Nicodemus: The Life and the Legend

By Reginald Rodman

Part One:
The story of Nicodemus beginning with his meeting with Jesus and
his awakening personal growth. Discovering that his inherited religion was in serious upheaval as
a result of his meeting with Jesus he abandoned his high position as a leader in the Religious status quo, and by following Jesus and his teachings of Jesus, Nicodemus discovered a new and life-giving spiritual maturity in Christ.

Part Two:
The best way of describing Part Two is to refer you to the book you have already published. (Seeing with the Heart and Soul). It is a collection of short stories of biblical and human experiences relying on legitimate and accepted theology, using anachronism as a tool to make biblical events contemporary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499045673

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by The Rev. Reginald C. Rodman.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014911915

ISBN:      Hardcover    978-1-4990-4565-9

                Softcover     978-1-4990-4566-6

                eBook          978-1-4990-4567-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/26/2014

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Contents

The First Trimester

Chapter 2 Second Trimester

The End Of The Beginning

The Wet And Holy End Of The Birth Of Nicodemus

New Chapter

Jerusalem: Nicodemus And Vera

Part Two

Back To Jerusalem

Following The Man

Kitchen Tables

Day At The Office

This Man Jesus?

Advent In The Checkout Lane

Church People

Lightship

Aids To Navigation

Beauty And Sharing

Excerpt From The Log Of Finesse

Spirit And Birth

Eli And Sammy

Eli And Sammy The Dying, The Waking The Wonder Of Form

Very Wise Men

Very Wise Men

Very Wise Men

Who Needs The Church

Who Needs The Church

The Man Who Makes Carols

Merry Christmas

Great Caesar’s Host

The First Trimester

Nicodemus put down the March issue of the Jerusalem Theological Review. He liked seeing his name on the cover as a contributing editor, but what really impressed him was the scholarly and highly readable monograph based on Deuteronomy 18:15 and much of what followed. His mind jumped ahead to the upcoming faculty meeting and then back to the morning news about this Jesus fellow and the shocking yet captivating news about the temple. What’s going on? he thought to himself. Something was exciting him, but he didn’t know what it was.

He glanced across the kitchen table at his wife who had just turned the serving platter so that the largest of the two jelly doughnuts was closest to him. God, she’s beautiful, he thought. He was fascinated by this creature that enlivened him and then began to fantasize about staying home.

She was almost totally absorbed in Sylvia Porter’s column on Roman futures. She knew Nicodemus had spotted the doughnut and waited for him to go through his funny little ritual that was so childish and endearing. His hand came forward, as if unattached to the rest of him, while the rest of him read with pretended interest the nutritional information on the back side of a box of Wheaties. Ponderously his hand passed over the large doughnut and then tenderly assumed plucking position over the smaller one—the doughnut he hoped his wife would end up eating.

She came through. No, hon, the other one.

Then began the looks and gestures she treasured so about her husband. They always seemed to happen quickly and smoothly. His hand heard her before his mind did and, as if it didn’t matter, seized upon the larger doughnut just as his ears received her first vocal giving for the day.

Ah, I get the big doughnut, thought Nicodemus. His insides rejoiced, while his outsides feigned nonchalance.

She felt a quiet delight as she watched her childlike professorial husband so unaware of her detection and love. The giant doughnut zoomed toward his mouth, accelerated first by his large ambitious eyes and then slowed down considerably as it entered his atmosphere of guilt.

Damn, he thought, she’s unconscionably generous, and here I am, sixty-four years old, incapable of small generosities and pretending not to be selfish.

It tasted like ashes in his mouth until the jelly part squished out.

I wonder if she’d—maybe if I put my arms around her. I’ve got a whole half hour before the bus comes.

She knew the mixed feelings he was swallowing along with his doughnut. Dear gentle man, she thought. So bright, so sensitive, so much the child. Strong in the holiest of ways, yet hopelessly governed by the larger doughnut.

