The Apprenticeship of Nicodemus, a devotional thought

There's a story in John 7 about a guy named Nicodemus. He's most famous for his encounter with Jesus back in John 3, where he comes to Jesus secretly, at night, to ask him some sceptical questions about his message and ministry. It's the exchange that prompts Jesus to say one of the most famous of all his sayings, about how much God so loved the world (John 3:16). That's not Nicodemus's only appearance in the story, though. He shows up again in Chapter 7, where he gets “smack-talked” by the Pharisees for speaking up in defense of Jesus. In this scene, the Pharisees are running Jesus down (their big critique is that he can’t be the Messiah because he’s only a Galilean hick), and Nicodemus timidly suggests that “we shouldn’t condemn him without hearing him first and finding out what he’s doing...” He gets shut down pretty quickly, like I say, but if you keep tracking with old Nicodemus, you’ll see that, after the crucifixion, he’s the one who provides the spices and myrrh for Jesus’ burial (19:39).

What stands out to me here is the progressive emergence of Nicodemus as a fully devoted follower of Christ: it starts with some clandestine questions asked skeptically in the dead of night, and it ends with him offering 75 pounds of myrrh for Jesus burial (an amount fit only for a king—Nicodemus is saying something pretty direct here about who he thinks it is that they’ve executed).

So what does the “spiritual evolution” of Nicodemus tell us? 1) That we ought never to downplay the curious inquiries of the seekers in our midst. That could be a Nicodemus-in-the-making asking us the tough questions, and we should take them seriously as such; and 2) That we ought never to discount the first tentative steps people make in standing up for Jesus. Nicodemus’s timid suggestion to his peers that they shouldn’t condemn Jesus before hearing him out was hardly a bold line in the sand. But it was the sign of a heart in crisis, a heart agonizing over what side of history it wants to be found on, a heart that will eventually put 75 pounds of myrrh on the line for his crucified King. Who knows what we may end up putting on the line for Jesus, if our first feeble efforts to take a stand for him are nurtured and honoured?