Is God Fair? What About Gandhi?

It would be an understatement to say there was a lot riding on their ability to fulfill the law. Keeping it would make for a better life on earth and provide eternal security in the life to come. For a serious Pharisee like Nicodemus, the weight of this responsibility must have been stressful. How was one to know if they were righteous enough? The law became the measuring stick, and for those Pharisees who were intellectually honest, their inability to keep it must have bothered their conscience greatly. Such was Nicodemus’s heritage as a Pharisee.

We should note that the timeline of this conversation is interesting too. The book of John is focused largely on the events leading up to the Crucifixion. Take the cleansing of the Temple, for example. It is arguably the most dramatic confrontation between Jesus and the religious orthodoxy outside of His trial and execution. He cleared the temple of money changers and those selling cattle, sheep, and doves. This was the biggest tax-collecting event of the year for the Jewish leadership, and nothing is quite as likely to get a man in trouble as interfering with another’s pursuit of money. Yet, Jesus boldly entered the temple probably overthrowing every table in sight. This story is recorded in John chapter 2 while the other Gospels recorded this event near the end of their respective writings.

A documentary appearing on the History Channel a few years ago conjectured that this event at the temple sealed the fate of our Lord in the eyes of the Jewish authority. Until this time, Jesus had only been a thorn in their side, but now, by interrupting their flow of money, He had pushed their level of tolerance beyond the breaking point. Getting rid of Jesus would have assumed a new level of urgency.

At the same time the Roman rulers of Judea were having difficulty keeping their overseers back in the Roman White House happy as some of their fellow politicians were questioning their ability to govern and keep the peace. So both Herod and Pilate might have feared that any disturbance like the one Jesus caused on the biggest religious and financial day of the year had the potential of inviting more unwanted attention. Getting rid of this agitator, from their perspective, would have provided an easy solution. Consequently, both civil and religious authorities came to an agreement as how to handle this troublesome rabbi. The circumstances were now ripe for His execution. Enter Nicodemus―a wealthy, well-educated aristocrat honored and respected in the community as a Pharisee and member of the Jewish Supreme Court.

So why did this highly regarded man feel the need to come to Jesus at night? Maybe the answer can be found in his knowledge as a powerful insider. We are sure he was acutely aware of his cohorts’s blinding rage and their plans to destroy Him. However, we also know he believed Jesus to be a man of God. This conflict must have produced serious stress in his mind. Have you ever been part of an organization that you felt was treating someone unfairly? Did you feel the need to step in and straighten it all out?

Paul indirectly tells us how the rite of circumcision became his tool to explain why Old Covenant thinking—and its concomitant mindset—had no place in the New Covenant and why those who still demanded circumcision were so far off course. In Galatians 2:3-5 (RSV) he writes, “But even Titus, who was with me, was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. But because of false brethren secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy out our freedom which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage—to them we did not yield submission even for a moment, that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.” How these false brethren “knew” that Titus was not circumcised is suggested by Paul’s using the term “spy out.” We’ll let the reader figure out what this implies attempting to guide your understanding only by noting that what was true then is true now: people don’t have x-ray vision. Paul did not put up with this underhanded behavior from them for even a moment. “Not for an hour” (AV), would Paul allow the truth of the Gospel to be compromised. Not for an hour would he allow the thought to even settle among the hearers that keeping the Old Covenant was necessary to gain salvation under the New.

In Chapter 3, “Before the Thunder—Jesus and Nicodemus,” we saw how the slow growth of religious tradition had come to have the force of law over the lives of everyday people. This creeping blight had been growing for centuries. Indeed, as illustrated in the case of the tradition of Corban, the “tradition of the elders” had supplanted the very Law of God from which the tradition sprang. It will be recalled that the record also pointed out that there were “many” such traditions. The Pharisees, who vowed to keep these traditions, became imprisoned by them, and they sought to force their prison on others, and weren’t shy about demanding others comply. It is clear from the Gospels, that the deference given to the tradition of the elders above the Law is what drew some of Jesus’s harshest criticism of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law. His stinging rebukes to such a sorry state of affairs are also why they must have viewed Him as a source of irritation.