Recently my daughter began a new job and in our telephone conversations back and forth, asking her about how she liked it, she remarked to both her mother and me, “In this job, I really have to think.” None of us saw that as a bad thing at all, especially since she is imbedded in the Federal Bureaucracy of the Fish and Wildlife Agency. Many educators have observed that by far the largest industry in America is now the thinking industry and that the universal requirement of most all jobs require employees to think.
Some of you may remember Fritz Lang’s classic science fiction film of the silent picture era entitled Metropolis. It remains a landmark masterpiece about a futuristic society where most people work in monotonous drudgery, pulling levers, and being slaves to an assembly line. The reality is that for America, that future has long since passed. I suspect the rest of the world is not as far behind as we might think. The youth of the world isn’t waiting for ipods, ebooks, and kindels. They have them now. They already know that the world of the twenty-first century requires brainpower, not muscle power.
The Gospel, too, has always been about “new news” as well as “good news.” Jesus made people think and stretched and expanded their thinking. Nicodemus was a distinguished rabbi and therefore would have been a highly regarded scholar. He came to Jesus under the cover of night, indicating he really didn’t want to be publicly seen with Jesus, but he definitely did want to meet Jesus in person. There is some indication that Nicodemus, so sure of his reputation, tried to be somewhat condescending to Jesus, but Jesus would have none of it. It is Nicodemus who half jests with Jesus, “ Can one enter the womb again?” Yet from the context of the passage, Jesus is making Nicodemus think. Nicodemus must stretch his mind to comprehend Jesus’ metaphors. Nicodemus must process what Jesus meant, not simply what words he thought Jesus had said. Incidentally, it is likely that Jesus never said you must be born again, but that the correct translation is “one must be born from above.” After all, Jesus was seeking to lift Nicodemus’ horizons, not confine them. Jesus wants all humanity to move forward, not simply go round and round in circles. I think Jesus would have enjoyed the observation credited to Albert Einstein that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Nicodemus needed to be lifted out of his comfort zone and moved from the groove in which he was trapped. He needed to understand that he couldn’t hide behind custom, regulations, and rules, but had to ask the hard questions such as, what is the purpose of the rules, what are the customs attempting to accomplish, what do the regulations ignore or leave out, and how is God’s purpose to be an instrument of blessing furthered or hindered by how you interpret things. Who is your neighbor, what is the Sabbath made for, what is the larger meaning of the law and prophets, are all questions a scholar like Nicodemus must be willing to struggle with. Jesus put forth a challenge to Nicodemus and Nicodemus was scared.
Yet, it seems as if Nicodemus seriously did ponder what Jesus’ words meant. Later, Nicodemus enters the gospel again, when along with Joseph of Arimathea anoints Jesus’ body after Jesus died on the cross and helps give him a proper burial. That was a brave thing to do, and no disinterested rabbi would have done it. Nicodemus came out from undercover. He was not thinking like before. Moreover, that John, the Gospel writer, mentioned Nicodemus by name rather than saying simply a certain rabbi, indicates that people in the Christian community knew of Nicodemus, that he was identified, not as an anonymous bystander, not as one whose mind was closed and shut down, but as one who was now following Jesus. Nicodemus was no longer hiding from the implications of what Jesus had meant by finding jest in Jesus’ words; Nicodemus was thinking and living as a disciple, going into new territory where people of faith had not gone before.
I suggest that Nicodemus is a good example for us. I don’t know of a parish named for Nicodemus, but there should be. We need to think in new ways of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus, what it means to be a strong witness to the Gospel in our world. Yes, Nicodemus’ thinking was profoundly shaken up. His former, fellow rabbis might have even accused him of being radically changed into a revolutionary thinker. He became totally different. I know, it sounds terribly Ithacan, but in some sense, we, too, are called in our time and place to become revolutionary thinkers and brave new trailblazers for Jesus.
