JOHN142 - Nicodemus was a Pharisee

John 3

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Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. That's how John chapter 3 opens. And there's enough here for us to start chewing on in terms of making sense of who this guy was and what the political pressures involved were about. Now it seems like every single season of this podcast, we end up talking about the Pharisees. And depending on what book we're looking at, you know, I might take it from a little different angle or emphasize different things. So I know that we've talked about the Pharisees quite a bit. Still, to make sense of this passage and to get ourselves in the shoes here, where we of the original audience where we can feel the tensions of this story the way we can feel the tensions of a Twitter exchange today, we got to talk about the Pharisees again for a minute. The Pharisees happen between the Old Testament and the New Testament. There aren't Pharisees in the Old Testament. They're kind of precursors of them. Not really. I mean, there are people who have similar values and similar ideas, but it looks like the Pharisees become a significant thing about 150 years before the birth of Christ. I was talking the other day about the feast of dedication that celebrates Hanukkah and the purging of the temple that the Maccabees did in the 160s BC. Well, that purging and that reform movement that the Maccabees led, it didn't last very long. I mean, they did a good job of cleaning things up initially. The descendants of Alexander the Great's general Seleucus were turds. They made things really difficult for the Jewish people. They profaned the temple of God. And finally, they just pushed their luck too hard. And a bunch of hardcore Jewish guys rebelled. They got other people to rally to their side. This is the Maccabean Revolt in the 160s BC. And they won against a global super empire, a superpower, the Seleucids. That was pretty awesome. And they purged the temple. They did all the cleansing and everything. They took apart the altar stone by stone and they built a new one and they got things back on track. And that was awesome. But you know how a lot of times a group will be good at breaking something that needed to be broken, but not great at leading when it comes time to lead? Well, that was the Maccabeans and their descendants. It turned out to be a very corrupt hundred-year little mini kingdom that runs from, what was it, the 160s BC to the 60s BC. And it kind of flames out in an ugly way. And that was the relative, that's what set the politics of Jesus' time in motion. And one of the ways that those events set the politics of Jesus' time in motion is somewhere there, yeah, 140, 150-ish, a group of very religiously devout Jewish people in the midst of the early Maccabean Revolution were like, hey, we need to do piety around here. Like we need normal people to live with the piety of priests. Now, in this way, we should be very sympathetic to the Pharisees. They looked back to the Old Testament. They're like, well, what did we get wrong? What were the bad things that happened? Okay, well, we worshiped idols. We married our neighboring families and we made deals with them, even though they worshiped pagan gods and it watered down the sincerity of our belief. And God explicitly said, Don't do that, and we did it, and he explicitly said, I'm going to punish you if you do that kind of thing. And so then Ezra and Nehemiah came along in the 440s BC and they got things cleaned up. They set it on a good track. We need to be on a good track. We need to do the things the good people did in the Old Testament. We need to not do the things the bad and stupid people did in the Old Testament. And so it's kind of a religious reform movement within a larger political, ethnic, religious-ish reform movement. So the Pharisees at this point, they're kind of like Puritans. I don't know. The Puritans were more about ecclesiology and but also the Puritans were very much about piety. Um maybe they're like the Pietists. A lot of your evangelical movement uh comes out of the pietist movement in Europe. I don't know quite what to compare them to. They were just people who took it seriously. And they were like, we shouldn't just have like a class of people who takes God seriously and obeys him. We should all do that. So I the Pharisees start off kind of nice in that regard. And as a result, this class of non-priests, they're not priests and they're not Levites, they're teachers, they're experts at the Bible and the law, they're holy men, they're a club that eventually gains formal political power. It's not long, you know, by getting close to 100 BC, they're actually in fights with the high priests slash kings of the Maccabean kingdom. So that means they're pretty powerful. By the time we start to hear about them in history, they're a very significant group. And then the Pharisees kind of, you know, get into it more aggressively with the very corrupt leadership of their kingdom. And Josephus tells us that one of the leaders of that kingdom actually crucified a whole bunch of Pharisees. That's kind of a forgotten detail that when you think about it, you know, I mean, that happens in the uh, I don't remember exactly, maybe the 80s BC, maybe 20 years before the collapse of the Maccabean kingdom. But Pharisees got crucified in that time. Let that sink in for a minute, because they're the ones who are doing the crucifying around 30 AD. So within less than a hundred years, they go from being the victims of a mass crucifixion to crucifying Jesus. You know, just a little self-awareness moment right there. So there's this internal strife that goes hot, blood is shed with this just absolutely fervent, you might almost say fundamentalist religious, uh, Jewish fundamentalist movement within Judaism in the first century BC. Well, then eventually the Romans, um, well, somewhat bloodily, somewhat bloodlessly, it's kind of a political move, they topple the Maccabean kingdom and Roman control takes over. And then it's kind of very formalized a little bit after the time of the birth of Jesus, and Judea and Galilee become part of formal Roman provinces. And by the time of Jesus, the Pharisees are not a huge group in terms of numbers because it, I mean, it was took crazy qualifications to get there. Okay, uh, the Jesuits, like the Jesuits, I think they have like some kind of oath or something that they take to like crush and destroy Protestants everywhere. I don't know if that's still the thing, but when they were founded, they were like an anti-Protestant missionary movement as a pretty aggressive group. I'm not crazy about that part of what this Catholic organization, the Jesuits, are about. But I gotta tip my hat to their intelligence. The Jesuits are crazy well trained, which I mean they kind of need to be to carry out at least their initial commissioning, which is pretty subversive. Well, the Pharisees are crazy well trained. So maybe, you know, 500,000 people sympathized with the Pharisees and wanted to be Pharisees at the time of Jesus, but you got to learn all these languages. People didn't speak Hebrew, that's what the scriptures were in. They spoke Aramaic. And people could handle Greek, like you're common people, but the Old Testament scriptures, the Septuagint was a very common Bible that was floating around as well. So these people were multilingual, multicultural, in that they understood Roman culture, ancient Near Eastern culture, Hebrew culture, probably Egyptian culture, Babylonian-Persian culture, because these guys were purveyors in all of these different scattered Jewish traditions. Bottom line is they were brilliant. And to get to this point where you could do it, you would have to sit under the teaching of a rabbi for a long time. And so the Pharisees are not a huge group. 