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Not having received a welcome in the temple which was His Father’s house, Jesus did not force the issue. That earthly temple would fade away and He, the true Temple wherein God dwells, would rise again in glory. For the moment, He limited Himself to proving that He was the Messias by teaching and miracles. During these few days, He worked many more miracles than are recorded; and the Gospel states that many, seeing the miracles He wrought, believed in Him. One of the members of the Sanhedrin admitted not only that the miracles were authentic but also that God had to be with Him Who worked these signs.
A Pharisee, and one of the rulers of the Jews,
Came to see Jesus by night.
JOHN 3:1
By all worldly standards Nicodemus was a wise man; he was well versed in the Scriptures, a religious man, inasmuch as he belonged to one of the sects, the Pharisees, that insisted on the minutiae of external rites. But Nicodemus was not, at least in the beginning, a fearless man, for he chose to talk with Our Blessed Lord at a time when the mantle of darkness hid him from the eyes of men.
Nicodemus is the “night character” of the Gospel, for whenever we meet him, it is in darkness. This first visit is definitely described as being at night. Later on at night, as a member of the Sanhedrin, it was he who spoke in defense of Our Lord, saying that no man should be judged before having a hearing. On Good Friday in the darkness after the Crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea came:
And with him was Nicodemus
The same who made his first visit to Jesus by night;
He brought with him a mixture of myrrh and aloes
Of about a hundred pounds’ weight.
JOHN 19:39
Despite the fact that there were social impediments to discourage his showing any interest in Our Divine Lord, he nevertheless did come to see Him when He was in Jerusalem for the Passover. He came to do reverence to Christ, and he learned quickly that this kind of reverence was not enough. Nicodemus said to Him:
Master, we know that Thou hast come from God
To teach us; no one, unless God were with him,
Could do the miracles which Thou doest.
JOHN 3:2
But though Nicodemus had seen the miracles he was not yet ready to confess the Divinity of Him Who worked them. He was still holding back a little, for he veiled his personality under the official “we.” This is a trick intellectuals sometimes use to escape personal responsibility; it is meant to imply that if a change is needed it must be for society at large, rather than for their own hearts. Later on, during this night conversation, Our Lord chided Nicodemus as a “teacher” for still being ignorant of many prophecies. In this, Our Lord was showing Himself to be a Teacher too. But before the dawn had broken on their long discussion, Our Lord proclaimed that though He was a Teacher, He was not merely that; He was first and foremost a Redeemer. He affirmed that not human truth in the mind, but a rebirth of the soul, purchased through His death, was essential for being one with Him. Nicodemus began by calling Him a teacher; by the end of their meeting Our Lord had proclaimed Himself a Savior.
The Cross reflected itself back over every incident in His life; it never shone so brilliantly on one who knew the Old Testament as it did this night. This Pharisee had thought Him to be only a Master or a Rabbi, but he discovered in the end that there was healing in what had always been thought up to then to be a curse; namely, a Crucifixion. Our Blessed Lord, in answer, bade him to leave the order of worldliness.
Believe me when I tell thee this;
A man cannot see the Kingdom of God
Without being born anew.
JOHN 3:3
The idea that stood out in the beginning of the discussion between Nicodemus and Our Lord was that spiritual life was different from physical or intellectual life. The difference between spiritual life and physical life, Jesus was telling him, was greater than that between a crystal and a living cell. Spiritual life is not a push from below; it is a gift from above. A man does not really become less selfish and more liberal-minded until he becomes a follower of Christ. There must be a new birth generated from above. Every person in the world has a first birth from the flesh. But Jesus said that a second birth from above is necessary for the spiritual life. So necessary is it, that a man “cannot” enter the Kingdom of God without it; He did not say “will not,” for the impossibility is real. As one cannot lead a physical life unless born to it, so neither can one lead a Divine life unless born of God. The first birth makes us children of our parents; the second makes us children of God. The emphasis is not on self-development, but on regeneration; not on improving our present state, but on completely changing our status.
Overcome by the loftiness of the idea suggested to him, Nicodemus asked for greater clarity. He could understand a man’s being what he is, but he could not understand a man’s becoming what he is not. Nicodemus understood about redecorating the old man, but not about creating an entirely new man. Hence the question:
Why, how is it possible that a man
Should be born when he is already old?
Can he enter a second time, into his mother’s womb,
And so come to birth?
JOHN 3:4
Nicodemus did not deny the doctrine of the new birth. He was a literalist; he doubted the exactness of the term “born.”
Our Blessed Lord answered the difficulty:
Believe me, no man can enter into the Kingdom of God
Unless birth comes to him from water
And from the Holy Spirit.
What is born by natural birth
Is a thing of nature,
What is born by spiritual birth
Is a thing of Spirit.
