‘One on one with Jesus’ series: Jesus and Nicodemus-teaching the teacher
A few weeks ago I was listening to some breakfast radio on Triple M, and Roo, Dits and Loz were interviewing a former race car driver from Ireland, Martin Donnelly. Donnelly famously survived a horrific crash at Spain in 1990. Rounding a sharp corner, his Lotus was suddenly crippled by mechanical failure and charged into a barrier at approximately 260km/h. The force of the impact ripped the car apart and threw Donnelly onto the track, still strapped into his seat. As he lay unconscious, sprawled on the bitumen, he was oblivious to the cars roaring towards him at blistering speed.
Donnelly nearly died on the track. When paramedics reached him he was asphyxiated and had turned blue, having swallowed his tongue. Donnelly suffered head trauma and severe damage to his lungs, and both his legs were badly broken. When he was transferred to hospital, Donnelly was in a coma, and nearly died twice in theatre when his heart stopped. In the radio interview, Donnelly said that he can’t remember the crash or emergency surgery afterwards. Donnelly’s situation was so dire that his mother was told: “Go and make peace with your God because I don’t expect him to last through the night.” His mother rushed through the hospital to find the chaplain, who attended Donnelly’s bedside and read him the last rites.
As Donnelly recounted these events on the breakfast radio program, the panel were astonished that he had lived to tell the story. One of the interviewers said to him: “You must have been good.”
Human philosophy is that to have favour from God, a person has to be good. The more virtuous one is, the better one behaves, and the more righteous and religious they appear to be, then they will receive God’s favour—as long as they’re good.
In today’s ‘one on one with Jesus series’, we are introduced to Nicodemus. There is a significant shift from the characters of recent weeks in John—the man whose blindness from birth was thought to be the result of some kind of sin in his life, or the life of his parents. The woman caught in adultery. the Samaritan woman at the well. Each of these are portrayed as much less than good; presented with their moral flaws and failings exposed, those met with disapproval, those who would be least expected to be shown God’s favour.
Today we are introduced to someone who presents as good—really good. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and a member of the Jewish ruling council. He was a teacher steeped in the Old Testament scriptures and how they should be applied to everyday life situations in accordance with the traditions of the elders. He is a moral, upstanding member of the community. He speaks courteously: “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher come from God, for no-one is able to do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”
Based on what he observes Jesus do, Nicodemus evaluates that God must be with Jesus because a person can’t do great things unless God is with them. But the religious leaders have also observed things which their framework says Jesus shouldn’t do—associating with the immoral, the unholy, eating with sinners and tax collectors, making himself unclean, doing things that they regard as work on the Sabbath. This threatens the very integrity of their religion!
Nicodemus is trying to make sense of who Jesus is and evaluate where he fits in to his religious structure. “We know” says Nicodemus. His assumption is that the religious leaders’ knowledge is the default standard under which everything else must fit. The religious leaders are the teachers—they see themselves as the ones who hold wisdom and who are qualified to impart it. Nicodemus and the religious teachers think that they have the capacity and the authority to judge whether Jesus is acceptable or unacceptable.
But Jesus shows that he is the Teacher with authority. He is the judge who delivers the verdict: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” (verses 19-20).
The natural human instinct is to not let anything threaten the notion that we are inherently good. Rather than let our deeds be exposed, we instinctively try to protect our sense of goodness, by covering up our failings, presenting our best selves. This might work with others—at least those who don’t know us well—but it doesn’t work with God, before whom everything is laid bare, and we must give account. No one is good enough to go up into heaven. No one is good enough to climb their way to God and earn his favour.
The Pharisees thought they were light for the community; a beacon of exemplary moral behaviour for others to follow. By their deeds they thought God would be pleased with them; indeed they expected they had God’s favour, unlike those irreligious, unholy, immoral people who Jesus cared for: the man born blind, the woman trapped in adultery, the Samaritan woman at the well.
But trying to be righteous by keeping God’s commands only gets one so far. If the Pharisees wanted to be justified by the law, then they will be judged by the same law. So refusing to help someone desperately in need on a Saturday was not God’s intention behind the Sabbath. Diligently making sacrifices yet being unmerciful to one’s neighbours was not the piety that was pleasing God. In reciting the right prayers in public, yet whispering untruthfully about others in the shadows, the religious were not pleasing in God’s sight. They may not have literally committed murder, but when they held hatred against their brother in their heart, they were not pleasing to God. They may not have broken the commandment ‘Do not commit adultery’ but by looking at women lustfully they were still being faithful in their heart to their wife and to God. Deceiving others by using false measures and improper scales was stealing from people which did not please God. Their ladder to climb up to heaven looked promising, but was broken at the bottom rung.
Every religion is based around the premise that if one is good, they will be blessed from heaven. That was how the radio commentator made sense of Martin Donnelly surviving the horrific crash: “You must have been good.” If he wasn’t good, he wouldn’t have survived, because those who are not good should be punished. We Christians think that way too. We want to see the wicked suffer. Deep down, we have a sense of satisfaction when something bad happens to someone who upsets us or wrongs us. But if God punished evil by wiping out evildoers…who would remain? For the Psalmist says: “If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?” (Psalm 130:3).
God is a righteous God who demands justice and must punish wrongdoing. But he’s a loving God who doesn’t want to wipe anyone out. So he sent his one and only Son to fulfil the sacrificial system; to be the once-for-all perfect sacrifice of sins, when he would be lifted up high on a Cross, executed as a common criminal even though he was innocent, to take the punishment that we deserve.
