While Jesus desires to die, and John desires to live, Nicodemus alone desires to know. He goes out of his way to meet with Jesus. In their colloquy by night (3:1–21), however, he stands apart as the questioner. Likewise, as challenger, he stands outside the temple coterie (7:45–52) just as he does Jesus’ circle, not fully leader of the Jews and not a follower of Jesus. Yet his questions to Jesus early on haunt the rest of John’s book and make Nicodemus a central figure. We are not surprised, then, when he shows up after Jesus’ death to honor him with a gift of spices (19:38–42).
Call him Nicodemus the uncertain, disinterested, always engaging and disengaging; oscillating between the center and the circumference, between Jesus and those who write Jesus off, his brothers, friends, ex-followers, enemies, even baffled strangers like Pilate who encounter him purely by chance. Nicodemus savors uncertainty. He lingers in the twilight where no categories are firm, no vocabulary final, reminding us of Bulkington in Melville’s Moby-Dick, who inspires the observing narrator and shipmate to assert that “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God.” Like Bulkington, Nicodemus is the secret member of the crew.
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From Nicodemus’ position on the periphery, when the Jews are shouting Jesus down in the temple, he brings them up short with a single question: “Does our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he does?” (7:51) I want to cheer. What a dramatic reappearance of Nicodemus in the middle of John’s book, bursting on the scene again at this point of tense interaction and sharp interpretative interchange.
Nicodemus comes back into the story with a reaction that we didn’t get when we first met him questioning Jesus. There the conversation ended with his long, almost suspended silence. We wanted more. What was Nicodemus thinking as Jesus’ words echoed in the night air? (I’ve “discovered” three letters from Nicodemus to John that perhaps answer this question, which inventions follow this chapter, a “Fictive Interlude.”) Here, as a result, Nicodemus’ reaction to the crowd feels like a resolved chord. He was the cool questioner, withholding judgment, insisting like a skeptic on results, actions. He didn’t buy Jesus’ story, but has clearly hung around, observing him closely, and now on his behalf asks for fair play, though keeping his distance.
In the scene that follows in the same temple, however, Nicodemus chooses silence. When Jesus and Nicodemus and the Jews reconvene early the next morning (8:2), the Jews bring before Jesus a trembling woman taken in adultery. Nicodemus hovers just outside the action. A ruler of the Jews, but in contrast to the day before in the temple, Nicodemus keeps silent. He provides a ground base of questioning for this extraordinary scene of power and compassion. John reinforces our sense of his presence by invoking at the end of the scene (8:12), as he had at the end of Nicodemus’ colloquy with Jesus earlier, the Prologue to his book, which contains the whole and marks both these encounters with Jesus, Nicodemus’ and the adulterous woman’s, as pivotal.
Though he is marginal, neither fully Jew nor disciple, friend nor stranger, Nicodemus is the speck of dust in John’s eye that he can’t get rid off. He wants him to believe, but John’s integrity as a writer won’t let him fudge when Nicodemus does not become a follower of Jesus, and he gives us the questioner. Nicodemus’ resolved and detached character takes on a life of its own that cannot be made into what it is not. He chooses knowledge over belief, and even John in his own book cannot change this.
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A knower but Nicodemus the outsider acts boldly. We’ve seen him speak out, while maintaining his distance, but in the end he simply acts. And what an action, it is an unforgettable gesture. As pure and extravagant as Mary’s gift of perfume, Nicodemus brings 100 pounds of embalming oil with “myrrh and aloes” (19:39) for Jesus’ burial. He does not ask for fairness in the treatment of Jesus. It’s too late for that. He simply acts, insisting on honor, courageously joining Joseph of Arimathea in wrapping Jesus’ body for burial. Extraordinary, this last glimpse, John giving us a Nicodemus in silent, fragrant action.
And John subtly contrasts the knower and the believer in this scene. The “secret disciple” (19:38) Joseph of Arimathea does the talking, negotiating with Pilate. Nicodemus does not speak. After Joseph of Arimathea succeeds in getting Jesus’ body, Nicodemus joins him. But where are Peter and the others?
It is only the two outsiders who have the courage to act, one out of belief in Jesus and one out of respect for Jesus, for the knowledge he clearly possesses. Joseph of Arimathea must speak to come clean, to declare who he is. Out of tremendous personal integrity, Nicodemus must act to pay homage, but at the same time this allows him to maintain ambiguity. Though present, his position can’t be resolved. More than admirer, certainly, yet not disciple or we would have heard. And the disciples are noticeably absent. Their belief results in embarrassing absence while, ironically, Nicodemus’ knowledge results in extraordinary action.
The disciples’ absence, of course, heightens the power of Nicodemus’ presence. Where Joseph of Arimathea appears out of nowhere, John carefully makes Nicodemus’ appearance a climax, intensifying as well the drama of his gesture. He becomes bolder as he observes Jesus under a wider variety of circumstances. And possibly Jesus’ defining action for Nicodemus was the forgiveness shown the adulterous woman. Witness to such manifest power, Nicodemus realizes the true depth of Jesus’ understanding.
Regardless, after he meets Jesus, given continued observation, Nicodemus’ emergence is inevitable. When we first see Nicodemus he speaks privately in a night scene. When we see him again, he raises a question publicly in broad daylight and, finally, joining Joseph of Arimathea, he goes beyond words and simply acts publicly.
A fine reversal of the first scene in the last epitomizes Nicodemus’ stance. As John limns his progress with just a few strokes, we’re aware that in the first scene Nicodemus is implicitly accused of lacking life, while Jesus is volubly alive. In the last scene, however, Nicodemus is beyond John’s grasp and emphatically alive as, in silence, he respectfully touches the dead body of Jesus. And unlike Thomas and Mary Magdalene, he touches Jesus’ body on his own terms.
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Once John grants Nicodemus life, the energy of the center that for John is always the character of Jesus must be shared. We catch Nicodemus only out of the corner of our eye, but when we do, he becomes a center himself, pulling John’s interest to what had been the periphery and making this figure of knowledge central.
John loses control of Nicodemus early on. The narrator begins straightforwardly to introduce his colloquy with Jesus, announcing that “There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that you are doing, unless God be with him.” But subtly Nicodemus moves to a central position in John’s book. “Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus says unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” (3:1–4).
Though Nicodemus addresses Jesus with respect, conventionally as a Rabbi, his words are tinged with irony. Instead of saying simply “I know,” he addresses Jesus as a representative of others, a “ruler” of the Jews in fact, saying, “We know that thou art a teacher come from God” (3:2). I hear his greeting as more a question than a declaration. As a consequence, we view Nicodemus immediately on an equal footing with Jesus, instead of an uncritical admirer come to fall at his feet in homage. Jesus’ response accepts this equality. He makes clear in a rather brusque manner that Nicodemus’ assumptions are unacceptable: “Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (3:5–6).”
The oracular “Verily, verily” shifts our sympathy away from Jesus to Nicodemus where it remains throughout their colloquy. We identify with the questioner. For Nicodemus’ remains the key question of John’s book, “How can a man be born when he is old?” Rather than Pilate’s, “What is truth?”