By visiting Jesus at night, Nicodemus avoids the daylight that might reveal him as associating with a man who is unpopular with the religious institution.  To be unafraid or unashamed of professing our friendship with Jesus by the way we live always brings hard demands.  We often prefer the false safety of darkness to the light of Christ that exposes, for example, our selfish, racist, sexist, or violent selves.  Lent is designed to drag us out of darkness into the Easter light of Christ through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.