Nicodemus the Maverick Disciple

“Maverick” is a word and moniker that came into heavy use during last year’s presidential campaign. It is a strong word, suggesting a rugged, independent, trust-worthy and folksy quality. New Testament scholar Robert Kysar borrowed this label in his 1993 book John, the Maverick Gospel, in which he shed light on the uniqueness of the community from which the fourth gospel came. In that gospel, and in our passage for today, ironically enough, we see the personification of a Biblical maverick: the Pharisee turned admirer and defender of Jesus, Nicodemus.

Apart from this somewhat familiar encounter by night between Nicodemus and Jesus, we see him again in two other places in the gospel. In chapter 7 at a point of intense conflict between Jesus and the chief priests and Pharisees, Nicodemus plays the role of conciliator. When people in the crowd began to call Jesus the Messiah and the prophet, it pushes the Pharisees to the point of calling in the Temple Police to make an arrest. But it was Nicodemus who bravely asks: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” His cover of night is now blown, and his own now point to him and say “surely you are not also from Galilee.”

Nicodemus, then and today, with his calmness and fair counsel, stands in marked contrast to the pervasive group-think and mob rule justice that hovers at the edges of the gospel stories, and for that matter, infects public mindset today. It doesn’t take much to influence a crowd. Today, we have 24 hour a day cable news that leads many of us to convince ourselves that we know the results of trials before they even begin – the verdict usually falling close to our worldview and place in life.

The other time we meet this maverick is after the death of Jesus on the cross. Joseph of Arimathea, who tended to the body of Jesus, was joined by Nicodemus, who brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds (John 19:40) That is a lot of burial supplies! Together, “they took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen clothes, according to the burial custom of the Jews.” Very few things can be more intimate than caring lovingly for a body before burial. It is a practice that has all but disappeared from our culture. Only a century ago family members would clean the bodies of their loved ones – at home usually – and dress them in their finest.

So what we have here is a man who was drawn to the person, the power, the message of Jesus in the face of opposition and derision from his own group, the Pharisees; coupled with an over-all atmosphere of fear at the time which allowed this first encounter between the two to take place only in the middle of the night. Nicodemus is clearly inspired by what he is seeing in Jesus and wants more. Jesus points the way. “No one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.” Many know this exchange more from the King James Version of the Bible that uses the phrase “born again.” Being “born again” is the measurement and the faith language of whole denominations and generations of Christian believers. Many Episcopalians have been caught flat-footed when approached on the street by evangelists or in polite conversation with friends. Are we born again Christians? Us? Is that what we have to be to experience and profess to enter the Kingdom of God? Or is the spirit of baptism enough?

These self-imposed labels within Christianity – born-again, progressive, traditional, orthodox, main-line Protestant, evangelical – can influence not only the churches we attend but also the kinds of books we decide to read to deepen our faith. Though I can speak of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I am reluctant to call myself a born-again Christian – due mainly to my not wanting to be put into a perceived box or perhaps considered a modern-day Pharisee by some.

Last summer, I became aware of a book that was being passed around by friends, read on airplanes and getting a lot of buzz on the Internet. It was also being highly recommended by what I would call the Evangelical side of the church. The book is The Shack by William P. Young. Young, a son of missionaries who grew up among the tribes in the highlands of New Guinea, writes a fictional account of a father who suffered life-changing grief and loss when his youngest daughter Missy was abducted and brutally murdered. Mack, the father, is torn apart by the depth of his grief, a pain he calls The Great Sadness. The book centers on what happens when he receives a note from God to drive miles away to the very same remote shack in rural Oregon where the body of his slain daughter was discovered. There he meets an unlikely team of grief therapists. A large black woman named Papa, a small Asian woman Sarayu, and a Middle Eastern man – clearly Jesus -- dressed as a simple laborer. The main character Mack finds the scene hard to comprehend. He wonders if “since there were three of them, maybe this was a Trinity sort of thing.” (pg. 87)

I have to admit, by page 84 my cynical seminary trained eye and an Episcopal progressive bias was building and I nearly put the book down for good. I thought: I knew where this narrative was heading. A white evangelical male author hitting all of the right diversity appropriate buttons to demonstrate the openness and timeliness of his message. Was I reading the theological version of today’s identity politics -- when white men try to figure out if being a wise Latina woman has anything to do with looking at the world? But, I pushed though and read on.

The Shack’s first person of the Trinity, Papa, unfolds to Mack the mysteries at the heart of the Christian faith, but she does so by crying the same tears of loss that Mack cried at the loss of his daughter. She draws him closer and slowly erases the distance between them.

The Trinity is described like this: God the Father is completely unlimited, without bounds. When things went off track with Adam and the Garden of Eden, the three together “rolled up our sleeves and entered into the middle of the mess – that’s what we have done in Jesus.” When we spoke ourself into human existence as the Son of God, we became fully human. Only Jesus could express my heart and will into any given circumstance (pg. 100).

“We are not three gods, and we are not talking about one god with three attitudes, like a man who is a husband, father and worker. I am one God and I am three persons, and each of the three is fully and entirely one.”

And the clincher: “All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists within Me, within God myself. I am love.” The climax of The Shack comes when Mack is able to learn to forgive – and to love again. The Great Sadness lifts.

The Shack was not for me C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain, but I can see why so many readers find the book so fresh and have recommended it to their friends. William Young’s maverick approach paints an unconventional and highly personal description of the Trinity that is breathtakingly accessible.

What can easily get lost on this feast day of the Church, Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate one of the core understandings of the church - that took the church a couple of centuries to develop - is what lies behind this search for words and understanding to what God is doing in the lives of everyday people.

We can easily glaze over in trying to comprehend the mystery of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, when what is more important, I believe, is what the Trinity is meant to say to us. It is about love. It is about relationship.

Revisiting the gospel story for today, Jesus paints a picture of the Holy Spirit and the movement of God that is unbounded and limitless and generous. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where is goes.” “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” not to “condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

What I hope we take away from today’s message and feast is that to understand God’s mystery fully is like trying to get our arms about the wind. It can’t happen all at once. So we get small glimpses of it. When the sun comes up each morning. When people pray to God with their whole heart for healing. As mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters… put their world back together after heart-breaking loss. When we work for peace and never again go to war in God’s name – or condemn in God’s name. And when the Great Sadness lifts in our lives (and I believe we all have a sadness God is waiting to lift) and we can begin to love again – for the moment at least we will know God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.