Seeking Jesus Away From The Glare Of Others: Nicodemus And Jesus

Today’s passage is a remarkable dialogue between our Lord Jesus and a key leader among the religious higher-ups, who, generally speaking, were very hostile to Jesus.

Nicodemus had a different response though to Jesus, he had a different spirit about him. He took his role of spiritual leadership seriously. He wanted to know all that God had for the nation of Israel, including himself,

and he had been impressed by and convinced by Jesus' presence, his teachings and his miracles and so he sought an audience with Jesus, under the cloak of night.

John 3:1 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council.

So Nicodemus was a part of that leadership group whose hackles Jesus was raising, and throughout the book of John, that tension we can see growing very significantly.

Nevertheless, Nicodemus wants to meet with Jesus, but again wants to do so without being detected. As a member of the leading council, he was fearful of being seen with Jesus one on one. He needed to keep up appearances, to make it appear that he was still in lockstep with the Jewish ruling council, despite his growing positive fascination with Jesus.

This was because God‘s spirit was at work in him. It takes great courage to be a free thinker, to not go along with the dominant viewpoint around you. It takes some hutzpa to go against the grain.

2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

In verse 2 Nicodemus says “we know you are a teacher from God“, and here, speaking in the plural, he clearly identifies the fact that he was not alone among others in the ruling council in wondering about Jesus, and wondering if he is who he says he is, if he just might be the Messiah.

But Nicodemus, it appears, was the one among those who were open to Jesus, who found the strength and resolve to go against the grain and simply have this conversation with Jesus.

It’s interesting that for most of the formal spiritual leadership, thus far and in the future, Jesus' miracles were not something that piqued curiosity. They were not wonderful demonstrations that God had arrived.

They were instead a real irritant, they were perceived as being a real problem, because the leaders knew that such miracles could not be from the darkness, could not be from Satan.

As Nicodemus said, no one could do those impossible things, those miracles if God were not with him.

This demonstrates a solid basic knowledge of the character of God that Nicodemus had. He understood that God is good, and that God only ever does good things.

So his conviction, however much it was against the norm, was that God was with Jesus. Just how that was true he is in the process of figuring out in this passage.

The fact that Jesus is God had not yet fully dawned on Nicodemus, as it had not on any of the followers of Jesus.

But here we can identify Nicodemus as someone who was in the process of weighing the cost of following Jesus.

What’s so interesting is that Jesus doesn’t seem to directly respond to the questions or statements of Nicodemus. Notice that?

But what Jesus has is an ability to understand the undercurrent of the questions, the question beneath the question. Jesus had the full range of spiritual gifts at work in him, so his responses, rarely specifically answering with clear forensic precision, his answers nevertheless get to the heart of the matter. And so they carry the conversation forward so that Nicodemus has more questions.

Nicodemus is clearly perplexed. Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” What does that mean? It means that there is a way to see and there is a way to not see, there is a way to understand, and a way to not understand.

Here Jesus is indicating that the way to see is not through human wisdom not even discoverable by human investigation. The kingdom of God can be seen and begin to be understood only when a person is born a new, born from above, born again, spiritually reborn.

This is something quite unique to the Christian faith, and it does challenge the frequent human desire to earn knowledge through investigation, to gain status through understanding. But Jesus here in response to all that Nicodemus has said so far, is saying that what Nicodemus seeks can only be attained through God revealing himself to Nicodemus.