The Man Who Came at Night

After the wedding at Cana, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for the Passover feast, and the wonders he did there set the city talking.

Among the talkers was a man named Nicodemus. He was a Pharisee, a member of the council that ruled God's people, and a famous teacher of God's law. (Pharisees studied the law so closely that they had worked out how far a person could walk on the day of rest.)

Nicodemus came to Jesus at night. The Bible doesn't say why. Maybe he didn't want the council to see.

He sat down across the lamp from Jesus. "Rabbi," he said, "we know you are a teacher who has come from God. No one could do the signs you do unless God were with him."

Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

Nicodemus frowned. "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he climb back inside his mother and be born a second time?"

(Nicodemus had a grey beard and a long, important robe. He tried to picture it. It would not fit.)

Outside, a night wind rattled the shutters.

"The wind blows wherever it wants," Jesus said. "You hear it, but you can't tell where it comes from or where it is going. That is how it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

No baby works hard to get born. Nicodemus had spent his life working hard at being good for God. Jesus was talking about a new life only God's Spirit could give, as free as the wind.

"How can these things be?" Nicodemus asked.

"You are Israel's teacher," said Jesus, "and you don't understand these things?"

(The most famous teacher in Jerusalem had just been sent back to school.)

Then Jesus reminded him of an old story. Long ago in the desert, snakes had bitten God's people, and many of them died. Moses lifted a bronze snake up on a pole, and everyone who looked at it lived.

"As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert," Jesus said, "so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him will have life that lasts forever."

Son of Man was Jesus' name for himself. Nicodemus did not know yet what "lifted up" meant. Jesus did.

"For God so loved the world," Jesus went on, "that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it."

Then he said, "The light has come into the world, but people loved the darkness instead, because the things they did were evil. Whoever does what is true comes into the light."

Nicodemus had walked through the dark streets to get there. Now the Light of the world was sitting across the lamp from him.

John doesn't say how Nicodemus walked home that night. But much later, when the council wanted Jesus arrested, Nicodemus stood up. "Does our law judge a man before it hears him?" The man who came in the dark was beginning to speak in the daylight.

Nicodemus was right that Jesus came from God, more right than he knew. Jesus was walking toward the day he would be lifted up himself. The bronze snake had hung on a pole in the desert. He would hang on a wooden cross, so that anyone at all, a grey-bearded teacher or a child in pajamas, could look to him and live.

The wind of God's Spirit is still blowing through the dark, and all over the world people are being born again into the light of Jesus.