Do not be surprised, then, at My telling thee
You must be born anew.
JOHN 3:5–7
The illustration of Nicodemus was inadequate. It only applied to the realm of flesh. Nicodemus could not enter into his mother’s womb a second time to be born. But what is impossible for the flesh is possible for the spirit. Nicodemus had expected instruction and teaching, but instead, he was being offered regeneration and rebirth. The Kingdom of God was presented as a new creation. When a man issues from the womb of his mother he is only a creature of God, as a table is the creation, in a lesser degree, of the carpenter. No man in the natural order can call God “Father” to do this man would have to become something he is not. He must by a Divine gift share in the nature of God, as he presently shares in the nature of his parents. Man makes that which is unlike him; but he begets that which is like him. An artist paints a picture, but it is unlike the artist in nature; a mother begets a child and the child is like her in nature. Our Lord here suggests that over and above the order of making or creation, is the order of begetting, regeneration, and rebirth by which God becomes our Father.
Evidently, Nicodemus was startled out of his purely intellectual approach to religion, for Our Blessed Lord said to him, “Do not be surprised.” Nicodemus wondered how this effect of regeneration could be produced. Our Lord explained that the reason why Nicodemus did not understand this second birth was that he was ignorant of the work of the Holy Spirit. A few moments later, He suggested that just as His death would reconcile mankind to the Father, so would mankind be regenerated by the agency of His Holy Spirit. The new birth Our Lord hinted at would escape the senses and is known only by its effects on the soul.
Our Blessed Lord used an illustration of this mystery, “You cannot understand the blowing of the wind, but you obey its laws and thus harness its force; so also with the Spirit. Obey the law of the wind, and it will fill your sails and carry you onward. Obey the law of the Spirit and you will know the new birth. Do not postpone relationship with this law simply because you cannot fathom its mystery intellectually.”
The wind breathes where it will
And thou canst hear the sound of it,
But knowest nothing of the way it came
Or the way it goes;
So it is, when a man is born
By the breath of the Spirit.
JOHN 3:8
The Spirit of God is free and always acts freely. His movements cannot be anticipated by any human calculations. One cannot tell when grace is coming or how it will work on the soul; whether it will come as a result of a disgust with sin, or of a yearning for a higher goodness. The voice of the Spirit is within the soul; the peace which It brings, the light which It sheds, and the strength which It gives, are unmistakably there. The regeneration of man is not directly discernible to the human eye.
Though Nicodemus was a sophisticated scholar, he was, nevertheless, perplexed by the sublimity of the doctrine that he was hearing from the One Whom he called Master. His interest as a Pharisee had been not in personal holiness, but in the glory of an earthly kingdom. He now asked the question:
How can such things come to be?
JOHN 3:9
Nicodemus saw that the Divine life in man is not just a question of being; it also involves the problem of becoming, through a power that is not in man but only in God Himself.
Our Lord explained that His teaching was something that no mere human could ever have thought out. There was, therefore, some excuse for the ignorance of the Pharisee. After all, no man had ever gone up to heaven to learn the heavenly secrets and had then returned to earth to make them known. The only one who could know them was He Who had descended from heaven, He Who as God had become man, and was now speaking to Nicodemus. Our Lord for the first time referred to Himself as the Son of Man. At the same time, He was implying that He was something more than that; He was also the only-begotten Divine Son of the Heavenly Father. He was, in fact, affirming His Divine and human natures.
No man has ever gone up into heaven;
But there is One Who has come down from heaven,
The Son of Man, Who dwells in heaven.
JOHN 3:13
This was not the only time that Our Lord spoke of His reascension into heaven or of the fact that He had come down from heaven. To one of His Apostles He said:
Believe Me when I tell you this;
You will see heaven opening,
And the angels of God going up and coming down
Upon the Son of Man.
JOHN 1:51
It is the will of Him Who sent Me,
Not My own will, that I have come
Down from heaven to do.
JOHN 6:38
He Who comes from above
Is above all men’s reach;
The man who belongs to earth
Talks the language of earth,
But one who comes from heaven
Must be beyond the reach of all.
JOHN 3:31
Is not this Jesus, they said,
The son of Joseph, Whose father and mother
Are well known to us? What does He mean by saying:
I have come down from heaven?
JOHN 6:42
What will you make of it,
If you see the Son of Man
Ascending to the place where He was before?
JOHN 6:63
Our Lord never spoke of His Heavenly, or Risen Glory without bringing in the ignominy of the Cross. Sometimes He spoke of the glory first as He was doing now with Nicodemus, but the Crucifixion had to be its condition. Our Lord lived both a heavenly life and an earthly life; a heavenly life as the Son of God, an earthly life as the Son of Man. While continuing to be one with His Father in Heaven, He gave Himself up for men on earth. To Nicodemus, He affirmed that the condition on which man’s salvation depended would be His own Passion and death. He made this clear by referring to the most famous foreshadowing of the Cross in the Old Testament.
