In today’s readings
we meet two men who haven’t got the foggiest idea what is going on around them,
men who feel as if they are in the dark. That makes them readings which we can
all relate to, because I suspect we often feel like that too. Sometimes it’s
national and international situations which leave us feeling like that:
coronavirus, climate change, Brexit – what’s going to happen? We don’t know. Or
it may be family or work situations that we can’t see a way through. Sometimes
it’s issues of faith, and doubt, or inner struggles which make us feel we don’t
even know ourselves anymore. We’re in the dark.
Nicodemus is
literally in the dark in our Gospel reading today. He comes to Jesus, we are
told, “by night”. That’s not just a
reference to the time he visited. Light and darkness are very important in the
Gospel of John. It starts with John telling us that Jesus is “light that shines in the darkness, and the
darkness has not overcome it.” 1.14 Whenever we come across light or
darkness in this Gospel we are meant to sit up and take notice.
On one level, Nicodemus
probably comes by night so that no one will see him. He’s a respectable
religious leader, one of the ruling council, the Sanhedrin, and he doesn’t want
people to know he is visiting Jesus, a controversial figure. But John is also
telling us that he’s in the dark in other ways. He doesn’t understand what’s
going on. He’s obviously fascinated by what he has seen and heard of Jesus, but
he can’t work who he really is, or how he should respond to him, and that
leaves him stumbling about, unable to see the way ahead.
Nothing quite makes sense to him. He doesn’t fit Nicodemus’
preconceptions of what a holy man ought to be like, let alone the Messiah. He
breaks the rules, heals on the Sabbath, associates with all the wrong sorts of
people. He isn’t from the religious elite, a member of the, the Sanhedrin, as
Nicodemus is. He isn’t a priest. He isn’t synagogue leader. He’s just a
carpenter from a backwater town in Galilee. And yet God seems to honour his
work. Those he prays for are healed. People are changed. There is an authority
about him which is undeniable.
It is all very baffling for someone like Nicodemus, and probably
frightening too. He’s used to being in control, knowing what’s what. He’s a
leader, after all, and leaders like to feel they’ve got a handle on things.
Jesus tells him that he needs a whole new birth, a new beginning, if he
is to have a hope of “entering the kingdom
of God”. Jesus isn’t talking about life after death, something in another
time and place, by the way. He’s not offering Nicodemus a passport to get him
through the pearly gates. Jesus is revealing God at work in the here and now,
in daily life, among ordinary people, the Word made flesh who dwells among us.
Nicodemus thought he knew where to find God; in the law, in the ancient
Scriptures, in the rituals and customs of the Synagogue and Temple, but in
Jesus, God seems to be showing up beyond those places, beyond the pale, even
among sinners. He’s going to have to
start from scratch if its ever going to make sense, abandon what he thought he
knew and work it all out anew from the beginning. That’s why Jesus talks about
the need for new birth.
But “How can anyone be born after having grown
old?” asks Nicodemus. It’s not just the physical impossibility of getting
back into the womb that stumps him but the fact that, as we would say “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.
He’s very definitely an old dog, and a top dog too, someone who is, or was,
settled in his opinions, confident of his knowledge. He’s spent a lot of time
getting where he is. Is he really going to have to start all over again? His
society venerated and respected old age and the wisdom it brought. Who would
want to be a child again, with all the uncertainties and vulnerability that
implied?
Nicodemus arrives in
the dark , and it sounds as if he goes away not much more enlightened. But
wonderful things can happen in dark
places. Babies grow in the darkness of the womb, seeds germinate in the dark
earth, and in this conversation something is sown, something is conceived,
which will, much later, bear fruit. We meet Nicodemus twice more in John’s
Gospel. The first time is when the Jewish leaders first start planning to get
rid of Jesus. Nicodemus, who is one of them, argues that he should have a fair
hearing. Later on, after the crucifixion, he is one of those, alongside Joseph
of Arimathea, who arrange for Jesus’ burial. He provides the spices and oils
for anointing the body. The fact that
his name and his story have been preserved and passed on in the Gospels suggests
that he became a member of the Christian movement after the resurrection, and medieval
legend says that he was beaten to death by the Jewish Temple guard after he
was baptised by Peter and John, and was buried with St Stephen in the tomb of
the Rabbi Gamaliel.
We don’t know what
time of day the Old Testament reading is set in, but Abram might as well be in
the pitch black when God’s call comes to him to leave everything he knows in
his own native land and set out across the desert to a new land which God
doesn’t even name for him. God promises
that he will make a great nation of him, that all the families of the earth
will be blessed by him, but how can that be? What this brief reading doesn’t
tell us is that Abram and his wife, Sarai, have no children, and by this stage,
humanly speaking it is impossible that they will do. Abram is 75 years old when
they set out; Sarai is well past child-bearing age. They are living in Haran in Mesopotamia, and
they no doubt expect to die there, and probably not too far in the future.
But God has other
ideas. If you or I heard a message like
this, at the age of 75, we would probably politely ignore it, and wonder
whether we ought to go a little easier on the booze – it sounds like complete
nonsense. There is no way that God can make a great nation of Abram. His line
ends with him. And sending him out on a spree like this seems not just daft but
cruel. God’s call to Abram makes no sense, and as the years pass (he is 100
years old when his son Isaac is finally born) it doesn’t become any clearer. He
has no idea how God will bring any of this about. He is completely in the dark,
and it is a long time before any light dawns.
But Abram goes, we
are told, stepping out into that darkness without any real idea of what will
happen next.
So, Nicodemus and
Abram, two men who are in the dark - as we all sometimes are; in the dark about
what is happening to them, in the dark about what God is up to, in the dark
about how it will all work out. Two men who are told that they will need to
give up what they have, to let go of the certainties in their lives, if they
want to be part of what God is doing in the world, part of his kingdom. Two men
who are told they have to accept that darkness, that unknowing, that
bafflement, if they’re going to find the new future God wants for them.
Their stories remind
us that doing something new, seeing something new, being someone new, nearly
always means stepping out into the darkness, letting go of things that we have
clung to, leaving behind things that are familiar, whether that’s the status
and knowledge we’ve built up over a life time, like Nicodemus, or the
familiarity of our native land, our kindred, the things that have given us
security, like Abram. That can be hard to do, but if we are clinging to them,
we can’t cling to God, who is our real security. If our hands are full of them,
they can’t be open to God and all that he wants to give us. Nicodemus and Abram
find the courage to step out into the dark and put their trust in God, but how
do they find that courage, how do they know that it’s right?
Perhaps our second
reading, from Paul’s letter to the Romans, gives us a clue. He says that “Abraham believed in the presence of the God
who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not
exist.” However much Abraham liked his settled life, he heard in God’s
voice a call to life. What was the thing that didn’t exist? It was the child he
longed for. He literally had no future in Haran. His line, his name, would die
with him. His hopes were dead, but he decided to believe that God could give
life to those dead hopes. However hard the journey, he decided to take a chance
on life. Nicodemus sensed something life-giving in the words and actions of
Jesus, even if it wasn’t “life as he knew
it” , even if it would require him to start all over again, and it would
probably lead to hardship for him. There was something life giving in this man
from Nazareth, which – in the end – he couldn’t walk away from. He decided to
take a chance on life.
These stories are
good news for us when we are in the dark, when we are in a dilemma about the
way forward. How do we know what to do? Which way will we go? “Which is the way that leads to life?”
they ask us. “Choose that way, follow that
way,” because, however strange and different it might seem, that is where
you will find God at work, the kingdom of heaven springing up, hope that
nothing can destroy.
Amen
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