The old man furrows his brow and says nothing. He’s trying to get to some thought that’s out of reach. No amount of education or professional experience has prepared him for this, and Nicodemus, normally a fluent and wise teacher anytime he’s ever been asked a question, is struck dumb. Childlike utterances are the best he can do. “But how?” he asks Jesus. “ Born again? What are you talking about?”  

Recently, he’s been feeling two things at once, both the encroaching of a strange darkness within himself, a kind of awareness of his own smallness, and the approach of a light that is lovely but itself strange to him. Strange and familiar. In the night he has crept towards this strange luminous face that has been lately drawing crowds in the city streets. He’s heard the chatter, of course. He’s been looking into it, applying all of his know-how and still coming up short. Deciding to find out for himself, rather than depend on secondhand gossip, he’s come here and is sitting alone with this new teacher, Jesus.  

The best advice his father had ever given him was that if you don’t know something, find someone who does and ask. Nicodemus has just about run himself crazy trying to comprehend his own failure to comprehend and a combination of helplessness and perhaps even wonder have compelled him to find a way to meet with Jesus. But so far, it hasn’t been quite what he expected, whatever it was he expected. The clarity hasn’t come. The questions have only deepened, as his sense of competency continues to slip. He’s uncomfortable.  

“Nicodemus,” Jesus leaned forward and put his hand on the old man’s arm, “most people shut the light out because it exposes their dark deeds. But not you, look, you’ve moved toward the light. That’s something, isn’t it?”  

Yes, that’s something, he thinks as he wanders the marketplace, almost in a stupor. Days have passed, and he can’t get the conversation off of his mind. There is a light beginning to dawn for him, he feels, but its effect is almost to bring another kind of darkness. Not an evil darkness, but a darkness like gestation, like a mystery gathering life, a thought in the mind preparing to be clothed by action, or a music composing in a warm, shadowed silence. He listens.

“His mercies are new every morning, so great is his faithfulness.” Lips move in the dim light before dawn, whispering prayers with hands raised. Empty hands. Worn hands opened to receive. A baby’s crying drifts to his ears from a house somewhere. The old man looks at his hands as the light lays upon them like a gleaming liquid, filling and showing the markings of gathered years. The wrinkles life’s leaving has left. That finger is crooked from an old injury, the others from arthritis. But his own hands seem strange to him now, like they’ve been dipped in the radiance of another world and pulled slowly back into this one upon whose Eastern horizon an ancient sun is just beginning to appear. Jeremiah’s lament seems appropriate to him and he laughs quietly to himself, thinking, “Can an old fool begin again? Be born again?” 

At the noonday meal, he asks a friend, “What would you do if you’d been born blind and suddenly healed?” His friend had said something very appropriate about praising God for a miracle, but Nicodemus had wondered whether the adjustment would be equally wonderful and distressing. What if you hadn’t known you were blind in the first place? What if what you had thought was light, wasn’t? Or was just a tiny glimmer of something greater than you’d ever imagined? Like growing up underground and calling your lamp the sun, and one day the roof caves in and there’s the real heavenly body gazing in upon you and a stone has fallen to crush your poor lamp. The whole blazing world would be wonderfully new, miraculously brilliant, and, in a way terrifying. Ironically, to turn toward the sun would be at the same time to be oriented to reality and disorienting as you left all you’d held to. Leaving the familiar blindness behind would be a kind of death in order to live.  

Nicodemus lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. Amidst the many unfixed thoughts that stormed in his mind, one fixity there was. He saw the face of the young teacher Jesus and it was repeating, “You must be born again, old man.” The face seemed to grow the way the river grew in Ezekiel’s vision, ever deepening as he waded further and further in. The face of Jesus in his memory was as deadly serious as a child at play. Nicodemus waited for the joke in Jesus’s words to be revealed. But no such relief came. Jesus and his words just hung there. 

That night he dreamed of his own mother. It seemed he saw her before his own birth, a young vital woman, newly married. Now she was growing a new life within her and leaving an old way of life behind her, and her face was all gladness, even when there was worry, it was encircled by a city wall of gladness. The unknown that faced her would soon show its own little gleaming face, and the little stranger would be welcomed until the young mother would say, “how strange to think of life without you, little one.”  

“A child will be born to us, a son given.” Again, lips move in the soft light before dawn, whispering prayers with hands raised. Empty hands. Worn hands opened to receive. He’d thought of Isaiah’s words almost immediately upon waking from the dream of his mother. The fertile darkness of the womb from which he had emerged long ago, strange and new into the brilliance of this world, seemed to be encircling him now again. This man Jesus, his face, his words, was becoming like a presence in an inner room that moves outward until all that once contained it is now contained within it. Like a little hummed tune that swells into a dance. Like the tiny seed of joy in the heart that traces its tingling tendrils all over until the whole body is born up by laughter. 

Our Lord Jesus Christ has told us

that to enter the kingdom of heaven

we must be born again of water and the Spirit,

and has given us baptism as the sign and seal of this new birth.

Here we are washed by the Holy Spirit and made clean.

Here we are clothed with Christ,

dying to sin that we may live his risen life.

As children of God, we have a new dignity

and God calls us to fullness of life.

From  ChurchofEngland.org