And the light appears in darkness, and the darkness apprehended it not.
John's opening moves from the Word who is life to the Word who is light, and verse 5 is where that light meets the world. In nature light always beats darkness, so why did this light meet a darkness that neither took it in nor gave way?
Shines, not shone
John uses the present tense, and commentators press that point. The verse is not a report of one past moment. It describes what light always does against darkness:
Here I come to the judgment of the world, and of "His own." "The light shines in darkness." In nature that is impossible. If light shone into darkness there, no darkness would be left for it to shine in. The judgment of the world follows, for "the darkness did not take it in." Notice also that "the light shines in darkness" is a general statement. He does not say "shone."
The reversal of Genesis
In the Bible's first chapter, light breaks on darkness and the darkness goes. Here that pattern breaks. One writer sets the two scenes side by side:
When the Word appeared, the light shone. But the scene He came into was one of darkness. In Genesis 1 we read how by the divine word the light of creation burst upon the darkness; and the darkness vanished. Here we have light of a far higher order. It shines in the middle of moral and spiritual darkness. Only grasping the light could clear that darkness away, and men did not grasp it. Yet though the darkness remained, there was no other light for men than "the life."
What the darkness is
Older translations end the verse with "comprehended." Writers explain the word as "apprehended": the darkness did not take the light in. One writer then sets this darkness beside the gloom over the unformed earth:
But men were in fact in a fallen condition, far from God. So the verse hints at a darkness worse than the gloom that covered the deep before the six days of creation began.
That darkness is not a rival god or a first principle of the universe. It is a condition, and only one thing meets it:
Some ancient religions called darkness the mother of all things, or an evil god locked in endless war with the good Lord of light. It is neither. It is the moral condition of fallen man. It is the absence of light, and quite different from physical darkness, because light itself has no effect on it. Grace alone can deal with the difficulty.
Nothing in man to receive it
One writer puts the failure down to what man is, not to what he did. Man had nothing in him to answer the light:
Man was not light. He was darkness, without any glimmer of the nature of God. More than that, he had no power to receive this light. His whole nature stood against it. They saw no beauty in Him to desire Him. Here was the display of the divine nature itself, and nothing could go further than that. In the natural world, where there is light there is no more darkness. In the moral world it is not so. The light is there, pure in itself and showing up everything. Yet no one sees who is there.
Blindness that is chosen
Commentators differ over where the weight falls. Some put it on what man cannot do, others on what he will not do. The second view makes the darkness a choice, not an accident:
Anyone with eyes to see and a heart to understand can tell that the world is in darkness, that is, in ignorance of God. And the world has only itself to blame, for the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not take it in (John 1:5). This is not because men cannot see the light that shines. It is because they will not, for "people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil" (John 3:19). They stay in the darkness by choice, and so they lie under condemnation.
The end of the darkness
The verse records a refusal, not a defeat. The shining continues, and it has an end in view:
Light finally triumphs and darkness passes away. The process that will reach that happy end is going on now. "The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining" (1 John 2:8).
Summary
- Shines — the tense is present, not past. This is what light always does, whether or not anyone receives it.
- Shines in darkness — in nature that is impossible, since light would leave no darkness behind. Here the darkness stayed.
- Darkness defined — not a rival power, but the moral condition of fallen man. Light itself does not touch it, and it is worse than the gloom over the deep at creation.
- Darkness refuses — man has no power to receive the light, and his nature stands against it. As writers show from John 3:19, the blindness is also chosen. That is why it carries condemnation.
- Darkness passing — grace alone deals with the difficulty, and the process is already running: the true light is already shining.