Pragmatic Approach

Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; this man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him." (John 3:1-2)

This is a story that I have been seeking to unpack and understand much more thoroughly for a number of years now. When I first started to conduct my personal time with God along the lines and principles of inductive Bible study, the very first place I began was at the beginning of the book of John. The reason I did this was because I wanted to unfreeze this passage about Nicodemus containing the most famous text in the Bible. And the reason that it was so frozen in my heart was for a number of reasons. John 3:16 has been quoted so many times by people who both appreciate it deeply and those who are completely clueless as to any significance contained in it that my own heart was calloused to being able to absorb it myself at all. The only way I could relate to it was on an intellectual level and I was certain that this was not enough to get me into a right relationship with God.

Because my heart really did yearn to come into a real appreciation of this important text and its surrounding messages about God, I decided to use this new, exciting tool of inductive Bible study to see how it might melt away the prejudices, the preconceptions and the hardness of heart that I had experienced for most of my life and bring to life this verse for me personally. Unfortunately I have lost all of the journals in which I recorded those first encounters with God through this passage. And even though I still continue to search through all my belongings years later in hopes of discovering those early writings, I have come back again to cover the same ground using the same digging tools to find even more than last time as well as to refresh what has slipped from my mind since that first massive dig.

Since this blog is simply a recording of my own personal journey with encountering God through His Word and not a teaching tool to indoctrinate others, I feel more free to simply report whatever is coming to me in the present without forcing it to flow as smoothly as a teaching experience might require. But the reason that I post it on the web is so that God may use it to guide someone else He is working with to discover what I have been sharing and may be able to use something He has blessed me with to add to someone else's experience in a positive way. And even though I almost never hear about those events I still feel privileged to be able to make my encounters with God available for others to peruse and for Him to use more openly.

As I ponder and meditate on this again this morning I try to get a sense of what was really going on in the head and heart of Nicodemus, why he decided to come to Jesus at night and what some of his plans were before Jesus so abruptly changed the intended direction of the conversation. I am sure Nicodemus had mixed motives as we all do and I don't think it is wrong to speculate as to what they might have been since these stories are given for us to relate to at a heart level in our own lives. While we don't have to insist that our ideas are right and other's are wrong, we can allow the Spirit to prompt us as to the bigger picture that was going on through clues that we can see in the passage and the context. This is how I have encountered some of the most compelling insights for me personally and the Spirit has frequently used them to apply in convicting my own heart about things and attitudes that I need to adjust to come more into alignment with God's ways of thinking, feeling and perceiving.

What I see in this context that clearly flows seamlessly well back into chapter two is quite a number of things. I see clear reference to Nicodemus as “a man” in the context of the last verse of chapter two where it says that Jesus knew what was in “man”.

I see the reference to Nicodemus as “a ruler” as a strong clue that Nicodemus probably had some typical thinking that all insiders in power structures tend to develop. People in any organization that come into positions of power and control over others tend to develop an “us verses them” mentality that excludes any newcomers until they have been checked out and invited to join “the club” so to speak. As this is often the case in many situations I can see the strong possibility that Nicodemus was checking out Jesus more closely with a potential offer in his back pocket to take a closer step to becoming one of the insiders eventually. He was exploring ways of coordinating with Jesus and His obvious power and influence with people and how to bring about some conciliatory moves to meld Him into the current group of the elite where He might have more public input.

Nicodemus was taking the first small step to see how Jesus could become more recognized as a legitimate authority among the Jews. As a representative of the insider's club of the elite and powerful, Nicodemus was likely feeling that he was being very generous and gracious in his compliments when approaching Jesus in this conversation. He viewed himself as the one coming from a position of greater authority and had the desired advantages that he assumed Jesus would appreciate and desire Himself. Since every up and coming Rabbi would be hopeful to be accepted into the upper echelon of society so that their teachings could be more publicly recognized and appreciated, Nicodemus assumed that he was doing Jesus a great favor by cracking the door open a bit to the highly exclusive insider's club of the rulers, thinkers and shakers in Jewish society.

Look at the initial things that Nicodemus said to Jesus from this perspective. The very first thing out of his mouth is to address Jesus as a Rabbi. Remember that this was not after Jesus had spent years teaching the people but was right at the very beginning of His public exposure. So He was not yet widely viewed with credibility as a real teacher. He was in many minds seen more along the lines of a wanna-be teacher who was just trying out his wings. For a long-respected and older insider to approach such a newcomer was in itself a very high compliment. And Nicodemus felt that he was being very generous in showering Jesus with compliments and recognition for His promising attempts to establish Himself as a publicly recognized authority of the law.

The next thing he talked about was a compliment that Nicodemus believed Jesus was very possibly legitimate as far as religion was concerned. Nicodemus was not completely lost in hypocrisy as many of his associates proved to be later on. Nicodemus had a heart that was longing for something deeper than the crusty religion that was promoted by the leaders of the day. But he had learned to get along to stay along and was doing the best he knew how to give Jesus an opportunity to come into a position on the inside of the elite to help Nicodemus make a real difference. He sensed something genuine and real about the way Jesus talked about and represented God that was missing in all the other Rabbi's and leaders so he wanted to be the first to join forces with Jesus in some way to assist His rise to a position of influence and begin to make a difference in the sad state that religion had come to be in their society.

Nicodemus acknowledged that Jesus had something going for Him with the signs that He was producing. This is interesting in the light of the demands of the Jews back a few verses in 2:18. It is not clear to me at all from this passage just what is directly referred to when it keeps talking about signs that Jesus was doing. What is clear is that John intends his readers to focus in on this issue of signs all throughout this book and this is one of the things I want to understand much better. In 2:23 just a few verses before this it says that many believed in His name, observing His signs which He was doing. But it is not clear at all as to what these signs actually were. Very possibly they were miracles of healing that He had started performing. But that doesn't seem to be clear yet in my examination of this book.

