Almighty God, you show to those who are in error the light of your truth, that they may return to the way of righteousness: grant to all those who are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, that they may reject those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

IN A POEM based on John 3.2 (“The Night”), the 17th-century writer Henry Vaughan wrote of the night as a time with the potential for particular insight. It is the time when the busy world stops, Christ’s “prayer time”, and the time when Christ might knock on the door of the human soul.

Vaughan praises Nicodemus for recognising in Jesus a light different from the world’s and for going in search of him by night:

Most blest believer he!
Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes
Thy long expected healing wings could see,
When thou didst rise,
And what more can be done,
Did at midnight speak with the sun!

Vaughan’s conviction about Nicodemus’s depth of vision is not altogether shared by commentators on the story of his visit to Jesus (John 3.1-17). Nicodemus gets off to a good start, in grasping that the “signs” he has witnessed could not be done “apart from the presence of God” (John 3.2).

His choice of the night as the time to investigate further hints at nervousness about the reaction of his fellow Pharisees to anyone seeking deep conversations with Jesus. More positively, night would also have been the time when Jesus was less besieged by crowds.

And yet Nicodemus goes on to miss every opportunity offered to him to see the consequences of this perception. Brendan Byrne shows how he and Jesus use the same Greek word in different senses: anothen (John 3.4) can mean “again” or “from above” (Life Abounding, Liturgical Press, 2014). Jesus uses it in the second sense.

Nicodemus takes him to be intending the first sense, and is baffled by the implausibility of a second physical birth. The rest of their conversation is an exercise in radically re-educating this “teacher of Israel’s” understanding of the way that God might act in the world.

Jesus continues the metaphor of birth, as he makes an elegant move from one way of seeing to another. In reply to Nicodemus’s astonishment at the idea of entering “a second time into the mother’s womb”, he speaks of the way to “enter the Kingdom of God” (John 3.4-5).

The contrast is between “flesh” and “Spirit” (John 3.6, 8), and those who even glimpse the Kingdom of God and wish to pursue it must give up seeing through the lens of flesh, and seek the freedom of perception that the Spirit will bring.

It seems that Nicodemus, while intrigued, is unable to follow this illustration (John 3.10). Jesus has one more attempt, this time at great personal risk. He tells Nicodemus that the truth of what has just been related is guaranteed in his own identity as “the Son of Man” who came down from heaven (John 3.13). He is the one who will bring healing, prefigured in Moses (John 3.14).

His promise to those who believe in him is eternal life, given by a God whose loving intention for the world is salvation, and not condemnation (John 3.16-17). If Nicodemus cannot believe such assurances, no one else will be able to convince him.

Jesus’s self-revelation would have provided early ammunition for the opponents who would later accuse him of blasphemy and seek his death. We assume that Nicodemus did not use what he had been told to malicious advantage; for he is next seen bringing myrrh and aloes to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body (John 19.39).

Another follower took a different course of action. Judas, who had listened to Jesus declaring that he was “the light of the world” who had come to dispel the darkness, had his feet washed, ate a meal with the disciples, and went off to use what he had heard to betray Jesus (John 12.44-13.30). The end of this episode is stark and devastating: “And it was night” (John 13.30).

A different kind of dramatic device shapes the story of God’s call to Abram to seek a new country (Genesis 12.1-4a). Five times God gives assurances of blessing, promising that from Abram will come “a great nation” (Genesis 12.2). Only at the end, and in a factual understatement, does the writer note that Abram was then 75 (Genesis 12.4). He trusts in God, despite being advanced in years and childless.

It is this trusting faith, not the evidence of good works, that Paul celebrates as worthy to be “reckoned as righteousness” (Romans 4.5). The bolder move is in his assertion that the promise transmitted to all who share Abraham’s faith is not just for the Jews (“adherents of the law”), but also for the Gentiles, the “many nations” now entitled, through faith, to think of Abraham as their father, too (Romans 4.16-17).