The conception of Nicodemus
Readings from the Gospel of John
John 3:1-15, At Passover
Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 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.” Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born over (or: from above).” “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born over (or: from above).’ The wind (or: spirit) blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked. “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” (…)
John 3:30-34, Some days later, John the Baptist says:
“He must become greater; I must become less. The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. Whoever has accepted it has certified that God is truthful. For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without limit.”
John 7:32,45-52, At Sukkoth, more than a year later
The Pharisees heard the crowd whispering such things about him. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees sent temple guards to arrest him. (…) Finally the temple guards went back to the chief priests and the Pharisees, who asked them, “Why didn’t you bring him in?” “No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the guards replied. “You mean he has deceived you also?” the Pharisees retorted. “Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him? No! But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them.”
Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus earlier and who was one of their own number, asked, “Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?” They replied, “Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.”
John 19:38-42, At Passover, another half year later
Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jewish leaders. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body away. He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.
Have you ever thought about what it means to be ‘conceived of Holy Spirit?’ For some it may simply affirm that Jesus was born of a virgin. But would that mean that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary and fathered Jesus? What does that make God? What does that make Jesus: a demi-God, half human and half divine? I don’t think the apostles thought along those lines. They spoke Aramaic, read the Hebrew scriptures and left us writings in Greek. In the Latin of the creed, spiritus is masculine and the association with male role is easily made. But in Greek, pneuma is a neuter word, and in Hebrew ruach is feminine. The apostles would more naturally talk about someone as being ‘born of’ the spirit, as we see in the story of Nicodemus. Someone who is born of the spirit is ‘not born of a husband’s will but of God’ (John 1:13), making God both father and mother of his children.
The apostles were not very much concerned with the biology of Jesus’s birth. Luke, in chapter 3, speaks of Adam as ‘the son of God’ and he traces Jesus’s descent from David through Joseph. Paul opens his letter to the Romans with a proclamation of Jesus, ‘who according to the flesh was formed from the seed of David, and who according to the Spirit of holiness was powerfully declared to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead.’ So let’s postpone thinking about Mary’s insemination, and first think more about the multiple ways in which the disciples experience being conceived and born of Holy Spirit.
Nicodemus is drawn by the spirit
There is a fascinating subplot in the Gospel of John, connecting with the story of Jesus at the beginning, the middle and the end. It is the story of Nicodemus, a wealthy elite lawyer and councilman, known from both the Talmud and the New Testament. He is not only highly successful, but also a genuinely religious man, with an open mind about Jesus. Given the sensitivities, he comes to Jesus in private and at night. He opens politely and self-confidently at the same time, suggestive that there may be more members of the Council with a positive interest in Jesus: “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God.” Many people today could say the same thing. But in the Gospel of John Jesus gives him a blunt answer, which we can paraphrase as: ‘How would you know? Have you ever seen the Kingdom of God that you would know? Only those who are born again can know.’ Nicodemus is a bit annoyed and decided to take Jesus’s answer literally and mocks him: ‘Do you want big men like us to crawl back into our mother’s wombs and be born again?’
There is a double entendre here that Nicodemus ignores. ‘Born over’ can also be understood as ‘born from above.’ Jesus is the one who came from above, from God’s reality. Jesus is not talking about a physical birth but about being born of the spirit, about our spiritual being. Flesh produces more flesh, but spirit generates more spirit. Nicodemus visit to Jesus was polite and interested but still political and guarded. He was concerned about outward appearances, for many of his peers considered Jesus as a false prophet who poisoned the people and should probably be arrested and executed. Jesus is concerned about Nicodemus inward being, and for that Nicodemus needs to change and turn inside out: He needs to look inward and upward instead of outward and down. He needs to be born again from above. The words that Jesus uses remind us of his baptism, in which John the Baptist washed him from his old self and the spirit descended upon him. When God declared: “you are my son.” That is the message that Jesus shares with his followers: You too can be born from above. You too can see the kingdom and go in and out with the Father.
For Nicodemus it is difficult to let go of his status as a member of the supreme council. He is offended by Jesus. It is not realistic: ‘How can this be?’ There is no way that he will be born of the spirit today. Then Jesus sows in him an image that is even more offensive: ‘Your peers may consider me a diabolic snake they want to eliminate, but remember what Moses did when so many cursed Israelites were dying of snake bites: he put a bronze serpent high on a pole and told everyone to look up, so they would be saved.’
...but afraid to come out
At Sukkoth, the big autumn festival, Jesus is again denounced as a false prophet who poisons a cursed people. Nicodemus protests a little but shuts up when they ask him whether he has sympathy for Jesus. Nicodemus still obeys his public persona.
