Nicodemus and Redeeming Grace
Lent 2A | John 3:1-17
How does he get there? In the big city, at night, visiting the traveling rabbi with a small host of disciples. One who just showed up to the Temple earlier that week and made a great scene; whose signs of wonder at the Passover festival attracted so many. What compelled him? Not to join the throngs during the day, but to still seek him out?
I don’t know, it doesn’t say. But we can imagine, can’t we?
There’s one version of this that runs through my mind. I start with a parking lot — it wouldn’t be a street corner, too public — a parking lot, with spaced lighting. More, outside a bar around midnight than parking garage meeting with Deep Throat with secrets about Watergate. The kind of place that people like them aren’t supposed to be. And the sort of place that people who know this isn’t where they’re supposed to be also aren’t supposed to be. Like Southern Baptists meeting each other in the liquor store. Nobody’s looking at them. Not there, then.
And in my version, there are trench coats, I suppose, and they make sure not to be under the streetlights. Even if nobody’s looking, there’s still something to not being seen, right? In drawing up this image of a secret meeting, I find it embellishes the parts of the story I most want to imagine are central — the secrecy, the nighttime — because it helps me make the conclusions I want to draw — that Nicodemus doesn’t want to be seen. And I take this as essential and true, final. And yet . . . it doesn’t say this.
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