Nicodemus' Dark Night and Urgings of Love

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark the Second Sunday of Lent, March 8, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

In today’s gospel we have two potent images of possibility that drive the entire encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus: night and rebirth. Night is that time when things lose their crispness and their sharp edges. The usual certainties of daytime slowly drain away as the sun dips behind the mountains. The daylight world of logic, of either-or, shades into ambiguity and paradox, both-and. Rebirth entails a kind of shedding, a dropping away of the scales from our eyes, an unstopping of our ears that something new, something a little more like the love we see revealed in the person of Jesus might break in, take hold, and fashion us.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. Some scholars will tell you that Nicodemus has had a full schedule and this is only time he get on Jesus’ calendar. Or they’ll tell you that Nicodemus is sneaking away by night because, as a leader in the community, a teacher, he doesn’t want his flock to see him taking counsel with this upstart young rabbi Jesus. Perhaps.

I think a better way to understand Nicodemus approaching Jesus at night is that it’s symbolic of a certain spiritual disposition that has been awakened in Nicodemus—a willingness to step into the unknown, a willingness to embrace ambiguity and paradox, a willingness to set aside the rational, discursive world of the linear intellect, and walk as a newborn in the world of faith and dream, the world of possibility bubbling up beyond what the daytime mind can grasp or comprehend.

Nicodemus is someone who’s got this God thing figured out. As a Pharisee, and a leader of the Jewish people, he’s got a pretty clear idea about who God is and how God works. But something is stirring in him, I think. A zephyr of the Spirit is tap tap tapping on the door. He sees something in the person of Jesus that tells him there is more to God than what he already knows. Something is moving in this dark night of Nicodemus’ soul that opens him to a reality beyond the staid certainties of his inherited orthodoxies. New life, eternal life, beckons.

Too often, we hear of the “Dark Night of the Soul” first spoken of by St. John of the Cross in his beautifully elusive poem by the same name and think it refers to something like depression or low mood. What John of the Cross is talking about is really of a different order. John of the Cross is pointing to a moment in the spiritual life of each one of us that is not reserved for spiritual athletes and mystics. He’s speaking of that moment when, as we grow into deeper relationship with God, our previous ways of making sense of ourselves, our world, and God start to loosen up, to crumble, and the sure-footed certainties that brought us comfort and consolation no longer suffice.  He writes,

One dark night,
filled with love’s urgent longings
—ah, the sheer grace!—
I went unseen
my house being now all stilled

Doesn’t this put Nicodemus’ nighttime foray in a different light? His old way of making sense of things has been plunged into darkness and, stirred by the grace of love’s urgent longings, he steps out into the open, into mystery, into possibility, into the possibility of new life being born in him. The speaker of the poem is guided,

With no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.
This guided me
more surely than the light of the noon
to where he was awaiting me
—him I knew so well—
there in a place where no one appeared

The inner stirring of love, the call of the Beloved that burns in Nicodemus’ heart draws him out of his house, the safety and security of having God all pinned down and sewn up tight and into true encounter, loving relationship with a person instead of a set of ideas, or words on a page. Significantly, the encounter takes place where no one appeared. The encounter can’t be reduced to words, phrases, or images. Deep calls to deep as the psalmist writes, and everything changes.

Of course, at first Nicodemus approaches Jesus with his usual intellectual apparatus. “Rabbi,” might be an honorific, but it also signals that Nicodemus thinks of Jesus as just another teacher like himself. And Nicodemus interprets Jesus’ injunction to be “born from above,” in a rather humorously literally way. Old habits die hard. Ways of approaching God that once served us, no longer suffice, and they can get in the way of seeing the new thing God is unfolding under our noses. Nicodemus’ night is really a call to surrender that whole identity as “leader,” as “teacher,” as a “man in the know,” and let something born from above, take center stage in his life. This is scary stuff for most of us. “How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks with a note of panic in his voice.

The speaker of John of the Cross’ poem speaks of laying her head on the flowering breast of the beloved and continues,

I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

The speaker goes out from herself, from her old way of making sense of herself, the world, and God. All things cease—a kind of death ensues. But it is a death that promises new life, new freedom, deeper union and communion with the one whose deepest desire is to love is into loving. Notice that speaker leaves behind all cares and that the old life is forgotten among the lilies. The speaker is now wholly given over, surrendered to such an extent that the word no longer holds—lover and beloved are transformed into one another.

This is why Abram/Abraham figures so prominently in our readings for today as well. I always think of Abram and Sarai as fairly settled and comfortable before the Lord showed up and announced the new thing he was up to. They’re old. They’ve paid their dues. They’re enjoying their retirement and the regular routine of their predictably ordered days. But the Lord has other plans—“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you,” he says. Leave behind everything you know, every identity you hold to, all the things that have provided security in the past and I will make you fruitful beyond anything you can imagine, God says.

And the miracle is that Abram goes. He surrenders that whole way of seeing and being. He lets it go. And as Paul says, Abraham steps out in faith. He walks into unknowing and mystery. He listens to the hymn of possibility, trusts in the God who watches over our going out and our coming in and who never sleeps, and leaves the house.

So what does this mean for us in this season of Lent? I wonder if it might include a time of self-reflection as to what houses we’ve dwelling in recently. What ideas, images, stories of ourselves, others and God have we been operating by? Perhaps we might pray to God to reveal to us where we’ve been hiding out, holding on, and boxing God up in unconscious preconceptions. Where have we seen a rabbi instead of Christ Himself?

What if in this season of Lent we like Nicodemus and Abram and Sarai, by grace, stepped out of some old habits to make a little space for encounter with the person of Jesus? What if we let our old ways of navigating “go dark,” and took the risk of encounter? This might mean forgetting everything we think we know about the Bible and diving into a gospel as if it were a love letter written personally to us. It might mean setting aside some time to pray the Daily Offices or spending some time each day in silence wasting time gracefully with God and letting Christ pray in us. It might mean trying a service we don’t usually attend—a weekday or Saturday Eucharist, an Evensong, Stations of the Cross. It might mean volunteering at the Food Bank. It might mean taking a cue from Isaiah who calls the true fast the breaking of every yoke of oppression and injustice and witnessing at the Legislature while it’s in session.

The same inner stirring of love that propelled Nicodemus out of his certainties and graced Abram and Sarai with the courage and the fortitude to wander away into the wilderness is still at work in each of us. It’s the restless yearning that burbles under the hustle and bustle of our distracted daily lives. And the invitation is always to open to it. To embrace the night. To take the risk of relationship and encounter. To step out of the door of business as usual, expose ourselves to the unpredictable work of the Spirit that blows where it chooses. The night, the darkness, what we don’t know and can’t master might just hold the key. Why not step out? All we have to lose is ourselves. And perhaps we’ll find our heads laying on the flowering breast of the Beloved whose light is brighter than the noonday.