Half a year later, at the feast of Passover, the conflict between Jesus’s followers marching on Jerusalem and the authorities, the end becomes inevitable. An emotional Jesus encourages his friends to find meaning in the death he is about to suffer, high on the cross. He compares himself to a grain of wheat carried at the top of the stem, ready to be sown: “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). During their last meal together, as they struggle and protest, he compares them to a woman in labor, as if they are the mother in which he is sown, the inseminated womb from which he is to be born again:
John 16:20-22. Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.
When Jesus is arrested and brought before the supreme council, Nicodemus remains silent and, by implication, joins the others in condemning Jesus to die. Jesus is brought before the Roman governor and sent off to be crucified, at the side of the road into Jerusalem, high on the edge of a former stone quarry. Jesus’s confused disciples have fled the scene, but Nicodemus is standing there, looking up to the snake that bit him.
...until he looks up to Jesus on the cross
Dying on the cross takes hours, as it takes hours for the poisonous image to work its way into Nicodemus’ heart. Nicodemus is dying either way. If he remains silent, he is dying on the inside. But if he speaks up, he will die on the outside. But Nicodemus is not alone. With him stands Joseph, another rich councillor tormented by his conscience. He owns one of the newly hewn graves in the old quarry, now polluted with the blood of an innocent man. When evening falls the soldiers pierce Jesus’s side with a spear to see whether he is already dead. And the teachers of scripture must have remembered the words of the prophet Zechariah (12:10):
I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of mercy and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.
Joseph and Nicodemus do what decent people are supposed to do, but what they themselves were afraid to do in the open. Looking up to the cross, they feel a healing spirit that simultaneously bestows and begs for mercy taking over from above and from inside. They let it happen, knowing full well how they will be denounced as disciples of Jesus by their peers. They formally ask Pilate for the body of Jesus, as if they are part of his family. They carefully take down the body of Jesus, and wrap it in linen cloths, together with an extraordinary amount of expensive spices. They want to stretch his legs but these remain bent from the crucifixion, almost as if the body wants to curl up like a fetus. Then Josephs opens his new family tomb. The stone that blocks the entrance is rolled away. Nicodemus and Joseph carry the full-grown body of Jesus deep into the womb of mother earth.
The Gospel of John leaves it to us to imagine what happened to Nicodemus as he was moved from bystander to mourner. It was a huge decision. But what did Nicodemus think was happening? Did he consider the possibility that Jesus would be born again from the grave, because he had seen Jesus lifted on a cross, just as he had predicted? Did he feel that he, Nicodemus, was healed from the poison inside as he looked up to the ‘snake’ on the pole? Was he being born ‘from above’ through the spirit within him?
* *
Baptism of Christ, Giotto di Bondone, around 1305 CE, in the Cappella Scrovegni, Padua.
In this ancient fresco by Giotto, Jesus is born out of water and spirit, with angels welcoming Jesus out of the water into the spiritual reality. But see how Jesus is turned to the human side, towards John the Baptist, Peter and Andrew. The water simultaneously represents his going down into this world and his coming out of it. Notice also how, unlike in other representations of this scene, the Holy Spirit is not depicted in bodily form as a dove. Instead, an image representing the word of God (holding the Bible) breaks through from above. Giotto represents the spirit as the words “You are my son, the beloved one,” as words from the Bible. It is the calling of God in psalm 2:7 that begets Jesus as his son: “You are my son.” Psalm 2 stands behind the annunciation in Luke 1:32 and is quoted when Jesus is baptized (Mark 1:11), when he is transformed in his prayer on the mountain (Mark 9:2-7), when he sacrifices himself for his friends (Hebrews 5:1-5) and when he is raised from the dead (Acts 13:30-33). It is the eternal creative and generative power of God from creation to conception, and from baptism to crucifixion and resurrection. In the language of the Hebrew Bible, the spirit and the word of God are both expressions that indicate how the power God breaks through into our reality. In antiquity, a Jewish author wrote: (Judith 16:14)
"Let all your creatures serve you, for you spoke, and they were made.
You sent forth your spirit, and they were built; there is none that can resist your voice."
Suggestions for dialogue
A moderator can explain the dialogue steps and invite people to contribute:
- Check in with yourself. Share with each other how you are in this moment. Then take a moment again to seek stillness, humility and openness.
- First round: Share something from the text or image(s) that stood out to you and that you would like to explore with the group, briefly indicating the thoughts and feelings that it evoked within you. Listen to the others do the same: what resonates with you? Responses in this round should be limited to questions for clarification.
- Second round: Name one or two things that resonated with you from the things that others just shared.
- Third round: Having heard the group, the moderator names the main topics for exploration. The moderator may also propose a common thread that emerged in several topics. The exploration normally starts with asking the person(s) who brought up the topic to expand on it.
- Leave room for silence and contemplation.
- Check out by sharing what you take home from this dialogue.
These suggestions are an adaptation of the Estuary protocol. Look for more at https://www.estuaryhub.com
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