The Question He Came to Ask at Night

He came after dark.

John says it when he arrives, He came to Jesus at night, and says it again at the very end, Nicodemus, who had previously come to Jesus at night, as if he wants it on the man’s name permanently. (Older English Bibles repeat it a third time, in chapter seven, following later manuscripts.) It’s his tag. Other people in the Gospels get their town or their father. Nicodemus gets the hour.

He was not a stranger to religion. John introduces him with his whole standing: a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. Jesus, a few lines later, calls him Israel’s teacher, a teacher of the teachers. He was about as far inside as a person could be. He had the seat, the training, the respect of the room.

And he came at night.

The text never says why, and it’s worth not pretending it does. Maybe he was busy all day. Maybe it was quieter. But John does tell us, a few chapters on, that many of the rulers believed and kept it to themselves, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue. A man with everything to lose had reasons to pick his hour carefully. That’s an inference about Nicodemus. It’s not an unkind one.

He opened politely, the way a careful man does. Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God. We know. He brought a credential and a conclusion with him, the way people do when they’re nervous about a conversation.

Jesus skipped past both. Truly, truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.

And Nicodemus asked the question that makes him worth a chapter.

How can a man be born when he is old?

It’s a practical question. It isn’t hostile. He takes the words at face value and pushes on them: Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time to be born? But underneath the literal part is the honest part. How does anybody start over at this age? He was a ruler. He’d been at this for years. Whatever he was going to be, he already was.

Jesus didn’t hand him a program. He talked about the wind. The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. You can’t schedule it and you can’t build it. You can only hear it.

Nicodemus asked once more, How can this be? And Jesus answered him with a little edge. You are Israel’s teacher, he said, and you do not understand these things?

Then, to this man, in the dark, Jesus said what is probably the best-known sentence in the whole book. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. And the one after it, which gets quoted less: For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.

That verse was said at night, to one worried insider who couldn’t figure out how a grown man starts over.

The chapter doesn’t say how Nicodemus answered, or whether he said anything at all. He just leaves the story.

He shows up again in chapter seven, and he’s still in the room.

The council had sent officers to arrest Jesus, and the officers came back empty-handed. When asked why, they said, Never has anyone spoken like this man! The leaders weren’t pleased. Have any of the rulers or Pharisees believed in Him?

Nicodemus was one of the rulers. John makes a point of reminding us that he himself was one of them. And he spoke up. Not much. He didn’t stand and declare anything. He asked a procedural question.

Does our law convict a man without first hearing from him to determine what he has done?

It was the most he could manage, and it cost him. Aren’t you also from Galilee? they replied. Look into it, and you will see that no prophet comes out of Galilee. In other words, whose side are you on. He’d said one careful sentence and been laughed at for it by the people he worked with.

The text doesn’t record a reply.

The last time he appears, it’s daylight, and it’s over.

Jesus was dead. Joseph of Arimathea, another man who John says was a disciple but secretly for fear of the Jews, went to Pilate and asked for the body. And then this.

Nicodemus, who had previously come to Jesus at night, also brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds.

Seventy-five pounds. A load a man feels in his back. Expensive, too, though the text doesn’t give a price. The two of them took the body down and wound it in linen with the spices, the way people did, and laid it in a new tomb in a garden close by, because the holy day was coming.

Put the two of them side by side and it’s almost a matched pair. Two men with seats and reputations. Both careful. Both, by John’s account, keeping their distance while Jesus was alive. And both of them, at the one moment when there was nothing left to protect him from and nothing left to gain, stepped out together and did the heavy work in public.

He didn’t do it at night. He did it in the afternoon, next to the place of execution, with his arms full, when anyone could see him and when it was least likely to do him any good. The man he’d come to question in the dark was dead. There was nothing left to gain by being seen with him. That was the moment he chose to be seen.

John never calls Nicodemus a disciple. He never records Nicodemus saying he believed. What he records is a man who came at night with a question, said one small thing out loud when it cost him, and then carried seventy-five pounds of spices out into the open for a burial.

A slow, quiet faith that started at night still counts. His ended in daylight.

Where this meets your week

The question you think you’re too old to ask. There’s something about God, or faith, or what happened to you, that you’ve never actually asked anyone because you felt you should know by now. Maybe you taught it once. Maybe you just sat under it for thirty years. He was a teacher of teachers and he asked the most basic question in the book. Write yours down this week, exactly as it sounds in your head, even if it sounds like a child’s.

Being inside and unsure. Not everyone reading this left. Some are still in the room, still in the seat, still saying the right things in daylight and wondering at night. Nicodemus never walked out, and he’s still in this book. If that’s you, you don’t have to announce anything. Just stop assuming the questions mean you’re finished.

The small true sentence in a meeting. He didn’t make a speech in the council. He asked whether it was fair to judge a man before hearing him, and he got mocked for it. Somewhere this week there’ll be a room where people are sure about somebody. A coworker, a relative, a neighbor, a group. Say the one fair sentence. It doesn’t have to win.

The thing done when it’s too late to matter. Some things you only get to do after. A visit to a grave, a letter to someone who can’t read it, looking after what somebody left behind. It can feel pointless. The last thing Nicodemus did for Jesus was done after he’d died, and the record kept it by name, down to the weight. If there’s an after-thing you’ve been putting off, do it.

Ask the question you’ve been embarrassed to ask.

At whatever hour you can manage. It can be at night, alone, with the lights off. It can be to God, if you’re not sure anyone’s there, or to one person you trust. Use your own words. How can a person start over at my age is a fine one. So is I don’t know what I believe anymore, and I’m scared to say it.

You don’t need the answer tonight. The text never says he got one that night. Just ask it out loud.

He first appears in the dark, asking how a man is born when he is old. He last appears in a garden, in daylight, with his arms full, near a tomb nobody had ever been laid in.

Someone else came to that garden early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, and the stone had been taken away.