She sensed his emerging embarrassment right on time and looked the other way while watching his every move. She felt drawn to him right then, and his inadequacy was very attractive to her.

I wish he would stay and love me.

He lit up a Fatima; she poured him another cup of decaf.

The bus pulled up close, stopped, exhaled, and then opened its door. He knew the driver. Gosh he’s been around a long time. I’ll miss him when he goes.

He settled in next to the window, across from the rear-door exit and thought about the faculty meeting again. Bus time was thinking time. So he started thinking. Then his eye caught the headline of the Jerusalem Enquirer, inadvertently held up for his reading pleasure by a preppy-looking man sitting in front of him and one seat to the right: No Injuries in Temple Tiff.

There was a photo of Jesus. The insides of Nicodemus began to move again. The feeling was exactly the same as those he had experienced while watching the TV before breakfast. Something was happening again, and it genuinely surprised him. He wasn’t automatically disapproving, and he was shocked at the fact that he wasn’t enraged at this violator, and most surprising of all was the feeling he had when his eyes fastened on the picture. It was like meeting the total stranger who knows you, like the truth of a dream that visits and then vanishes.

His heart murmured something to him that he couldn’t really hear, and his insides felt like the month of March: thawing, windblown, and quite possibly pregnant. The doughnut was quiet. Something was going on. Suddenly, the paper disappeared into the preppy’s El Al Bean leather briefcase and was, along with its carrier, swallowed up by the crowd at the bottom of Federal Street. And there was Nicodemus, his face unabashedly hanging out, looking at a picture that was now out of sight, blessedly unself-conscious and sincerely agitated, sitting in the back of the number 32 bus in Jerusalem.

He managed to endure the faculty meeting with a little more grace than usual, except that he ran out of cigarettes. The faculty was up in arms about the temple disaster, and everything they said could have come out of his mouth and should have—except it didn’t. For the first time since he was eleven years old, he didn’t know what to do or think or say. He decided to eat.

His last class was scheduled at three o’clock, and he dreaded it. He always felt uncomfortable with the graduating seniors and never knew why. They were waiting for him, and he knew what they wanted to do. They wanted to rant about this Jesus and his outrageous behavior in the temple.

And that’s precisely what they did. For forty-five minutes, they ranted and raged and quoted scripture and loved themselves to death in the process. They were fine, they were saved, and God help anyone whose god was larger or kinder or more human than they themselves.

Nicodemus sat at his desk and thought of Hieronymus Bosch and wondered why. And then, he couldn’t figure out for the life of him why he found himself mysteriously immune from his intensely invested students. Nothing connected.

I must be getting senile, he thought. Maybe I’m just not with it the way I used to be.

A picture of his old professors flashed across his mind followed by a snapshot of his wife’s face. Mercifully, the bell rang, the class was over, and Nicodemus was back on the bus looking for the preppy with the evening news.

Supper was warm and secure and elegant. Dos Equis in a bottle, avocado dip, gazpacho, and a Camel flauta. Rushing the season, they ate quietly and passionately in the still chilly courtyard until the evening cool pushed them inside where he made the mistake of trying to tell her about his day. He found it impossible to do. So he sat there facing her, staring in her general direction, looking for a way to express the inexpressible.

She was patient and recognized immediately that he was struggling with more than a hard day at the office or the smoldering remains of his Camel flauta. This was the part of being with him she fiercely loved. She knew he had to reach inside himself and couldn’t do it. It was beyond him, and she was glad. She cherished the fact that to touch his own soul, he had to touch hers.

And so he talked and confessed and anguished and sighed and maybe even whined about the struggle within and his religion without. He talked about his life, about getting old, about never being prime minister or even secretary of education. Finally, he talked about his day and how strangely it affected him. She listened to his almost soulful confession as if she were conducting, without moving her arms, the Palestine Philharmonic. Under her superb direction, he began to hear a little of his own tentative music. He liked it, loved her, and wanted to go to bed. He felt better.

