Diocese of Westminster Annual Repor t & Accounts 2020
The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. -John 1:5
THIS WELL-KNOWN line from the Gospel of John is an announcement of the Good News that Jesus Christ, the Light, has conquered the darkness in which the world is shrouded. He has defeated hatred with love, sadness with joy, and brought life where there was death. Stirring as these words are, it is easy to take the striking image as mere metaphor, as a pretty, idealised, yet tame, image of God: a sunny day as opposed to an overcast one. But the Evangelist wasn’t writing in tame times. The Early Church did not have an easy existence. Followers of Christ attracted harassment and persecution from all sides, religious and secular, from the beginning. Many Christians found themselves ostracised by their families and communities, unable to earn a living or remain in their homes. And then came the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in 70 AD, which, being a symbol of Christ himself, would have appeared to the early Church to be an event of apocalyptic significance. Christians were scattered in the wake of the upheaval, many all the
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way to Asia Minor. John himself spent time in Ephesus, but was ultimately exiled to Patmos, where tradition has it he wrote his Gospel. Modern Biblical scholars find the book to be full of references and signposts to the darkness and difficulty of John’s times, and yet it is also full of dramatic images of light conquering darkness, calling to mind another familiar passage from Sacred Scripture: a prophetic verse that may well have been in John’s mind when he composed his great prologue concerning Christ as the Light:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone. -Isaiah 9:1
