Let me begin with a question. Are you frightened of the night? Maybe you feel you have grown out of that and no longer need to leave a gentle light on to comfort you like many children have. But from the number of security lights on the houses behind us, I get the feeling that we haven’t grown out of being frightened of the night because we don’t know who or what is lurking in the shadows. We hear noises and it might be a fox, enjoying their new found security from being hunted with hounds (!), alternatively it might be someone trying their chances with the backdoor.

The night gives many powerful allusions for us and evokes our deepest fears and confusions. Phrases like ‘the night-time of our fear’, ‘the dark night of the soul’, ‘the night of worries’ and the hymn ‘through the night of doubt and sorrow’, can be powerful with the resonances they conjure up. So when John tells us that Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, he is not just saying it was after 8 o’clock (John 3:1-17).

The night is dark and despite him being described as a religious leader, Nicodemus is in the dark on the deeper matters. He doesn’t understand what being born again might mean and he may not be alone. He doesn’t understand that Jesus is offering a fresh start; that turning to the Gospel of Jesus Christ requires us to re-evaluate our priorities and come at things as if we are newborns. It means being not only prepared to put all our old baggage behind us, but being allowed to.

I have found myself wondering about the Charles and Camilla wedding. The guidelines that I am expected to work to say that when considering whether or not to conduct the marriage of someone who has been divorced I have to take into account whether this will undermine the Church’s witness to marriage and if it will be a cause of scandal and outrage. One of the reasons for that might be when this relationship has directly contributed to the breakdown of a previous marriage. Well, it is being widely reported that the Charles and Camilla relationship has extended over 30 years and by implication and confession through two marriages. The rules could almost have been written for them. The way it is often put seems clear cut. This relationship is adulterous, has broken two marriages and is a scandal. Go away!

The trouble with Charles and Camilla is that so much is in the public domain, even in the broadsheet and compact papers, that we can be blinded to what is not in the public domain. We make the mistake of assuming we know because the press have said so, the press never being wrong of course; we assume we know the inner secrets of their marriage and relationship! Here we join Nicodemus in approaching by night. There are things we don’t see and can’t see; things we don’t understand and there are fears too; fears for the integrity of the Church’s witness and credibility. There are the wider issues of what do I and every other parish priest say to the couple whose relationship has broken their previous marriages now wanting a church wedding. This could look like the rug being pulled from under our feet.

This is where this story of Nicodemus and Jesus at night becomes strangely relevant. Jesus is offering to Nicodemus a way out of whatever fix he is in. It might look completely intractable, but there is a new start.

I don’t pretend to know the inner secrets of Charles and Camilla’s present and past relationships but I suspect that there are many regrets and some of these are created by their peculiar circumstances. I remember the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, describing the marriage of Charles and Diana as the stuff of fairytales. Well he may have been more right than anyone thought because fairytales are not real and are a figment of the imagination and perhaps others have contributed to this mess in ways few other couples have to face, or may be there are surprising similarities when fantasy and reality clash beneath the surface.

The current Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken about the Church of England’s guidelines for couples marrying after divorce. Those guidelines include prayers of penitence - both for what we have done and also what we have found ourselves caught up in. There have clearly been mistakes and are many regrets and perhaps we need to trust those who have pastoral contact here to have worked with them on this.

If we are not going to say that this relationship should end, then what is needed is a way out of the mess they are in. They are in this respect no different to the rest of us in need of a way out from the night time of our fear, the night of worries that scare us and oppress us, the darkness of the ways we box ourselves into corners with no way out, the night of the tangled web we weave and the mess we make. This comes in the language of new birth, of fresh starts. After all, the passage ends by Jesus saying he did not come to condemn the world but for salvation. Forgiveness follows repentance. In Christ, though, the prospect of that forgiveness is held out to us before we repent and forms the invitation to turn away from the past, which is what repentance involves. That past is expressed in the imagery of the night, the darkness and all that locks us in fear.

For Nicodemus a new day dawns with his encounter with the light. It dawns for us too. What are the night-time fears, oppressions that lock us in that we need to make a new start from? No one is exempt from the need for repentance, whether they are of royal birth or not. Equally no one is excluded from the new life on offer which provides the context for the call to repentance.

There is a phrase in the daily office of Morning Prayer which reminds us that the night is past and day is at hand. It draws on the double imagery of it being morning, so the night is past, but also of how we use day and night to represent hope and fear, oppression and liberation and so much more. Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night and leaves in the day light of Christ’s gracious new life. In this light we have no need to fear the night, for as the psalmist says: “the darkness is no darkness with you but the night is as clear as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike” (Psalm 139). We are set free to proclaim forgiveness and should have the courage to proclaim it along with the call to repentance, because in God’s grace it precedes the call to repent. Christ did not come to condemn, but to save.

© Ian Black 2005

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