Meeting Jesus in the Dark
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30 A.D.
He came by night. Perhaps this was the time he could find away Jesus away from the crowds. Maybe evenings were the proper time to pay a visit. Or maybe he needed the cover of darkness to hide his interest in Jesus. Whatever the reason, the writer, John, makes note of the darkness around this encounter. Jesus himself uses images of darkness and light as he speaks to his visitor.
Nicodemus was 'in the dark' when it came to his understanding of Jesus. He says, "we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." He saw that Jesus must be from God, but could see no further.
Jesus words to him did not help illumine much! Being born from above, the wind, serpent, light and darkness. After hearing these words, it seems likely that Nicodemus went away still uncertain about this one who had drawn him to come to him in the night.
Nicodemus had a spiritual life shaped around avoiding, as much as possible, condemnation. Jesus announces to him that He, Jesus, had come not to comdemn, but to save! Laying hold of this truth, light begins to seep in and understanding follows. He was willing to approach Jesus in the night, and in time Jesus Christ would help his visitor to live in the light.
We know the darkness of doubt, ignorance and fear. We know the night of desperation and despair. The dark of confusion and even disobedience. For us too, Jesus' word is, "I have come not to condemn, but to save."
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| Dag Hammarskjöld |
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20th Century A.D.
Another man met Jesus in the night. For Dag Hammarskjöld the night lasted many years—three years of intense darkness and many years before that without the light. A respected diplomat, eventually head of the United Nations, who lived in anguished, silent inner turmoil, until at last, "at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaninful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal." Light, for Hammarskjöld, began to seep in.
He wrote: "For all that has been—thanks! For all that shall be—Yes!"
He had walked a long time in the night, and yet God had used that cover of darkness to meet with Dag and prepare him for the light. "Night is drawing nigh," he wrote, "How long the road is. But for all the time the journey has already taken, how you have needed every second of it."
Both men faced a dark night. God brought a slow, steady wind of understanding, of new life, of light.
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PONDER
• When have you needed to come to Jesus in the night?
What kind of understanding did God begin to stir in you?
Can you explain how God brought you from the darkness
into the light?
• These two men might have looked back with regret at
the time they had spent living without belief in Christ.
Yet, Hammarskjöld wrote, he had needed all of his
journey. In Amazing Grace, contemporary poet and author
Kathleen Norris writes: "I came to understand that God
hadn't lost me, even if I seemed for years to have
misplaced God." How do you view the time you have
spent wandering in darkness, maybe struggling against
new birth?
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From The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible, Richard J. Foster and others, eds., "Nicodemus" Profile (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005), p. 1943-44.
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