Nicodemus the Noodge
Psalm 16, 17 • Psalm 22
Job 9:1-15, 32-35 • Acts 19:34-48 • John 7:37-52
Having married into a Jewish family fifteen years ago, I’ve learned more than my fair share of Yiddish words, and one of my favorites is “noodge.” Taken literally, a noodge is a pest, a bother, but those simple definitions don’t do justice to the word’s rich connotations. Imagine that you’re in a committee meeting, and you and your fellow members have been engaged in a long, sometimes heated discussion of a thorny issue. Finally, it appears as though everyone is on the same page and the group can come to a well-earned closure. But then you hear a voice from the corner of the room, and one of the committee members says, “Well, not so fast there. I don’t think we’re quite done yet.” That person is a noodge.
Nicodemus, whom we encounter for the second time in today’s reading from the Gospel of John, is one of my favorite characters in scripture, and, boy, is he a noodge. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a group that Jesus characterized as being overly legalistic, and a member of the Sanhedrin, the high Jewish court. We first meet Nicodemus at the beginning of Chapter 3, when he comes to see Jesus and question him about how he can interpret signs. When Jesus tells him that no one can know the kingdom of God without being “born from above,” Nicodemus peppers him with questions: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
Then, in today’s reading from Chapter 7, we see that the temple police want to arrest Jesus and bring him before the Sanhedrin for prophesying. The Sanhedrin seem ready to proceed with the arrest, but then Nicodemus noodges in, with his own version of “not so fast there”: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?”
We meet Nicodemus for the third time in John’s Gospel after the crucifixion, when he provides embalming spices and helps Joseph of Arimathea prepare Jesus’s body for burial. Nicodemus the noodge, we discover, is actually Nicodemus the blessed.
Written by David Jolliffe
...who admits to being a noodge occasionally.