5,000, maybe 10,000 tops. I think Josephus says 6,000 is the number of Pharisees around the time of Jesus. But there are so many people who like them and support them. So they were not the dominant party at the time of Jesus. They're the one you always think of because you hear about them and they're the ones who most got into it with Jesus. The Sadducees were the more dominant party. They controlled the rhythms of the temple. The relevant high priests to the New Testament era are Sadducees. The Pharisees were much more interested in personal piety, or at least it comes off that way than the Sadducees. Also, they were super interested in some of the more, I don't know, miraculous, mystical sounding stuff of the Old Testament and the tradition, like angels and resurrection and the spiritual world and things like that. So, in light of all of that, the Pharisees' power came from being debate-me bros. They had their facts together and they were hard to beat in a debate. They had a reputation for being super geniuses, which makes the fact that Jesus constantly handled them effortlessly without breaking a sweat all the more impressive. The Pharisees were unbeatable. Their ideas, they were the kind of people who you talk to, and you're like, I don't know. I know you're wrong, but the amount of effort it would take to defeat you, I just all I can do is walk away. I don't have time, I'm working on other things in my life. You know, people like that. Well, imagine an army of five to ten thousand guys like that, well dressed, well funded, and the champions of the common man. The common man would look at that and be like, well, you can't beat those guys in an argument. Those are the those are the winners of the day. And so people liked him. They the power of the Pharisees came largely from their popularity with the people. Okay, again, you see how Jesus could be a threat to them? Because I uh Jesus was a lot more popular with the people than they were. They were popular with the people because they could use big fancy words, and they were kind of a surrogate argument winner against the old guard good old boys club that is the Sadducees. Kind of the a little bit fat and happy, lazy good old boys club who were the Sadducees. I'm not saying they were dumb, they were smart too. And so they were kind of the champions of the common man. Well, the common man ran after Jesus, much more. The common man didn't follow the Pharisees out onto a hillside a couple of times in groups of four or five thousand men with women and children too, to have the Pharisees feed them. They didn't go up on the side of a mountain spontaneously in gigantic droves to have the Pharisees teach them. And well, this was very threatening. I mean, the Pharisees' really only power was that enough people liked them that they could kind of get some of the popular seats on the Jewish ruling council, but they weren't priests. They weren't, you know, necessarily from the priestly line of Aaron. So their power came from knowing stuff and having the people like them. And Jesus was better at both of those things than they were. And further, in the interest of, you know, getting to that level of historical nuance that we've been talking about lately and understanding the pressures and the different little layers and shades of gray here with the Pharisees, it should also be noted that the Pharisees themselves were not a singular body who agreed on everything. There were different very prominent Pharisaic rabbis who came along over time and advocated for a Pharisaic school of thought. Some of them were much more strict than others, others were more lenient and had, I wouldn't say liberal, but a plan to how to make their Phariseism more practically doable for the common man. And so within the Pharisees, there was even disagreement on these things. And it's possible that as we dig into this deal with Nicodemus, you know, discreetly coming and talking to Jesus, it's very possible that Nicodemus is from a different wing of the Pharisee party than maybe the Pharisees who were pestering Jesus and John the Baptist earlier, demanding to know things. Maybe Nicodemus is from a group that has a little different style, a little different trademark that existed. As I have said before, I will say again now, on paper, the Pharisees would kind of seem like the good guys. Maybe reluctant good guys, maybe frenemy good guys, but they would be for most of you who listen to this and what I've encountered and have come to understand most of you believe and your values. For most of you, the Pharisees would be the party that you hold your nose and reluctantly vote for every time because they get there in a weird way and they kind of act like jackwagons about it, but they share your values. But if something came along that looked true and real and uncompromised and not weird and arrogant and aloof and controlling, but you still got you, but you got like all the good stuff, but even better, and it was authentic, you would wash your hands of the Pharisees in a second and chase after that real thing with a coherent vision, with a coherent read on history and the heart of a man, the heart of a woman, what makes a person a person, and where this is all going and who God is, you would listen. The Pharisees understood enough of it to fake it. They at least wanted to try to please God, even if ignorantly and dimly, even if clouded by arrogance, but Jesus was the real, it was a genuine article. So I think most of us would have been reluctantly pro-Pharisee, and then pretty quickly would have been like, okay, yeah, Jesus is what we actually want. All of that said, it's pretty crazy that this Nicodemus fellow who's on the Jewish ruling council is willing to show up and take a chance on talking with Jesus. Well, that's interesting. We'll break down more of what they talk about next time around. Um Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.