Growing Up

There's a strange kind of pride we carry when we feel like we've earned something. We like control. We like contribution. It's why, if we're honest, birthdays feel a little uncomfortable when you think about them too long. We celebrate a day we didn't choose, mark an anniversary we didn't earn, and take credit for a life that began entirely apart from anything we did. Someone else went through the pain to get us here, and we're the ones who get the cake. That tension between what we control and what we simply receive sits right at the center of one of the most well known conversations in the Gospel of John, the night Nicodemus came to see Jesus.

John introduces his Gospel differently than the other three. There's no genealogy, no birth narrative, just a direct declaration that the Word was with God, was God, and that through Him all things were made. From there John shows us a Savior who refuses to be boxed in. At a wedding in Cana, He turns water into wine on His own timeline, not anyone else's. In the temple, He drives out the money changers with a whip, declaring that His house will be a house of prayer, not a religious system people can manage and control. This is the same Jesus who, just a few verses later, finds Himself face to face with a man named Nicodemus.

Nicodemus was not a bad guy by any measure. He was a Pharisee, a ruler among the Jews, a man devoted enough to have memorized the first five books of the Bible, all 5,300 words of it, Leviticus included. He worshipped. He tithed. He prayed. He was there every time the doors were open. He came to Jesus at night, likely so his peers wouldn't see him, and opened with a statement that reveals exactly where he stood: "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God." Not I know. We know. He approached Jesus, God in the flesh, as one teacher greeting a colleague.

Jesus doesn't entertain the small talk. He goes straight to the heart of the matter: unless someone is born again, born of water and the Spirit, they cannot see or enter the kingdom of God. It's a jarring statement to make to a man this devoted. But that's exactly the point. Nicodemus represents something the church has wrestled with in every generation, the trap of behavior modification standing in for actual transformation. You can say the right things, show up in the right way, do all the right religious activities, and still not be born again.

The line that cuts deepest in this passage is the idea that no one gets pregnant by information. New life doesn't come from knowing more facts. It comes from intimacy.

Nicodemus had incredible information. What he was missing was intimacy with the God he had spent his whole life studying.

But this isn't a story that ends in condemnation. John doesn't leave Nicodemus in the dark of that first night. He shows up two more times. In John 7, when the Pharisees dismiss the crowds following Jesus as ignorant of the law, Nicodemus is the one who pushes back, asking whether their law judges a man before it even hears him. Something is beginning to show. Then in John 19, after the crucifixion, Nicodemus appears again, this time publicly, bringing a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to help prepare the body of Jesus for burial. The man who once came by night now shows up in the light, unafraid.

Growing up in faith rarely looks like a single dramatic moment. More often it looks like conception, invisible at first, hidden even from the person it's happening to, until enough time has passed that the change on the inside becomes evident on the outside. Nicodemus's story reminds us that the goal was never to accumulate more religious knowledge. It was always to be known, and to know, intimately, the God who made us.