Night Healing
John 3:1-17
Sermon preached the second Sunday of Lent, 2005
Midway Hills Christian Church
Today we continue our Lenten journey with a familiar story from the gospels about Nicodemus. As Bill and Judy and Greg and I placed all the assigned texts for Lent side by side, we noticed that they were stories of transformation and healing and each of them happens in a particular context. Last Sunday we looked at the story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness and considered how the wilderness might be a healing place in our journey toward Easter. Nicodemus’ encounter in today’s gospel happens at night. Night is the context for his healing.
I have always been intrigued by this story. Of course the most famous verse of the whole episode is John 3:16, “for God so loved the world that God gave the only Begotten One so that everyone who believes in that One should not perish but have everlasting life.” What are the events, what is the conversation that led up to such a profound pronouncement in John 3:16?
It comes at the tail end of a conversation that Jesus has, by night, with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Right off the bat, my eyebrows raise. Think about it. We read a lot about the Pharisees in the gospels, and they often speak and have conversations with Jesus, but how many of them are given a specific name. In this story, we know this Pharisees name. He is Nicodemus.
Well, what does this story tell us about him? He is a religious leader, well educated—Pharisees were doctors of the law, probably a senior adult (we conclude this from his question to Jesus “How can anyone be born after having grown old?”) He is searching. Even with all his accomplishments and maturity he is curious about Jesus. He is logical. When Jesus invites him into a spiritual conversation, Nicodemus has a hard time taking it all in:
Jesus says, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Nicodemus replies in logical fashion: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
When I come to the end of this conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus I wonder, “Was Nicodemus changed? Was he born of the Spirit? Did he become a disciple of Jesus?” The story here in the third chapter of Johns’ gospel is not clear. Nicodemus’ last words in this story are “How can these things be?” We are left not with a statement of faith by Nicodemus, but a question.
I believe Nicodemus did become a disciple of Jesus that day. And the reason I believe that is because he pops up again in the seventh chapter of John’s gospel. In that chapter Jesus has been teaching in the Temple during an important Jewish festival and he gets the crowd stirred up. The Pharisees get angry that the temple police have not arrested Jesus and it is Nicodemus who comes to Jesus’ defense.
Some interpreter’s have wondered why Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. Was it because he was afraid of what his colleagues might do to him if they knew? Maybe. Was it because he was ashamed to be seen with Jesus during the day? I don’t think so. One poet calls Nicodemus wise for coming to Jesus by night. Because night is often the time of revelation. It is Jesus’ prayer time and God’s knocking time. Listen to these lines from Henry Vaughn’s poem The Night:
Wise Nicodemus saw such light
as made him know his God by night.
Most blessed believer he!
Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes
Thy long expected healing wings could see
When thou didst rise
And, what can never more be done,
Did at midnight speak with the sun!
We often think of the night in negative terms—as something to be feared. Darkness is often associated with evil and danger. Darkness, night, can also be a spiritual condition. Many of us are familiar with the phrase ‘dark night of the soul.’ It comes from St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila who were sixteenth century Spanish mystics. The term is used as a blanket phrase to describe any difficult situation. When someone is going through a crisis or particularly difficult time in life, we say they are going through a ‘dark night of the soul.’ Somehow the dark night is usually thought of as our own making. We plunge into it because of bad choices we have made or because of some resistance to something in our lives.
I believe all of these are misunderstandings of the dark night. The Spanish words John and Teresa use are la noche oscura. The obscure night. The dark night is obscure, not bad, or sinister, or necessarily difficult. The noche oscura is a spiritual state in which we are confused about what is happening to us.
Psychiatrist Gerald May, who has written a profound book on the dark night of the soul, claims that centuries before Freud “discovered” the unconscious, contemplatives such as Teresa and John had a profound appreciation that there is an active life of the soul that goes on beneath our awareness. It is to this unconscious dimension of the spiritual life that Teresa and John refer when they use the term “dark.” In the same way that things are difficult to see at night, the deepest relationship between God and a person is hidden from our conscious awareness.
In speaking of la noche oscura, the dark night of the soul, John and Teresa are addressing something mysterious and unknown, but by no means sinister or evil. It is instead profoundly sacred and precious beyond all imagining.
St. John of the Cross says that in worldly matters it is good to have light so we know where to go without stumbling. But in spiritual matters it is precisely when we do think we know where to go that we are most likely to stumble. So God darkens our awareness in order to keep us safe. When we cannot chart our own course, we become vulnerable to God’s protection, and the darkness becomes a “guiding night,” a “night more kindly than the dawn.”
After listening to
Jesus talk about being born from above, being born of the Spirit, the last
words we hear from Nicodemus are “How can this be?” It is the most important spiritual question any of us could ask. Abraham
and Sarah asked it, Mary asked it. It
is a question that is a prelude to new life in the Spirit. No
level of education, status, influence, or maturity can transform us. It is only when we let go of those hard won
identities, let go of the light we have manufactured so we can find our own
way, and step into God’s dazzling darkness that true transformation can occur.
Nicodemus is mentioned a third time in the gospel of John. After the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate for the body of Jesus. Nicodemus is there too. He brings a mixture of myrrh and aloes and he and Joseph prepare the body of Jesus for burial. When all the other disciples had denied Jesus, betrayed Jesus, or were in hiding, it was Nicodemus--who had come to Jesus by night--that was there to the bitter end, to tend and care for his broken body.
I wonder what was going through Nicodemus’ mind as he touched and washed the body of Jesus. I imagine that night conversation he had with Jesus played over and over in his head: you must be born from above. You must be born of the Spirit.
I imagine that somehow he would have spoken the words of poetry that John of the Cross uttered fifteen hundred years later:
On a dark night,
Afflicted and aflame with love,
O joyful chance!
I went out unnoticed,
my house lying silent at last.
In darkness and secure,
down the secret ladder, disguised,
O joyful chance!,
in darkness, and shielded,
my house lying silent at last,
one joyful night,
in secret: no one was watching
and I saw no other thing,
my only light and guide
the light that burned in my heart.
That same light led me
more surely that the noonday sun
to where one was waiting,
the one I knew would come,
where surely no one would find us.
O you my guide, the night,
O night more welcome than dawn,
night that drew together
the loved one and the lover,
each transformed into the other!