And this Son of Man must be lifted up,
As the serpent was lifted up by Moses
In the wilderness; so that those who
Believe in Him may not perish,
But have eternal life.
JOHN 3:14–14
The Book of Numbers relates that when the people murmured rebelliously against God, they were punished with a plague of fiery serpents, so that many lost their lives. When they repented, Moses was told by God to make a brazen serpent and set it up for a sign, and all those bitten by the serpents who looked upon that sign would be healed. Our Blessed Lord was now declaring that He was to be lifted up, as the serpent had been lifted up. As the brass serpent had the appearance of a serpent and yet lacked its venom, so too, when He would be lifted up upon the bars of the Cross, He would have the appearance of a sinner and yet be without sin. As all who looked upon the brass serpent had been healed of the bite of the serpent, so all who looked upon Him with love and faith would be healed of the bite of the serpent of evil.
It was not enough that the Son of God should come down from the heavens and appear as the Son of Man, for then He would have been only a great teacher and a great example, but not a Redeemer. It was more important for Him to fulfill the purpose of the coming, to redeem man from sin while in the likeness of human flesh. Teachers change men by their lives; Our Blessed Lord would change men by His death. The poison of hate, sensuality, and envy which is in the hearts of men could not be healed simply by wise exhortations and social reforms. The wages of sin is death, and therefore it was to be by death that sin would be atoned for. As in the ancient sacrifices the fire symbolically burned up the imputed sin along with the victim, so on the Cross the world’s sin would be put away in Christ’s sufferings, for He would be upright as a priest and prostrate as a victim.
The two greatest banners that were ever unfurled were the uplifted serpent and the uplifted Savior. And yet there was an infinite difference between them. The theater of one was the desert, and the audience was a few thousand Israelites; the theater of the other was the universe and the audience, the whole of mankind. From the one came a bodily healing, soon to be undone again by death; from the other flowed soul-healing, unto life everlasting. And yet one was the prefigurement of the other.
But though He came to die, He insisted that it would be voluntary, and not because He would be too weak to defend Himself from His enemies. The only cause for His death would be love; as He told Nicodemus:
God so loved the world,
That He gave up His only-begotten Son
So that those who believe in Him
May not perish, but have eternal life.
JOHN 3:16
On this night, when an old man came to see the Divine Master Who had startled the world with His miracles, Our Lord told the story of His life. It was a life that began not in Bethlehem, but existed from all eternity in the Godhead. He Who is the Son of God became the Son of Man because the Father sent Him on a mission of redeeming man through love.
If there is anything that every good teacher wants, it is a long life in which to make his teaching known, and to gain wisdom and experience. Death is always a tragedy to a great teacher. When Socrates was given the hemlock juice, his message was cut off once and for all. Death was a stumbling block to Buddha and his teaching of the eightfold way. The last breath of Lao-tze rang down the curtain on his doctrine concerning the Tao or “doing nothing,” as against aggressive self-determination. Socrates had taught that sin was due to ignorance and that, therefore, knowledge would make a good and perfect world. The Eastern teachers were concerned about man being caught up in some great wheel of fate. Hence the recommendation of Buddha that men be taught to crush their desires and thus find peace. When Buddha died at eighty, he pointed not to himself but to the law he had given. Confucius’ death stopped his moralizings about how to perfect a State by means of kindly reciprocal relations between prince and subject, father and son, brothers, husband and wife, friend and friend.
Our Blessed Lord in His talk with Nicodemus proclaimed Himself the Light of the World. But the most astounding part of His teaching was that He said no one would understand His teaching while He was alive and that His death and Resurrection would be essential to understanding it. No other teacher in the world ever said that it would take a violent death to clarify his teachings. Here was a Teacher Who made His teaching so secondary that He could say that the only way that He would ever draw men to Himself would be not by His doctrine, not by what He said, but by His Crucifixion.
When you have lifted up the Son of Man,
You will recognize that it is Myself you look for.
JOHN 8:28
He did not say that it would even be His teaching that they would understand; it would rather be His Personality that they would grasp. Only then would they know, after they had put Him to death, that He spoke the Truth. His death, then, instead of being the last of a series of failures, would be a glorious success, the climax of His mission on earth.
Hence, the great difference in the statues and pictures of Buddha and Christ. Buddha is always seated, eyes closed, hands folded across a fat body. Christ is never seated; He is always lifted up and enthroned. His Person and His death are the heart and soul of His lesson. The Cross, and all it implies, is once again central in His life.
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