Brilliantly orchestrated, the pivotal scene unfolds in three movements of increasing length and decreasing complexity, as Jesus’ vocabulary narrows to a chant of “belief” and “light” and his monologue dominates. John signals us when a movement begins and ends, using the close of each for emphasis. All three movements begin “Verily, verily” (3:3, 5, 11), the first two ending with Nicodemus’ question. Significantly, the last movement ends not with a question, since Nicodemus has dropped out of the conversation, but with a declaration about “doing truth” in the light. This returns us to John’s Prologue, his opening hymn to the word and the light, signaling the importance of this scene.
As we have seen, Jesus’ program begins in the first movement, redefining “birth” as the necessary groundwork for the redefinition of “flesh” and “spirit” in the second. He insists that “flesh is flesh” and “spirit is spirit,” attempting to draw a clear line between the two. At the same time, Jesus ends this movement with the powerful but ambiguous image of the wind, and John dramatizes the word play (wind/spirit), which together undermine any rigid distinction between flesh and spirit.
Nicodemus’ question, furthermore, “How can these things be?” wins our sympathy. While we’re drawn to Nicodemus, we are distanced by Jesus. For his withering irony in response, “Art thou a master of Israel, and know not these things?” betrays a lack of patience. Jesus presses his program hard in this second movement, but Nicodemus’ genuine question breaks the momentum. He is no straight man, and his question dogs us throughout the rest of the book, which is why John introduces it here.
Nicodemus does not deny Jesus’ assertion. Instead, he asks in so many words, “in what way are you speaking of these things”? Yet Jesus’ tone shifts immediately to the hortatory with a flurry of premises, a rhetoric that Jesus wants Nicodemus to adopt because once the new vocabulary of “birth” and “spirit” is accepted, Jesus’ conclusion follows.
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The dialogue at this point, as if to consolidate his renaming power, becomes a monologue. John gives Jesus the last word, a long speech that does not end with a question. Jesus begins authoritatively, asking a question himself, albeit rhetorical, about understanding “earthly” and “heavenly” things (3:12). At the same time, he picks up Nicodemus’ irony from the opening of the scene, where he had addressed Jesus in the first person plural, “We know that you are. . . . ” Likewise, Jesus shifts here from “I” to “We.” More important, while driving home the firm distinction between earth and heaven, emphasizing their difference by the contrast between ascending and descending, Jesus repeatedly names the “Son of man.” And he dwells in heaven as well as on earth. The Son of man participates like Jacob’s ladder or the serpent that Moses lifted up (3:14) in both the earthly and the heavenly, blurring their outlines. What first seem to be hard categories prove to be soft.
A similar dynamic operates at the end of Jesus’ monologue. Working himself into a fine chant on the word “belief,” he climaxes with a demand for belief in the “name” (3:18) of the Son of Man/God. Anyone, not just Nicodemus could be confused, for by now this name signifies God and/or man. Jesus breaks the law of the excluded middle. In building language with Nicodemus in their contra-dance, Jesus dissolves the categories of flesh and spirit, earth and heaven, even man and God.
Returning at the end of his monologue to the primary categories with which John opens his book, Jesus makes a final attempt to draw the edges clearly. He turns to the consequences of not accepting his new vocabulary, such as “birth,” and its concomitant binary categories of thought and life, such as “flesh” versus “spirit.” What opposition could be clearer than light and darkness? An ancient dualism, Jesus turns it to his own ends, redefining it in terms of a person “come into the world” who courts the world and is either loved or rejected. In a wonderful move Jesus turns an abstract, traditional metaphysical duality into a drama of desire. Earlier Jesus has said he is not concerned to “condemn the world” (3:17) for not believing on the “name.” Now we understand why.
For the world, if it rejects the lover named light, suffers a condemnation that arises from within:
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that does truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God (3:19–21).
A deft move, Jesus avoids condemning, as does John throughout his book, by simply pointing to the condemnation that dwells in all who do not choose to inhabit his new edifice of language. And self-condemnation, we know, is the worst damnation.
This strategy enables Jesus to avoid the trap of dualism, inherited from the tradition of light/darkness, while constructing new categories with which to understand the world. Yet this advantage cuts both ways. Turning back on him, his strategy erases any sharp line between the categories. For light is reality, a bodily reality, the light in the beginning and in the end, while darkness is defined wholly in terms of this reality. Darkness ultimately has no substance in itself. The one who does evil does not finally, therefore, love darkness. Rather, he “hates the light.” Thus darkness is fundamentally the absence of light.
Jesus speaks of desire that forms character, those who “come to the light” like lovers. With John we appreciate the irony of Nicodemus the lover of light coming to Jesus by night. Later John uses the word symbolically, noting pointedly that Judas, after betraying Jesus, goes out into the “night” (13:30). But John clearly savors the night scene here for its dramatic effect. Using it counter to convention, darkness reinforces the note of affirmation at the end of Jesus’ monologue, where in a lesser writer we would expect condemnation. In the silence that John gives Nicodemus, we become aware that he knows but does not believe on the one “name.” For Nicodemus resists a single all-defining vocabulary with its rigid categories by which we are intended to understand our experience.
As a lover of knowledge rather than belief, Nicodemus is content to visit Jesus’ house of language and learn, but not to move in because it is ultimately too confining. The one Word by which “all things were made” and “without him was not any thing made that was made” (1:3) is profoundly and disturbingly exclusionary. No spiders or Visigoths need apply.
Nicodemus’ questions lodge in our mind for the remainder of the book. Their bringing language into account, riding the edge of figurative and literal, categorical and ironical, ultimately results in their going unanswered. That is, we find ourselves viewing all that John presents subsequent to this scene through Nicodemus’ eyes. His blurring the edges with irony that Jesus picks up and adopts, his silence as the categories dissolve, not light versus darkness but light and absence-of-light, finally prevails in this pivotal scene that forms the climax to the first part of John’s book.
Nicodemus, in short, consistent with his desire to know and his disinterested character, obliquely revises Jesus’ language and with it John’s book. Fittingly, in a scene that forms the climax to the last part of his book (19:38–42), before the resurrection and reunion, John brings Nicodemus and Jesus together again. And true to character, the ambiguous Nicodemus’ very presence questions the language of John’s book. If as the disciples say, they “believe,” why aren’t they present? So he continues to haunt us as we last see Nicodemus, now by daylight, bent in silence wrapping the dead body of Jesus.
The Nicodemus Letters to John
a Fictive Interlude
First
You ask me to confirm your account. You ask me as if records could be true. I answer let both the lettered and unlettered have his
