

Nor does it look like Nicodemus is astute enough to see the hidden lesson in the Temple Cleansing. Jesus’s temporary interruption of daily sacrifice promises the coming “end of sin” (not to mention of Sadducean hegemony), when He offers the Temple’s Final Sacrifice (see Dan 9:25-27). Nicodemus, it follows, could hardly understand that Jesus’s act also signals his intent to inaugurate a building project: the raising up of a new Temple based on his own Body, once he’s given it for the sin of the world. Thus, Jesus’s discourse on the lifted serpent — another figure for his own Body. Not that any of us could have seen the pattern of prediction until the Fulfiller himself showed up. Which, of course, is again the point: he did show up. The little hand reached out from Mary’s womb, and the renewal of all things began.

But from the “signs” Nicodemus does know enough to know that something is afoot.  Jesus’s mystifying rejoinders to Nicodemus’s questions reveal to him that he does not understand a whit about things that (at least in Jesus’s estimation) should be obvious from the theology of the Hebrew Scriptures: there’s a death about us that requires a rebirth from above (3:3-8), a sickness about us that calls for the lifting up of a curse-bearer (3:10-14).

Nicodemus Shuts Up

But I love something even more than the fact that Nicodemus knows to whom to come. After his initial “but, … but’s …,” he shuts up and listens. Apparently, he realizes he is in the presence of the True Teacher of Israel.

It’s interesting the way the narrative in John 3 subtly shifts in verse 16. Either John reassumes his own explanatory voice, or he continues Jesus’s answer to Nicodemus in a way that leaves the confines of the conversation behind. Either way, John’s or Jesus’s “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” thrusts Nicodemus’s nighttime foray into the bright daylight of God’s mission to reclaim his lost world.

Nicodemus has to go back into the dark place of his Sanhedrin colleagues’ murderous machinations against the Lord of light. In the face of their ultimately devilish scheme we hear him offer — and get shouted down for — a plea for simple procedural justice (John 7:50-51). What his posture is during the final trial we are not told. Mark puts “the whole council” of the leadership in cahoots (Mark 15:1) — perhaps Mark is being hyperbolic; perhaps known friends of Jesus were excluded from the proceedings. Regardless, I can only imagine how crushingly frustrating it must have been for Nicodemus to watch it unfold.

When last we see him, Nicodemus “the Teacher” offers his most elegant discourse, wordlessly carrying 100 pounds of spices for his Teacher’s burial.

Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pound’s weight (John 19:39).

Mute as his tongue is, here Nicodemus is his most eloquent: however rebirth comes to us it must pass through this tomb; the path to Jesus’s being lifted up as a sign of God’s love for the world and as the One in whom Israel’s (and the world’s) core sickness can be healed must call for this entombment; if an end is ever to come to unjust accusations and hearings, they must all be absorbed in this most heinous of injustices, the death of the one truly innocent human being who ever lived.

That grave could not hold Jesus. Praise be, the spices were not necessary.