before in the temple, Nicodemus keeps silent. He provides a ground base of questioning for this extraordinary scene of power and compassion. John reinforces our sense of his presence by invoking at the end of the scene (8:12), as he had at the end of Nicodemus’ colloquy with Jesus earlier, the Prologue to his book, which contains the whole and marks both these encounters with Jesus, Nicodemus’ and the adulterous woman’s, as pivotal.
Though he is marginal, neither fully Jew nor disciple, friend nor stranger, Nicodemus is the speck of dust in John’s eye that he can’t get rid off. He wants him to believe, but John’s integrity as a writer won’t let him fudge when Nicodemus does not become a follower of Jesus, and he gives us the questioner. Nicodemus’ resolved and detached character takes on a life of its own that cannot be made into what it is not. He chooses knowledge over belief, and even John in his own book cannot change this.
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A knower but Nicodemus the outsider acts boldly. We’ve seen him speak out, while maintaining his distance, but in the end he simply acts. And what an action, it is an unforgettable gesture. As pure and extravagant as Mary’s gift of perfume, Nicodemus brings 100 pounds of embalming oil with “myrrh and aloes” (19:39) for Jesus’ burial. He does not ask for fairness in the treatment of Jesus. It’s too late for that. He simply acts, insisting on honor, courageously joining Joseph of Arimathea in wrapping Jesus’ body for burial. Extraordinary, this last glimpse, John giving us a Nicodemus in silent, fragrant action.
And John subtly contrasts the knower and the believer in this scene. The “secret disciple” (19:38) Joseph of Arimathea does the talking, negotiating with Pilate. Nicodemus does not speak. After Joseph of Arimathea succeeds in getting Jesus’ body, Nicodemus joins him. But where are Peter and the others?
It is only the two outsiders who have the courage to act, one out of belief in Jesus and one out of respect for Jesus, for the knowledge he clearly possesses. Joseph of Arimathea must speak to come clean, to declare who he is. Out of tremendous personal integrity, Nicodemus must act to pay homage, but at the same time this allows him to maintain ambiguity. Though present, his position can’t be resolved. More than admirer, certainly, yet not disciple or we would have heard. And the disciples are noticeably absent. Their belief results in embarrassing absence while, ironically, Nicodemus’ knowledge results in extraordinary action.
The disciples’ absence, of course, heightens the power of Nicodemus’ presence. Where Joseph of Arimathea appears out of nowhere, John carefully makes Nicodemus’ appearance a climax, intensifying as well the drama of his gesture. He becomes bolder as he observes Jesus under a wider variety of circumstances. And possibly Jesus’ defining action for Nicodemus was the forgiveness shown the adulterous woman. Witness to such manifest power, Nicodemus realizes the true depth of Jesus’ understanding.
Regardless, after he meets Jesus, given continued observation, Nicodemus’ emergence is inevitable. When we first see Nicodemus he speaks privately in a night scene. When we see him again, he raises a question publicly in broad daylight and, finally, joining Joseph of Arimathea, he goes beyond words and simply acts publicly.
A fine reversal of the first scene in the last epitomizes Nicodemus’ stance. As John limns his progress with just a few strokes, we’re aware that in the first scene Nicodemus is implicitly accused of lacking life, while Jesus is volubly alive. In the last scene, however, Nicodemus is beyond John’s grasp and emphatically alive as, in silence, he respectfully touches the dead body of Jesus. And unlike Thomas and Mary Magdalene, he touches Jesus’ body on his own terms.
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Once John grants Nicodemus life, the energy of the center that for John is always the character of Jesus must be shared. We catch Nicodemus only out of the corner of our eye, but when we do, he becomes a center himself, pulling John’s interest to what had been the periphery and making this figure of knowledge central.
John loses control of Nicodemus early on. The narrator begins straightforwardly to introduce his colloquy with Jesus, announcing that “There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that you are doing, unless God be with him.” But subtly Nicodemus moves to a central position in John’s book. “Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus says unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” (3:1–4).
Though Nicodemus addresses Jesus with respect, conventionally as a Rabbi, his words are tinged with irony. Instead of saying simply “I know,” he addresses Jesus as a representative of others, a “ruler” of the Jews in fact, saying, “We know that thou art a teacher come from God” (3:2). I hear his greeting as more a question than a declaration. As a consequence, we view Nicodemus immediately on an equal footing with Jesus, instead of an uncritical admirer come to fall at his feet in homage. Jesus’ response accepts this equality. He makes clear in a rather brusque manner that Nicodemus’ assumptions are unacceptable: “Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (3:5–6).”
The oracular “Verily, verily” shifts our sympathy away from Jesus to Nicodemus where it remains throughout their colloquy. We identify with the questioner. For Nicodemus’ remains the key question of John’s book, “How can a man be born when he is old?” Rather than Pilate’s, “What is truth?” The former question is about experiencing and obtaining knowledge, the latter about seeking and believing. Pilate accepts the language of Jesus, while Nicodemus explores his language. Nicodemus asks about Jesus’ way of speaking, not what Jesus is speaking about.
Jesus’ method is apparent. John uses this scene to make it explicit early on. He invites Nicodemus to accept a new vocabulary, not “born” of the womb as we customarily understand the term but “born of the Spirit.” By this means Jesus attempts to construct an edifice of language from which there is no exit. John shows us Jesus at work building this structure: statements layered with carefully placed questions; oracular rhetoric raised on a foundation of concrete imagery; rigid categories, such as flesh and spirit, cut from steel. Jesus is the master builder.
Just as the breath of the wind through the courtyard takes his attention, however, Jesus is undercut by the disinterested Nicodemus, whose reasonable questions asked with calm, profound respect haunt us. Our sympathy shifts to Nicodemus. At the same time, he shares Jesus’ power of language building, who in turn borrows his irony, “Art thou a master of Israel, and know not these things?” (3:10).
Despite John’s orchestrating the scene to emphasize Jesus’ power, skillfully moving from their dialogue with its threshold imagery of birth/water to Jesus’ monologue with its categorical imagery of belief/truth, a counter movement undermines this power. Seen from Nicodemus’ exploratory, questioning perspective, we realize that the edges of Jesus’ new terms are not as sharp as they first appear. Perhaps they’re modeled in clay rather than cut from steel. In the end, during Jesus’ monologue, we are distracted by what might be revolving in Nicodemus’ mind. And after Jesus stops, the continued silence of Nicodemus hangs over the scene like a thunderhead.
John dramatizes the fact that Jesus’ power is inseparable from his mission of radical redefinition. Nicodemus’ night colloquy with Jesus, then, is critical to John’s book. First, because it makes explicit what is at stake. A new vocabulary is offered by Jesus, an attempt made to establish new categories, declare where the edges of things are in the new world inhabited by John’s Jesus. Second, these very edges are undercut by their language, the ironies they exchange where edges blur. Just as Nicodemus is both on the inside and the outside, so none of the distinctions that Jesus
