Reader’s Guide: “The Word for Today” Saturday, January 25, 2014 Read John 3:1-21 Once again it is helpful for us to read the whole story and then come back and look at individual sections. The story of Nicodemus is very familiar to most of us. It is a wonderful story which will help us to understand better how John thinks and what techniques he uses in proclaiming his gospel. John is the only gospel writer to tell us the story of Nicodemus – in fact he alone knows of a person called Nicodemus. We need to remember that the setting remains in Jerusalem which likely explains why Nicodemus is unknown to the other gospel writers who center their gospel nearly exclusively in Galilee. John has a whole lot more material that comes from Judea and Jerusalem. Likely John himself was from that territory. There is no reason for us to think that John’s stories in and around Jerusalem do not reflect historical remembrances. What a blessing it is for us that we have a gospel that provides us with so much more material. We might conjecture why this material is absent from Mark and the other synoptic writers. Perhaps Mark purposefully omitted it because he wanted to construct a storyline in which Jesus was exclusively in Galilee and moved in one journey to Jerusalem to die and be raised from the dead. More likely Mark was simply unaware of the material. We are blessed to have John’s story. In fact John has more material centered in and around Jerusalem than in Galilee. We are the richer for John’s gospel.