(The following is my sermon from Easter Sunday. It was presented in a style called a first-person sermon. This kind of sermon is one in which I play the role of a biblical character from the Bible.)
Good morning! It is such a privilege to be here with you this morning. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined a day like this—a day where millions of people around the world remember and worship Yeshua ben Yosef, the Lord Jesus, and His glorious resurrection. And to think that people in a land that I didn’t even know about would be worshipping Him—it is all so overwhelming!
My name is Nicodemus, and I am here today to tell you about my story. You may wonder why I am here instead of someone like Peter or John. Many people don’t realize that I became a believer in Jesus because of the events surrounding his crucifixion. Did you know that? Well, if you didn’t, I only have myself to blame, because I was slow to come to faith in Jesus, and I was intimidated to share my true thoughts about Him.
I hope that on this Easter Sunday, you won’t mind listening to the recollections of an old man. I know that many of you have a busy day ahead of you. I’ve been told that many of you will hunt for candy-filled eggs in your yard later today. You must have some strange chickens in your country! And I still can’t believe that many of you eat ham on a day that honors a Jewish man! But if you will bear with me for a little while, I would like to tell you how I came to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the one who saves us from our sins!
When Jesus first began to make Himself known to the public, I was a member of the Jewish ruling council called the Sanhedrin. It was similar to the Supreme Court that you have in your country, except we had seventy members instead of nine. Our council was divided primarily into two factions—the Sadducees and the Pharisees. I was a proud member of the Pharisees. Our factions were divided more or less over two issues. The first was our belief in the doctrine of what you call today the “Old Testament.” We Pharisees took great pride in preserving and following everything that God had spoken to our people through Moses and the prophets, but the Sadducees weren’t very interested in what they considered to be “religious superstitions.”
Our second point of disagreement was the way in which we related to the Roman Empire. Our people were ruled by the Romans at that time, and the Sadducees were willing to be more welcoming of their authority. We Pharisees, on the other hand—you might say that we tolerated the Romans, mostly because we felt like we had no other choice. But we longed for the day when God would send the Messiah, whom He had promised in the Old Testament, who would come and set up a kingdom based on God’s rule, not Roman rule.
That is why many of us among the Pharisees were intrigued when we heard about Jesus. He had certainly made a splash when He became a public figure. During the Passover feast that year, Jesus came to celebrate in Jerusalem, as all Jewish men were required to do. But when He arrived in town, He went to the Temple and began to chase out all of the people who were selling animals and all of the people who were exchanging foreign money for Jewish money. He kept saying that the Temple was His Father’s house and that it was supposed to be a place for prayer, not a marketplace.
And if that wasn’t enough to draw attention, He then started to teach people about God and heal them of various diseases. We were very curious about Jesus, but we didn’t know what to make of Him. We knew that He had been praised by John the Baptist, but that was kind of a mixed blessing to us Pharisees. After all, John had called us a brood of vipers when we visited him, so a lot of us were offended by him.
Still, when we considered Jesus, we couldn’t deny that God was with Him because of the power that He had to perform miracles. We decided that we needed to find out more about Him, so I decided to go and speak to Him personally. However, at that time, I didn’t feel like I could afford to be publicly associated with Him, so I went and spoke to Him at night when there was less of a chance that I would be discovered. I didn’t want anyone to think that I was necessarily giving my approval of this man. This is the story that many of you know from John 3.
When I went to visit Jesus, I wanted to approach Him with more than just common courtesy. I wanted to communicate respect, so I addressed Him as “rabbi,” which was the title given to honored teachers. I greeted Him and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with Him.”
He listened to my greeting and He was courteous, but His response made it clear that He wasn’t interested in sitting around and exchanging pleasantries. It was as if He said, “You call me a teacher, do you? Well, then, here’s what you need to learn!” He said to me, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
I have to admit, I was kind of taken aback by these words. I didn’t understand quite what He meant by them, but by the way that He introduced His statement, I knew that He considered this to be a very important lesson. He was clearly talking about the way to find a place in the kingdom that the Messiah would set up, but what did He mean that we had to be born again? I and the Pharisees believed that following the Law and our traditions was the way to enter the kingdom of God, be He seemed to be saying that something totally different was necessary.
An awkward silence hung in the air as I thought about these words. I didn’t know quite what to say, so I tried to break the silence with some sarcastic humor. I said, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
My words were ill-conceived, but I didn’t know what else to say. I was relieved but even more perplexed when Jesus went on to say, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Jesus was indeed a good teacher, because He stayed right with the main point! But I was still a poor student, because I didn’t understand what He was saying. Jesus seemed to be saying that a spiritual cleansing was necessary to enter the kingdom of God. It wasn’t until later that I remembered that God had said the same thing through the prophet Ezekiel. He spoke through the prophet about a spiritual cleansing, and He said, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you…And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules (Ezek 36:25–27).”
That’s what Jesus was talking about—the need to be cleansed from our sins. But I didn’t understand at the time. He explained it further, but in exasperation I said, “How can these things be?” Then Jesus said something that cut me to the heart. He said, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” He was right—I should have understood what He was saying, but I didn’t. He even connected His lesson to a story about Moses from the Old Testament, but I wouldn’t understand that until later.
