Nicodemus in the dark
Think about the last time you were outside at night. Not in town — somewhere dark. Really dark.
It takes a while for your eyes to adjust. At first, you can’t see much of anything. But if you wait — if you resist the urge to pull out your phone and flood the darkness with light — things start to take shape. The ground beneath your feet. The line of the trees. Maybe stars overhead, if you’re lucky. Maybe even a thin line of light on the horizon that might be your imagination, or might be the first promise of morning.
I think about Nicodemus standing outside in that kind of darkness.
John tells us that Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. Most people read that as secrecy — he was embarrassed, didn’t want the other Pharisees to see him. And maybe that’s true. Nicodemus was a respectable man, a leader, cautious by nature. He had a reputation to protect.
But I wonder whether the night is simply where Nicodemus was. He wasn’t ready for the full light of day. He wasn’t sure what he believed or what he was looking for. He only knew that something about Jesus intrigued him. And so he came.
He came as he was. In the dark. With his questions.
And here’s what strikes me: Jesus doesn’t send him away. Jesus doesn’t say, come back when you’ve figured it out. Jesus doesn’t say, come back in the morning when you’re ready to be seen.
Jesus has the conversation right there. In the dark.
And what happens in that conversation? Well, among other things, we get what might be the most famous verse in the Bible.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
John 3:16. You see it on bumper stickers and T-shirts and billboards. And it’s often presented as a kind of test — believe this specific thing and you’re in. Don’t, and you’re out.
But that’s not really what John is doing here. For one thing, the very next verse — the one that never makes the bumper sticker — says this: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Not to condemn. But to save.
And John puts these words in the middle of a story about a man who comes to Jesus confused. And leaves, as far as we can tell, still confused. Nicodemus doesn’t pass a test in this passage. He doesn’t make a profession of faith. He asks a slightly ridiculous question — “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb?” — and Jesus answers him with a metaphor about wind that I’m not sure Nicodemus understood at all.
And yet. Nicodemus keeps showing up in John’s gospel. Later, when the Pharisees want to condemn Jesus, Nicodemus speaks up — not with a bold declaration of faith, but with a careful, procedural objection. Give the man a hearing, he says. Don’t condemn him without a trial. It’s the kind of thing a cautious person says when courage and fear are fighting it out and neither one quite wins.
And then, after Jesus’s crucifixion, Nicodemus shows up one more time. He brings spices to help bury Jesus’ body. An enormous quantity of spices — an extravagant, almost excessive gesture. The disciples who had declared their undying loyalty were nowhere to be found. But Nicodemus came. And he brought what he had.
Some saints have a talent for belief. Peter looked at Jesus and blurted out, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” No hedging, no qualifications. Paul was knocked to the ground on the road to Damascus and got up a different man. He experienced faith like a thunderclap.
Nicodemus wasn’t like that. His faith was slow and halting and full of questions. It unfolded in pieces, over time. He never seems to have had a dramatic moment of conversion. He just kept coming back. Kept showing up. Kept stepping out into the dark to see what he might find there.
I think about Nicodemus in this season of Lent — a season that asks us to sit in the dark for a while rather than rushing toward the light. We know Easter is coming, but we’re not there yet. We’re somewhere in between. Somewhere in the middle of the night, when the shapes around us are unclear and we can’t quite see where we’re going.
The Spanish have a word — la madrugada — for the time between deep night and first light. It’s the hour when you might just suspect there’s some brightness in the east, but you can’t be certain.
I think the madrugada is where a lot of us live, spiritually. We’re drawn to something. We have questions we can’t quite articulate. We’re not sure what we believe, exactly, or we believe it on Tuesday and doubt it by Thursday. We’re cautious. We come by night.
But here’s the thing about the dark. Your eyes adjust. You start to see things you couldn’t see before — things you’d never notice at noon. The stars, for instance. They’re always there, but we can only see them at night.
The promise of this story — the real promise, underneath the bumper sticker — is that Jesus is there in the dark. That God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it. That meeting Jesus doesn’t require certainty as the price of admission.
Nicodemus never became Peter. But he saw something in the dark that kept drawing him back — to that first nighttime conversation, to the council chamber, and finally to the tomb with his arms full of myrrh. His faith didn’t look like certainty. But it was faithful. And it moved him, slowly and imperfectly, toward love.
The madrugada asks us not for answers but for willingness — willingness to stay awake, to keep watching, and to trust that the thin light on the horizon is real even when we can’t be sure.
The night is real. But so is the dawn. And there are some things you can see more clearly in the dark.