καταλαμβάνω (katalambano): When Light is Incomprehensible to Darkness

I remember the first time I read the Prologue of John's Gospel, that astonishing poem about the Word. The words immediately fell into rhythms and cadences, with conceptual horizons receding in time and space to the beginning of all time and space. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God...all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made..."

A poem is an arrangement of words, each one placed with precision, redolent of meaning, cumulatively a distillation of the writer's thoughts, and feelings, perhaps even unformed intuitions struggling towards the light of meaning. Even the best poems struggle to articulate ultimacy. However, the writer of John's Gospel was after more than ultimacy, at least in earthly, human terms. He was after eternity as it intersects with creation, giving voice, or at least words, to that primordial act of bringing into being by the One whose Being is the source of all that is or ever can be. And that One has now become flesh and dwelt amongst us. No wonder John ransacked the available conceptualities trying to find words, ideas, images, human expressions to express the inexpressible.

John 1.1-14 alternates poem and prose, or at least, changes gear from images evoking wonder, eternity and cosmic drama, to narrative informing and confirming historic statements. That first reading of John's Gospel, and those first verses, remains for me as a living memory of discovering the beauty of language that has the power to transform the way we think, and how we see the world. 

Later at College, and often enough since, I have returned to those 18 verses and prayed and thought my way into and around them. They are inexhaustible yet always rewarding, beyond understanding and yet they make the startling claim that they announce the light that enlightens every single one of us that is born into this world. And glinting in the last line of the first 5 verses a verse over which I have puzzled and prayed, and pondered and persisted in study. One scholar's translation puts it thus: "And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it." But I remember it from the old translation which is still the one I know by heart: "The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not".

And there it is, the ambiguity that has puzzled me all my exegetical life. Is the word that describes the failure of darkness saying it could not "overcome" or could not "comprehend", the defiance of this light. Then I find after a trawl through commentaries, and a study of the words in question, it can mean either and / or both. And that satisfies me. Not that it answers all the questions, but that it acknowledges the subtleties and complexities, the limitations and potential, of words used to describe realities beyond the capacities of human expression.

So from Christmas I've been working on a tapestry seeking to give a visual interpretation of that defiant ambiguity, the light shines, and the darkness has not overcome or comprehended it; has not defeated or understood it; the darkness hasn't a clue what to do about that patient, persistent, life-giving Word of light and love and life. Not a clue. 

Yet John's Gospel is precisely about the strategies and protocols of darkness doing its damnedest to extinguish the light of the world. Throughout the Gospel of John those who reject Jesus are rejecting the light, seeking to extinguish it by eliminating him; and throughout the Gospel Jesus is rejected by those who don't understand. To the powers of darkness the truth of a crucified God is incomprehensible; the one reality the engulfing darkness cannot subdue, overcome, comprehend, extinguish or contradict, is light.

All of this I am trying to make visual, with colour and tone, shape and symbol, an exegesis of that defiant ambiguity that is the essence of light - darkness cannot overcome or comprehend it. I hope to finish the tapestry by Easter, that great festival of Light, when the darkness and the light collided in the decisive confrontation to which John's poem bears witness; early in the morning as the sun was rising....and the darkness comprehendeth it not, and has not overcome it.  

 

Comments

[David C Brown]

Having had John's gospel read to me for as long as I can remember it is fascinating to think of reading or hearing it for the first time. But we probably should approach all the Bible as if for the first time.
Here are "Reflections" on divine light: http://dcbverse.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/

[Dave Summers]

Morgan Guyton has some good reflections on this verse - here, for example https://morganguyton.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/word-life-light-the-eternal-side-of-christmas/. Overlapping with your post and with other interesting slants too.