He loved those precious moments before sleep; and with a smile, he crawled into bed, anticipating the natural holiness that never came to him during the day. Gratefully, he kissed his wife good night and waited for what he secretly came to regard as his most effective prayer; but the sleep never came. He stared now at the ceiling, and it was much less responsive than his wife.

He had to work alone now, so he waited and tossed and turned. And just as he was entering the sanctity of sleep, the answer came. It was there all the time. It was there before the morning news. It was there ever since he read the article in the Theological Review.

God, I’m slow, he thought. And I know I’m not getting senile.

Immediately, he was out of bed and in his study, groping for the light and looking for the Review, unaware he had left it on the kitchen table. But there it was, on top of the pile that grew on his desk. There was a note, paper-clipped to its cover in his wife’s familiar hand: Nicodemus, you’re a slob.

He turned to the featured article—now much more important than his name on the cover—and read it with hungry, expectant eyes. He found the scholarly but upbeat translation on page 80: If a prophet who begins to prophesy (i.e., who is still unaccredited) gives a sign and a miracle, he is to be listened to—otherwise, he is not to be heeded.

Chapter 2

Second Trimester

Nicodemus placed the Review on top of the foothills of junk mail between the two mountains of books and papers that held down his desk. He was relieved, excited, tired, and knew something was about to happen. Standing in the middle of his dark study, he felt the urge to know where he really was and kept searching for some reference point that remained hidden. Some force, some spirit was pushing him out of his long-term legal residence between lost and found.

He sat down gently on his leather La-Z-Goy, flipped up the lever, and lowered his upper body away from the cone of light that shone down from the hot bulb and poolroom shade that hung over his desk and chair. With head and shoulders now outside the illumined perimeter and relieved from the demands of light, Nicodemus closed his eyes and tried to remember the face of Jesus. It was impossible. He smiled about that and felt wonderfully close to the one he couldn’t see and didn’t know. His lips moved and gave silent shape to the song that sang itself from the childhood of long ago:

I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the night watches. For you have been my helper, and under the shadow of your wings I will rejoice.

The darkness was of especially good quality in the murk of his study, and like an old friend, she closed his eyes and tucked him into the hospitality of sleep.

And then he dreamed. Directly under his La-Z-Goy, he discovered a trapdoor that opened to reveal a long staircase that went down into a basement. The passageway was chiseled out of solid rock, like a mineshaft, and stuck on the sides of the wall were candles, lit and giving off a remarkable amount of light. Each of the candles had a name that was spoken as he descended the stairway, but he couldn’t hear what the name was. He had feelings of guilt just like when, as a child in school, he was asked to name the prophets and couldn’t because he was so frightened that he forgot.

There was a cold wind that roared down the shaft with him, and he thought it odd that none of the candle’s lames flickered or were extinguished. At the bottom of the steps was the bus driver who was smiling and pointing to his uniform insignia, which said Torah Transit Authority. His other arm directed Nicodemus back toward the stairway, which wasn’t there anymore. Instead, there was a beautiful carpeted hallway that sucked the air right out of Nicodemus. He was moving toward it without walking, and it became larger and larger while—at the same time—it appeared to be moving away.

On his right-hand side was a real estate office, and seated at the desk was the preppy he had seen on the bus. Behind him was a large stylized poster showing a housing development made up of stuccoed condominiums surrounding a golf course on a plateau overlooking what he knew to be the Dead Sea. As if by magic, water was being shot into the air and then poured down on everything; but nothing (not even the golf course) was green or wet.

Then he saw a large sign in the preppy’s office, and it said: Essene Estates. Condos at Qumran. Vacancies. VA, FHA, YHWH. The briefcase in his other hand was filled with water, and the preppy was crying, unable to answer his beeping phone.

The three beeps of the microwave woke him up. He was disoriented and momentarily couldn’t figure out why he was in his study. And just as the dawn dawned, he found himself recalling the dream. Then he thought