Jesus would be lifted up, just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert. This event from Numbers 21 would have been one Nicodemus would have known well. During Israel’s wilderness wanderings the Israelites grumbled against God. He sent fiery serpents to bite them and many died. But God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and lift it up on a pole. Whoever trusted God’s promise by looking away from themselves and to the bronze snake lifted up on the pole would live.
In the same way, God has provided Jesus as the means for us to survive the bites of the Chief Serpent, Satan, and avoid perishing, and live. This is astonishing! The world runs by the principle of perform well or get out. Be good, or be punished. Even as we grew up in church, what was the message we most often heard? Now when you’re in church, you need to sit still, and you have to be good! Our teachers told us: you have to be good. Our coaches taught us that if we trained harder, we would perform better, and be rewarded. Our bosses told us that if we worked harder, we would win the promotion. In the same way we are so often tempted to drift into the thinking that if we are good, if we’re charitable, if we are deeply pious in worship, then God will bless us more than he already has.
When Martin Donnelly crashed into the barrier he was in a perilous situation. Unconscious, he was unable to save himself. He literally died three times, and would have perished had it not been for the rescue efforts of the paramedics. Like Donnelly, we too were in a desperately dire situation, racing head long into death, unable to change the course of our direction. We too died, spiritually died, the day Adam and Eve turned their back on God. We were completely unable to help ourselves. As Donnelly was completely reliant on the mercy of others to save him, and virtually needed to be made new, so too are we completely reliant on the mercy of another, and need to be born anew.
In today’s text Jesus teaches us the Good News. God is for all those who aren’t good, who cannot be good. He sent his own Son, Jesus, to be the good one for the world—the righteous one, the holy one, the one who has kept God’s commands perfectly for us. When God would have been completely justified to wipe us out, he sent his Son to bear the punishment we deserved, to suffer and die for us, and save us. That blows our human concept of love and justice apart. It turns our picture of God upside down—and our picture of ourselves upside down too—that God would be so determined for us to know him that he would be recklessly extravagant giving away his one and only Son to bring us back to him, paying for us to belong to him as his very own, not with silver or gold but with his own holy and precious blood.
That we are God’s very own means that we are no longer our own master. Salvation, then, means
a change must come in our life. God sent his Holy Spirit to us not just to fix us up, but to make us completely new so that we can look to Jesus and share in his life, righteousness and holiness forever. We have been made completely new so as to lay aside the assumption that we are the authority, the interpreter, the teacher, and instead sit before Jesus to be taught by him, and let his word interpret us—what are the motives behind our thoughts, desires, behaviours? Salvation means a leaving of our understandings and attitudes behind, our fashioning of God in our image, limiting the way he works to our ideals, and instead submitting to the reign of Christ and joining in in his life and mission.
Whoever looks up to Jesus, lifted high on the Cross, and trusts in his shed blood for the payment for all their sins is righteous in God’s sight. This faith makes us pleasing to God, rather than their own strivings. This is what Nicodemus had to learn. In today’s dialogue Jesus teaches Nicodemus that all of his study, all his knowledge, all of his strivings, will not help him. His being a Jew gave him no automatic part in the Kingdom; his being a Pharisee, esteemed holier than other people, counted for nothing; his membership in the Sanhedrin and his fame as one of its scribes earned not one skerrick of righteousness. Only the most radical change possible—a spiritual birth from above—enables one to see the kingdom of God.
Whoever has been born from above sees the Kingdom of God reigning in the Person of Christ. They will not perish but have eternal life. But Jesus’ promise that whoever looks to the Son of Man and believes in him will not perish does not mean that things in our heart, our life, do not need to perish. In the new life of the Christian, there must be a perishing. The old has gone, the new has come. We are called to lose our life in order to find it (Matthew 16:25). The Apostle Paul said:
“Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” (Colossians 3:5-10).
When Luther preached on this text on Trinity Sunday he said: “But if I believe in God and am born anew…I am willing that the condition of the soul be changed entirely….
Thus we must abandon the life of the flesh and enter into a new life, being dead to the old…There must be a real change and an entire transformation of nature, for the natural state and natural feeling must be completely overthrown.”[1]
The Good News for us is that it is God’s goodness that has secured our life with him. He who has saved you and begun a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6). This is what God gave his own Son for. This is salvation. As Paul wrote to Titus: “…when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:4-7). Amen.
Pastor Tim Ebbs
St Paul’s Lutheran Church, Glenelg
5th Sunday in Lent, 2026
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
Continued over the page
“Jesus’ promise that whoever looks to the Son of Man and believes in him will not perish does not mean that things in our heart, our life, do not need to perish. In the new life of the Christian, there must be a perishing. The old has gone, the new has come.”
- How has the message of ‘those who are good get blessed’ shaped your thinking?
- Do you expect God to reward the good and punish the wicked?
- How is that not good news for us?
- In what ways might you seek to protect your goodness and present as righteous before others?
- How does this not count for anything in Jesus’ sight?
- How did God punish wickedness while showing his love to the world at the same time? How is this true for you?
- How might we be like Nicodemus, seeing ourselves as ‘the teacher’?
- How does God’s word change this attitude?
- What is the good news for us in this text?
- How will being born again require a change in our life? What does that change look like in your life?
[1] Luther, Martin: Luther’s Church postil, Trinity Sunday, Sermons of Martin Luther, ed and tr John Nikolas Lenker, Vol 3 Sermons on Gospel texts for Pentecost, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Mi, 1983 pp420-421.
