UNSUBSCRIBE CROSSTALK

Photo of The Rev. Michael Johnston by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

Poor Nicodemus!  Before he can even open his mouth, careful readers are likely to distrust him.  Consider first the setting.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, which suggests mixed motives at best.  Is this an authentic movement from the Darkness of the World to the Light of Christ?  Or is Nicodemus just securing the safety of a shadow conversation to obtain some private information about the now well-known teacher?

Then consider also the context.  As chapter 2 of his story ends, John the Evangelist reveals his understanding of Jesus’ personal feelings about the people around him in Jerusalem.  He knows them only too well; does not trust them; and does not need their witness.

Then, as chapter 3 opens, out of this atmosphere of skepticism, steps one of those very people to speak to Jesus secretly.  He comes from one of the groups Jesus knows and whose witness he does not need.  He is a Pharisee and a “ruler of the Judeans,” which means that Nicodemus is a member of the Sanhedrin, the court which regulated religion and law throughout Palestine.  It is a council with which Jesus has no truck.

For his part, Nicodemus opens the conversation by addressing Jesus as “Rabbi.”  Could he be a prospective disciple?  Is the night visit prompted by a need to be certain about this new prophet before he takes his allegiances into the light of day?  For the moment, I will give Nicodemus the benefit of that doubt about his motives.  But then he betrays himself almost immediately.

Oddly using the plural pronoun, he gives Jesus precisely the witness he does not need or want:  “We know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one is able to do the signs you are doing unless God is with him.”  The problem here is that the witness is based on the signs, and that is exactly what Jesus does not trust.  How a person responds to the signs—-what the other gospels call miracles-—is a very big issue in John’s gospel.  And John’s text identifies three levels of response.

There are those around Jesus who simply ignore the signs or dismiss them altogether.  They’re the worst, of course; they don’t get it at all.  Then there are those who are interested in Jesus because of the signs.  They tend to confuse mystery with magic, and credit Jesus for magic alone.

Then there are those who understand that the signs point beyond themselves to the powerful presence of the Father in Jesus the Son.  These people understand that the signs—-like the wine-into-water at Cana in Galilee—- function as icons.  They are two dimensional worldly realities which only hint at the deeper third reality of God’s inexhaustible being.

The people at Level Two haven’t quite got it straight yet, but they’re redeemable—-which is where Nicodemus is in his spiritual journey.  So Jesus makes a frontal assault on Nicodemus’ Level II thinking and tries to facilitate his redemption:  “Amen, amen I am saying to you: if anyone is not born from above, he cannot see the reign of God.”

There’s a critical Greek word in that verse: anothen.  “If anyone is not born anothen, he cannot see the reign of God.”  The word means both again and from above.  English translators must choose between the meanings.  But poor Nicodemus is left to figure it out for himself, and regrettably, he figures it wrong.

Jesus is talking about allowing oneself to traverse the powerful terrain of God’s unrestricted presence—-where the winds blow where they will, unencumbered by the institutions and categories of this world.  He’s inviting Nicodemus to let loose of his hold on the expected things from below so that he can let the unexpected things from above wash over him like the renewing waters of baptism. 

He is asking Nicodemus to commit to a counter community and a counter reality, which are so permeated by newness that it’s as if you were starting life all over again from scratch.  But to this well-established Jerusalem official, such a change in social location and spiritual experience seems as impossible as reentering one’s mother’s womb.

I think Nicodemus would like to figure out how he can have it both ways; how he can hang-on to the world of Temple and Torah—-with all of their structures of status quo—-and continue to be a kind of closet disciple,  picking up the occasional night course taught by Jesus on the side.  This is hardly conversion to the third level response to our Lord.  And so Nicodemus remains at the end of the story bewildered and in the dark.

A decade or so ago, when the Historical Jesus Project was capturing the imagination of even the secular press, HarperCollins offered an Email subscription to the conversations that Jesus scholars were having with one another on line.  All you needed to do to join the conversation was to send an Email to Jesus2000@info.harpercollins.com with the message “SUBSCRIBE JESUS.”