I left my conversation with Jesus confused, but with a heart-felt respect for Him. I never personally spoke to Him again, but you can be sure that I followed His every move. All of us Pharisees did, especially as He continued to teach and heal the people. Many of the Pharisees turned against Him because He started to publicly criticize us. He called us hypocrites; He told the people that we said all the right things, but we didn’t do them. We talked about honoring God, but as He put it, we had put our own traditions in place of God’s Law, so we were no longer serving God but simply our own pride.
This kind of talk enraged many of my colleagues, so we ordered that Jesus be arrested and brought to us. This story is recorded at the end of John 7. We sent some officers to arrest Jesus, but they came back to us empty-handed. When we asked why, they simply said, “No one ever spoke like this man!” It was clear that they had been impressed by Him as well. My colleagues, however, were not impressed, and they began to insult the officers and the crowds of common people who were believing in Jesus.
It was clear that most of my colleagues in the Sanhedrin had already condemned Jesus. This really did not sit well with me, because we hadn’t even given Jesus a hearing yet. We were disregarding our own Law, which we supposedly cared so much about, so I stood up and said, “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?”
I saw maybe one or two sympathetic nods in the crowd, but otherwise it was clear that my objection had fallen on deaf ears. They began to insult me as well, suggesting that I was prejudiced and ignorant. I wish now that I had stood my ground, but I was ashamed to be humiliated in front of my colleagues. So, I fell silent.
Little did I know that I would later have another opportunity to speak up for Jesus before that Sanhedrin; that is, after he was betrayed by Judas and arrested. But in that moment, I cowered, and said nothing. I still was not a follower of Jesus, but I knew that whole trial was a sham. An amateur student of our Law could have seen how illegal the whole thing was! But it didn’t matter, because Jesus didn’t stand a chance of getting a fair trial. I still regret that I didn’t speak out against this injustice, but in hindsight, I know that—incredibly—it was all part of God’s plan.
As you know, the trials came to their pre-determined verdict, and after some more shady maneuvering, we got Pilate to allow Jesus to be crucified. I had really had my fill of this whole ordeal, but many of my colleagues went out to watch His crucifixion, and I felt myself compelled to go with them. I could have gone my whole life without seeing another crucifixion, but for some reason I felt drawn to go along.
When I arrived at the crucifixion site—a place called Golgotha—they had already crucified two other men, and they were preparing to lift Jesus’ cross up into place between them. When His cross was set into position, Jesus was lifted up high off the ground, and something that he had said during our conversation came back to me at that moment. He told me that he had to be lifted up, as Moses had lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. You see, in the Old Testament, there was a time when the people of Israel had sinned against God, and God brought His judgment against the people by sending poisonous snakes into their camp. But God told Moses to make a bronze model of a snake and put it high up on a pole in the camp, and whoever would have the faith to look at the snake would be delivered from God’s judgment—or in other words, they would be cleansed from their sin.
And then I realized—this was what Jesus was talking about! The new birth, the spiritual cleansing, gaining entrance to God’s kingdom, it all revolved around this moment—and it was playing out right before my eyes! Jesus had been lifted up, and He was dying on that cross, but somehow His death would make that spiritual cleansing—that forgiveness—possible, for as He said, whoever believes in Him would have eternal life.
I’m not sure that I could have explained all of that at the moment, but somehow I knew that what Jesus said was true. I needed to be spiritually cleansed; I needed to be born again, and somehow His death was making that possible for me if I would only believe in Him. And so I did. Even though I didn’t know what that would mean for me in the days to come, I believed.
I stayed there at the foot of the cross until Jesus passed away. Most of my colleagues shouted at Him and insulted Him, and encouraged the crowd to do the same. But there were a handful of us who remained silent and watched. One of my colleagues, Joseph of Arimathea, must of seen that something profound was on mind, because he came over and put his hand on my shoulder. I had hesitated to speak up for Jesus in the past, but I couldn’t keep quiet anymore about what Jesus had said, and so I told Joseph about my conversation with Jesus, and that I now believed in Him.
Then I heard something that I never expected—Joseph said that he, too, believed in Jesus. In fact, he had for quite some time, but he had kept quiet because of fear of the rest of the Sanhedrin. But he said he could no longer hide his love for Jesus, and that he was about to make a bold move. He said that he couldn’t stand the thought that Jesus’ body might end up in the common grave for crucified criminals, so he was going to ask Pilate to give the body to him.
This was bold indeed, because then everyone would know that he was a follower of Jesus, but I thought it was a great way to honor Him. I asked Joseph if I could join him, and he agreed. We would have to hurry because it was almost the day of Sabbath, when we would have to cease all of our work, so Joseph went and spoke to Pilate and I gathered up the linen fabric and the spices that we would need to give Jesus a proper burial. You can read about this in John 19.
You know, I love the way that our brother John recorded my involvement in all of this. There in John 19:39, he reminds you that I was the one who had come to Jesus by night, under the cover of darkness. It’s true—I had been afraid back then to associate with Jesus, but I was no longer afraid. I had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and that He had come into the world to save us from our sins. And when he rose from the dead, everything I believed was confirmed.
I had received new life and forgiveness of my sins from Jesus. I was born again. No, I never re-entered the womb to be born a second time. I was spiritually cleansed, and you can be cleansed as well if you will simply believe in Jesus.
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