Divine Appointments

Many years ago my wife and I were coming home from our vacation in Maine. We stopped for supper at the Travelers Restaurant in Union Connecticut, and “coincidentally” met some friends from Maine who were returning from their vacation in Pennsylvania. If we’d been five minutes later we would have missed them. In the Gospel of John, Chapters 3 and 4, Jesus meets two people, a Righteous Ruler and a Rejected Outcast, not by coincidence, but by “Divine Appointment.” The First appointment is with Nicodemus, in Judea Nicodemus is a Pharisee, the strictest sect of Judaism. He is also “a ruler of the Jews” (3:1). That means he is a member of the Sanhedrin Council, the seventy elders who, along with the High Priest, guard and guide the laws, customs, and traditions of the Jewish people. Nicodemus comes to Jesus “by night” (3:2), and acknowledges that Jesus is “a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him” (3:2). Nicodemus knows some things abo