But in the context it is clear that everything seems to revolve around this issue of signs. The immediately previous story was about Jesus cleansing the temple and the leaders then demanding that He produce a sign to justify His authority to upset their long-established traditions and practices revolving around the proper use of the house of God. It reminds me of what can very easily happen today if someone were to come into a church and suddenly start to disrupt the order of service or challenge the way worship is conducted. Immediately the ones in authority would demand to know how this new upstart thinks they have authority to challenge the long-established traditions of the church. There is a great deal of resentment stirred up in many minds and resistance against change explodes from every direction.

This encounter with Nicodemus takes on much more significance when viewed in the light of the very recent confrontational encounter Jesus had with the authorities of the established church. Jesus had certainly not endeared Himself to the insider's club by coming into the temple and physically throwing out everything they had spent years putting into place. He not only had thrown them out of their own base of operations but even worse had exposed them openly before the people to be the frauds that they really were but had been able to carefully excuse and conceal for quite some time. It was the public humiliation before the people that rankled them the most and they immediately became very defensive and aggressive in their own challenges as to why Jesus thought He could get away with such behavior in the church.

Jesus' response to their challenges about His authority was so cryptic to them that it did little to satisfy their demands for justification on His part. In fact, it only served to inflame their anger and resentment towards Him. He refused to perform some miracle on demand to satisfy their formula for justifying the existence of His asserted authority above their style of authority. He simply referred to some mystical reference to raising up a temple in three days after it was destroyed which made no sense to them. However, it did touch on one of the most sensitive nerves in their religion. They put so much value and reverence on the temple building itself that it had come to eclipse nearly all reverence and affection for God that had come to be missing in their religion. So for Jesus to challenge and expose that misplaced reverence in front of all the people undermined their credibility and threatened the power structure that was carefully balanced in the Jewish church.

Most likely, this confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish elite in authority was a huge topic of hot debate everywhere in the country. The leaders began to feel very threatened and insecure and were beginning to view Jesus as a threat to be dealt with while the common people were seeing an emerging hero that held potential to come and champion their oppressed condition under the harsh demands and control of legalism imposed on them by these religious ruling elite. Very clearly Jesus was challenging the whole system of assumptions in place in Jewish society and was forcing everyone to view reality through a different lens. It was not clear yet where He was headed with His plans, but it was very clear that He had an agenda very different than anything along the lines of the status quo.

So in this highly charged emotional upheaval so recently ignited, the very idea of Nicodemus coming to Jesus at all was an offer of an olive leaf so to speak. Nicodemus may have been a pragmatist trying to calm the waters a bit and see if he could somehow bring about some reconciliation and try to achieve a compromise so that Jesus could become more acceptable and palatable in His rise to influence. He may have felt that Jesus had just miscalculated a bit in His bold move in the temple and needed the influence and guidance of a more mature mind that could help Him not be so rash in His attempts to become established as a recognized leader among the Jews.

Nicodemus admired the zeal that he observed in the heart of Jesus for the reputation of God and he may have longed to make a difference himself in addressing the problems that traditional religion was causing in society. He likely did not share all the popular dark views of God to the extent that most of the leadership did and he wanted to see how he and Jesus could work together in more effective ways and to explore ideas of how they could compliment each others goals. After all, a young, daring and aspiring leader needs the council and friendship of more experienced and mature elders to help balance and stabilize them in their growth into maturity and their rise into positions of power. This is a well know fact of life and it was not necessarily wrong for Nicodemus to want to help Jesus in this way.

These are some of the things that I see as I contemplate what I perceive in these verses. Obviously things took a dramatic turn in a totally different direction as soon as Jesus responded to Nicodemus. But I think it is very helpful to spend some time unpacking the context before jumping into the words of Jesus in this passage so that we can see more clearly the emotional dynamics and social background in which these words were spoken.

Father, I am beginning to see more clearly things that relate very strongly to what I am experiencing right now. But I struggle to have the balance that I see in the life of Jesus while here on earth. Jesus was full of zeal for your reputation and confronted the false ideas about you deeply entrenched right in your house on earth. I see the very same problems today in the houses of worship supposedly dedicated to worshiping you. More often than not our services revolve around a worship of our own routines and forms of religion more than being opportunities to encounter your real presence.

This has disturbed me deeply and now I realize that it is not a bad disturbance. But I also know how vulnerable I am to being out of balance in my zeal. I have been trying to make a difference in your house and help people to see past the man-made religious exercises to see that worship is supposed to be all about you. Is that what Nicodemus was feeling? But you know how much resentment and opposition it is stirring up even right now. They are trying to make me afraid, trying to counteract and eliminate my influence, trying to stop anything I have offered to make a difference in people's focus.

As I ponder what happened in your life in this circumstance I am both baffled and a bit intimidated. I just can't see myself acting like you did in cleansing the temple, though if you wanted me to, that could possibly happen. But I sense that my fears of what people think about me would cause me to misrepresent you because my spirit and motives might not be always in harmony with the spirit you had during that event. But at the same time I do not want my fear of what people think to rob me of experiencing the zeal for your reputation that you have been cultivating in my heart for some time now.

Father, I make this your problem. You started this work in me and you have to finish it. Please bring me into perfect alignment with your passion for souls. Fill my heart and mind with the true view of reality that compelled Jesus to stand up for you against all common sense from human perspective. Teach me your ways, fill me with your passion, your graciousness, your kindness and compassion and cleanse me of all fear except for my fear of spoiling your reputation. Demonstrate your true character in my life to attract others to want to know you more intimately for themselves. Because this is all about your reputation, not mine. Thank-you God for hearing and responding to this prayer and for being faithful.