The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom
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Jesus’ way of speaking, not what Jesus is speaking about.
Jesus’ method is apparent. John uses this scene to make it explicit early on. He invites Nicodemus to accept a new vocabulary, not “born” of the womb as we customarily understand the term but “born of the Spirit.” By this means Jesus attempts to construct an edifice of language from which there is no exit. John shows us Jesus at work building this structure: statements layered with carefully placed questions; oracular rhetoric raised on a foundation of concrete imagery; rigid categories, such as flesh and spirit, cut from steel. Jesus is the master builder.
Just as the breath of the wind through the courtyard takes his attention, however, Jesus is undercut by the disinterested Nicodemus, whose reasonable questions asked with calm, profound respect haunt us. Our sympathy shifts to Nicodemus. At the same time, he shares Jesus’ power of language building, who in turn borrows his irony, “Art thou a master of Israel, and know not these things?” (3:10).
Despite John’s orchestrating the scene to emphasize Jesus’ power, skillfully moving from their dialogue with its threshold imagery of birth/water to Jesus’ monologue with its categorical imagery of belief/truth, a counter movement undermines this power. Seen from Nicodemus’ exploratory, questioning perspective, we realize that the edges of Jesus’ new terms are not as sharp as they first appear. Perhaps they’re modeled in clay rather than cut from steel. In the end, during Jesus’ monologue, we are distracted by what might be revolving in Nicodemus’ mind. And after Jesus stops, the continued silence of Nicodemus hangs over the scene like a thunderhead.
John dramatizes the fact that Jesus’ power is inseparable from his mission of radical redefinition. Nicodemus’ night colloquy with Jesus, then, is critical to John’s book. First, because it makes explicit what is at stake. A new vocabulary is offered by Jesus, an attempt made to establish new categories, declare where the edges of things are in the new world inhabited by John’s Jesus. Second, these very edges are undercut by their language, the ironies they exchange where edges blur. Just as Nicodemus is both on the inside and the outside, so none of the distinctions that Jesus makes—flesh/spirit, earth/heaven, light/darkness—remain hard. Almost as soon as these categories are defined, they begin to shift like the wind.
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Brilliantly orchestrated, the pivotal scene unfolds in three movements of increasing length and decreasing complexity, as Jesus’ vocabulary narrows to a chant of “belief” and “light” and his monologue dominates. John signals us when a movement begins and ends, using the close of each for emphasis. All three movements begin “Verily, verily” (3:3, 5, 11), the first two ending with Nicodemus’ question. Significantly, the last movement ends not with a question, since Nicodemus has dropped out of the conversation, but with a declaration about “doing truth” in the light. This returns us to John’s Prologue, his opening hymn to the word and the light, signaling the importance of this scene.
As we have seen, Jesus’ program begins in the first movement, redefining “birth” as the necessary groundwork for the redefinition of “flesh” and “spirit” in the second. He insists that “flesh is flesh” and “spirit is spirit,” attempting to draw a clear line between the two. At the same time, Jesus ends this movement with the powerful but ambiguous image of the wind, and John dramatizes the word play (wind/spirit), which together undermine any rigid distinction between flesh and spirit.
Nicodemus’ question, furthermore, “How can these things be?” wins our sympathy. While we’re drawn to Nicodemus, we are distanced by Jesus. For his withering irony in response, “Art thou a master of Israel, and know not these things?” betrays a lack of patience. Jesus presses his program hard in this second movement, but Nicodemus’ genuine question breaks the momentum. He is no straight man, and his question dogs us throughout the rest of the book, which is why John introduces it here.
Nicodemus does not deny Jesus’ assertion. Instead, he asks in so many words, “in what way are you speaking of these things”? Yet Jesus’ tone shifts immediately to the hortatory with a flurry of premises, a rhetoric that Jesus wants Nicodemus to adopt because once the new vocabulary of “birth” and “spirit” is accepted, Jesus’ conclusion follows.
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The dialogue at this point, as if to consolidate his renaming power, becomes a monologue. John gives Jesus the last word, a long speech that does not end with a question. Jesus begins authoritatively, asking a question himself, albeit rhetorical, about understanding “earthly” and “heavenly” things (3:12). At the same time, he picks up Nicodemus’ irony from the opening of the scene, where he had addressed Jesus in the first person plural, “We know that you are. . . . ” Likewise, Jesus shifts here from “I” to “We.” More important, while driving home the firm distinction between earth and heaven, emphasizing their difference by the contrast between ascending and descending, Jesus repeatedly names the “Son of man.” And he dwells in heaven as well as on earth. The Son of man participates like Jacob’s ladder or the serpent that Moses lifted up (3:14) in both the earthly and the heavenly, blurring their outlines. What first seem to be hard categories prove to be soft.
A similar dynamic operates at the end of Jesus’ monologue. Working himself into a fine chant on the word “belief,” he climaxes with a demand for belief in the “name” (3:18) of the Son of Man/God. Anyone, not just Nicodemus could be confused, for by now this name signifies God and/or man. Jesus breaks the law of the excluded middle. In building language with Nicodemus in their contra-dance, Jesus dissolves the categories of flesh and spirit, earth and heaven, even man and God.
Returning at the end of his monologue to the primary categories with which John opens his book, Jesus makes a final attempt to draw the edges clearly. He turns to the consequences of not accepting his new vocabulary, such as “birth,” and its concomitant binary categories of thought and life, such as “flesh” versus “spirit.” What opposition could be clearer than light and darkness? An ancient dualism, Jesus turns it to his own ends, redefining it in terms of a person “come into the world” who courts the world and is either loved or rejected. In a wonderful move Jesus turns an abstract, traditional metaphysical duality into a drama of desire. Earlier Jesus has said he is not concerned to “condemn the world” (3:17) for not believing on the “name.” Now we understand why.
For the world, if it rejects the lover named light, suffers a condemnation that arises from within:
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that does truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God (3:19–21).
A deft move, Jesus avoids condemning, as does John throughout his book, by simply pointing to the condemnation that dwells in all who do not choose to inhabit his new edifice of language. And self-condemnation, we know, is the worst damnation.
This strategy enables Jesus to avoid the trap of dualism, inherited from the tradition of light/darkness, while constructing new categories with which to understand the world. Yet this advantage cuts both ways. Turning back on him, his strategy erases any sharp line between the categories. For light is reality, a bodily reality, the light in the beginning and in the end, while darkness is defined wholly in terms of this reality. Darkness ultimately has no substance in itself. The one who does evil does not finally, therefore, love darkness. Rather, he “hates the light.” Thus darkness is fundamentally the absence of light.
Jesus speaks of desire that forms character, those who “come to the light” like lovers. With John we appreciate the irony of Nicodemus the lover of light coming to Jesus by night. Later John uses the word symbolically, noting pointedly that Judas, after betraying Jesus, goes out into the “night” (13:30). But John clearly savors the night scene here for its dramatic effect. Using it counter to convention, darkness reinforces the note of affirmation at the end of Jesus’ monologue, where in a lesser writer we would expect condemnation. In the silence that John gives Nicodemus, we become aware that he knows but does not believe on the one “name.” For Nicodemus resists a single all-defining vocabulary with its rigid categories