John 1:1-5


John 1:1-5
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”


Interesting verb tense switch in this last sentence. I assume it’s not a mistake. The “light shines,” i.e. continuously: it shined in the past, it shines in the present moment, and it will shine in the future. (The mystery of our faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.) But the interesting thing about the verb tense switch is that the darkness is placed in the past: it “did not overcome” the light. Not “it does not overcome” but “it did not.” Whatever fight darkness had in it is over, and it is the Word that was its demise, the Word being Jesus the Christ, of course.


This passage does bring up that big question: if God slash the Word created all things (“All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”), did God create evil, i.e. darkness? Is darkness to be equated with evil here? It seems logical. A binary system has been established (light over dark), as a structuralist critic would point out. Thought of in another way, one might consider the creation as recounted in Genesis 1: God separated the light from the darkness. If these things could be separated, then were they once blended together? How is this possible? In our reality, we know nothing but the separation of these two things. I assume we have no need to know the former reality, but it is nonetheless interesting to try to imagine dark and light together. Would this simply be gray? In our world, either light or dark almost always dominates the moment, yet light is what has a “presence.” Darkness cannot block out light. Light leaves, and only then can darkness show its presence. Thus darkness is merely the absence of light. Thus, once the Word brought life--which was light--darkness lost all its power; it became subjugated to the will of light.

And if life = light, then we who live have essentially become an incarnation of the creation scene in Genesis 1. Our pre-life existence was simply before God separated the light from the darkness in our unique selves, i.e. separated life from lack-of-life, because life is light. We have all been separated from darkness from our very birth in other words, because the Word brought us life, which makes us each a light of the Word. This gets pretty interesting, because if we are all lights, why do we see so much evidence of darkness in ourselves and in the world? This is a question that brings my stream-of-consciousness to a grinding halt. But I will close thinking of the light and of the Wilco lyric from “Jesus, etc.”: “You were right about the stars; each one is a burning sun [. . .] our love is all God’s money, each one is a burning sun.”

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