But dear faithful John never faltered.  We must always love him for that.  How humiliating for us if not even one had stood that test.  And how their after-contact with John must have affected the others.  John pulled the others back and up.  And how their faith so sorely chastened and tested came to its fine seasoned strength afterwards.

These very events of the early days now come back with new meaning to them.  Jesus’ words at the temple cleansing, and the kingly entry into Jerusalem, shine now in a new light and give new strength to their faith.[64] But John himself brings us back to this again in that long talk of the betrayal night.  So we leave it now.  But blue is a good colour for the eyes.  It reveals great beauty in the bit of tapestry-pattern John is weaving for us to trace these true blue threadings.

But there’s more here, much more, that adds greatly to the pattern.  There are faithful disciples and precious intimate friendships outside the circle of these future leaders.  Take only a moment for these as we push on.

There’s that night visitor of the early Jerusalem days.  Aristocrat, ruler, scholar, with all the supercautiousness that these qualities always grain in, Nicodemus actually left the inner circle of temple-rulers who were as sore to the touch as a boil over John’s drastic cleansing, and comes for a personal interview.  His utter sincerity is shown in the temper of his remarks and questions, and shown yet more in the openness of Jesus’ spirit in talking with him.  For this is a trait in Jesus’ dealings,—­openness when He finds an opening door.  It must be so, then and now.  He can open up only where there is an opening up to Him.  Openness warms and loosens.  The reverse chills and locks up.[65]

It is in another just such situation but far more acute, that this man speaks out for Jesus in an official meeting of these same rulers.  Timidly? have you thought, cautiously?  Yet he spoke out when no one else did, though others there believed in Jesus.  A really rare courage it was that told of a growing faith.[66] And the personal devotion side of his faith, evidence again of the real thing, stands out to our eyes as we see him bring the unusual gift of very costly ointments for the precious body of his personal friend.[67] It’s a winsome story, this of Nicodemus.  May there be many a modern duplicate of it.

In utter social contrast stands the next bit of this sort following so hard that the contrast strikes you at once.  It’s a half-breed Samaritan this time, and a woman, and an openly bad life.  The Samaritans were hated by Jew and Gentile alike as belonging to neither, ground between the two opposing social national millstones.  Womanhood was debased and held down in the way all too familiar always and everywhere.  And a moral outcast ranks lowest in influence.