“Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, ‘Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.’” This is from John 3.
Nicodemus is mentioned only in John, and we know little about him, save that he was devout, a Pharisee, and a member of the Sanhedrin. Later in the ministry of Jesus Nicodemus again appears, defending Jesus against the chief priests and Pharisees who sought to arrest him. ‘Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?’ he asked. We see him one more time, immediately following the crucifixion, as he joins with Joseph of Arimathea to take Jesus’ body from the cross, prepare it for burial, and lay it in the tomb.
He was a Pharisee. I could write pages about the origin, development, and practice of the Pharisees. I choose not to, because I would rather focus on the actual encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus. I will offer this bit of clarification, however. To the Pharisee the law (the Torah…that being the first 5 books of the Old Testament) was all. Their devotion to it led to several generations of interpreting each of the laws in greater and greater detail until there were thousands of regulations covering every aspect of life. The Pharisee gave his life to observing every regulation and teaching others to do the same.
Early in my ministry I received a sobering illustration of how difficult that could be. A young man, Jewish son of an orthodox family, became my friend. I told him of the belief and freedom of my faith. He really desired to take Jesus as his Messiah, but something held him back. One day he invited me to his home. As I walked in to his front room he stood beside a tall stack of books, one atop the other, as high as his 6 foot height. “These are all of the law and interpretations of the law; the regulations of the elders. If I obey all of these I will be ‘righteous.’”
The burden was crushing for him and he was never able to bring himself to set aside legalism and embrace grace. The apostle Paul was a Pharisee too, and he said he was blameless before the law. But look at him in the book of Acts; before Jesus brought him to faith he was hateful, angry, and violent, all in the name of God, of course . And each of us may know people of faith who believe all the right things, and who are orthodox in religious practice, but whose hearts and spirits seem untouched by the freedom and grace of Christ. There are too many of us who act as though we were baptized in Dill Pickle juice rather than in the cleansing, forgiving blood of the Lamb of God, who came to restore us to a life of Joy. Perhaps that is why John the Baptist called the Pharisees who came to check him out “Whitewashed tombs.” They looked good on the outside, but their insides were dead. They didn’t care for his characterization.
Paul reminds us that legalism will not win out, that something much greater is the answer. “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”
Prayer: “Merciful Father, I am so glad that my salvation is not up to my own merit, for I have none. I confess my fascination with sin, and my weakness before it. I am empty of good to bring to you as evidence of my worthiness. The older I get, the more I realize how weak I am in the things that really matter. I am astounded by the greatness of your grace…greater than all my sin, and greater than the accumulated sin of all history. I see you in Jesus, and I see your magnificent mercy. In eternity I will see you face to face, and you will remind me of your grace and erase all memory of my failures. Then I will be free indeed. Amen.”