With the start of another year of school, my mind goes back to the years when I started school.

New clothes. New classes. New friends and old friends.

Most everyone, though, wondered and worried about the biggest question of all:

What teacher or teachers will I get?

I remember my fourth-grade teacher. Mrs. Boodie. She had an infamous reputation. It was rumored that if you disagreed with her, she would push you down the hallway stairs. Behind her back we dared to call her Mrs. Bootie. While terrified, we were also appalled at the injustice of the kids who lucked out and got the younger, prettier teacher just across the hall.

My fifth-grade teacher was nice as could be, Miss Gaudino. Midway through the year, she was engaged to be married. She showed the students her engagement ring. The class was abuzz. It was like she was becoming royalty. Our moms organized a bridal shower, and they let us give her wedding gifts.

Then the engagement was mysteriously and suddenly broken, and she took a long time off, at least, more than a week. We liked her, so having substitutes wasn't really fun. When she came back, we could all tell it was hard for her. But she said she wanted to be with us, and we believed her.

As long as I was in school, the fascination with teachers never stopped.

My music teachers, Mr. Elmgreen, Miss LaRue, Mr. Sandburg and Mr. Lutke were always challenging me to play better, take breaths at the right place, practice to increase my range and skill. But all four also seemed to believe in me as a person, not just the body at the end of the brass instrument that made music in the band or orchestra.

My communications teacher, Miss Delbridge, took believing in me to a whole new level. She convinced me to do speeches on prostitution, on abortion, on existentialism. She cast me in reader’s theater scripts that didn’t seem to fit me, except they did. She saw it. I didn’t. She was shaking me up to discover something new. And when I failed, that was all right, too.

How can this be? I learned to use my voice, not in singing, but in speaking. It’s amazing the different moods and expressions that just our speaking voices can summon. How can this be, but somehow it was.

Nicodemus asked that same four-word question of Jesus.

It was in response to Jesus saying that a person had to be born again.

We are so used to the term “born again” now that it’s hard to imagine how it must have hit Nicodemus’s ears two thousand or so years ago. Jesus had a way of shaking up peoples’ ideas about this world and the next and what it takes to get new life.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, what none of us want to be, but at some point or another, it’s pretty hard to resist making rules that help us think we’re getting closer to God without actually yielding ourselves to him. We may not be perfect, but we can do this list of things and contribute well to the social good. That’s just the way we are wired. Let’s put on our Sunday best - shorts or suits, either will do.

How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb? It’s not hard to see that Nicodemus was asking the question for himself, about himself. He’s acknowledged that Jesus comes from God and yet he’s missing it.

In the discussion, Jesus goes to Moses and the lifting up of the snake in the wilderness.

The people were dying, and yet all they had to do was look up and live. It was the same for Nicodemus as he sat there with the Son of Man. It’s in their conversation that the Bible verse we’ve all memorized was first uttered.

“For God so loved . . . “

Jesus, the most incredible teacher, challenges people to something new, shakes us up, sees what’s in us and not in us, throws us down the stairs even—the teacher who is God himself. All for us to do is just look and believe.

Another dear promise from Jesus also involves Nicodemus. Swirling around Nicodemus was debate about Jesus. Some people wanted to arrest him, while others wanted to follow the One who just asserted: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:37)

Nicodemus appears in the debate of what to do about Jesus and asks the others “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” (John 7:51)

He's defending Jesus. And their response is not an answer to his question, but a dismissal and an accusation. Even if the law doesn’t judge, these people of power and influence and leadership consider it their role to do just that. “Are you from Galilee too?”

Scripture doesn’t tell us of any reply from Nicodemus.

Myrrh and aloes. Seventy-five pounds of it. That’s the next time we see him. Surely that was a heavy and costly package of, was it, faith? Had he cast off trusting the suit or shorts or robes of his own righteousness? As he was wrapping the linen cloths with the spices, did he think back to the snake that Moses lifted up and what Jesus said about it? Did he remember the call to be born again? How heavy and heavily scented Jesus’ body must have been when they placed it in the tomb.

I know enough to know that I don’t know enough. I like to think of Nicodemus as a life-long learner. Me too, I hope. What did Nicodemus do after Easter Sunday?

Beyond thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought, beyond our Pharisaic habits or traditions or false ideas of righteousness, beyond earthly life itself we keep running into our own helpless failure. But we’re looking in the wrong place. We must take our eyes off ourselves and look to the cross and tomb. Only then does the white flag of helpless surrender rise, and blood and living water flow down.