So I did, and it was really pretty cool to come home from work, open up my Email and find a five page message waiting for me from Luke Timothy Johnson on the Character of History.  Then followed a rebuttal to Johnson’s essay by John Dominic Crossan –- perhaps the most erudite and widely known of the Historical Jesus Scholars.  And then Marcus Borg –- whose work is featured in one of our own Lenten Academy offerings this year.  It was all very heady!

Then I learned that I could subscribe to another service which would give me access to all the people out there in cyberspace who were talking to each other about what the scholars were saying to themselves in their “inner circle” chats.  That merely required sending a different message:  “SUBSCRIBE JESUS CROSSTALK.”  And it provided a mass of material.  I remember one Monday night when it took my then-slow computer seven minutes to download some thirty-five messages.  And it took me about two-and-a-half hours to read them all.  They were by no means little paragraphs or small sound bites.  They were pages and pages and pages of essays, with a lot of academic posturing and scholarly credentials trotted-out.

I pretty quickly realized that this was overload; that the information super highway was not going to bring me closer to Jesus; that this incredible piece of human ingenuity and marvelous technology was a thing from below, not from above, a worldly distraction—-not even a sign--that could become an addiction, like playing hours of video games.  How easy it would be to consume hundreds of hours thinking I could somehow get connected to the Divine Reality by reading pages and pages of historical data on 1st Century Palestine from a lot of self-styled rabbis of the microchip.

There I was, a latter day Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night and hoping to amass enough information to strengthen my witness by day.  So around about midnight, I sent a third message to Jesus2000@info.harpercollins.com, which read:  “UNSUBSCRIBE JESUS CROSSTALK.”  And that seems to be John’s message too: UNSUBSCRIBE CROSSTALK so you can traverse the terrain of the ineffable God in Christ Jesus.

There is a coda to this piece.  So hang with me a little longer.  As the Gospel of John unfolds, Nicodemus will return to the text in chapter 19 when he and Joseph of Arimathea come to Pilate in the light of day and ask for the body of the crucified Jesus.  It occurs to me that this may have been the text that Michelangelo had in mind when he carved his Pieta that now resides in the cathedral museum in Florence.  It is less well known than his earlier and more famous work by the same title in St. Peter’s in Rome, but in many ways it is more dramatic.

The piece was sculpted at the end of Michelangelo’s life; and was originally intended to decorate his tomb.  There are four figures in the composition: a diminutive angel in attendance to the scene;    the Blessed Virgin who cradles the body of our Lord in her lap; and a slightly oversized male figure whose arms surround the seated mother.

It is in many ways an unfinished work, as well as a mutilated one.  Look closely and you see that Our Lord is missing his left leg.  It was destroyed by the artist who was unsatisfied with the execution.  Likewise, he took a hammer to the left arm just above the elbow—-later reconstructed by a student.

Michelangelo's journals tell us that in his last years he had lost much of his conviction in the value of his art and came to despair of his gifts.

The younger man, who was able to look at an un-worked piece of stone, and see within it the perfect image that God had given him to shape, came to doubt whether his craft had ever truly been in service of his Lord. So works were left undone, and certain pieces destroyed or damaged by self-doubt.  The journals also tell us that the principal figure of the Pieta, in addition of course to Our Lord, is Nicodemus, whose face is a self-portrait of the aging artist.

Now consider for a moment how Michelangelo-as-Nicodemus —- anguished by his own sense of failure, doubtful that his life’s work had meaning, old and broken -- embraces nonetheless the Suffering One and seems also to shoulder with the Virgin the awful pain of the dead and mutilated Savior.

This is a distinctly affective image, which says that humanity participates in the suffering of the Deity--and the Deity in the suffering of humanity.  And it occurs to me that when we, like Nicodemus and Michelangelo, approach the death and resurrection of our Lord, we come to know the Father.  When we come not with our curiosity and our need for data, but with our brokenness, to embrace the broken Christ, we begin to traverse the ineffable terrain of our God.  And that is our movement – however halting – from the Darkness to the Light.