When the World Needs Light: Reading John's Prologue in a Divided Age

There is something curious happening in our cultural moment. We speak constantly of truth, yet distrust anyone who claims to possess it. We demand justice, yet cannot agree on what makes a thing fundamentally just. We invoke the language of right and wrong with moral certainty, all while insisting that morality itself is merely a human construct, subject to revision by each generation.

The contradiction would be amusing if it were not so desperately sad.

I grew up in a household where these categories (truth, justice, goodness) were simply assumed. They had weight, gravity, a kind of ontological heft. By the time I encountered a more experiential expression of faith later on, I had already begun to sense that the world around me was losing its grip on the vocabulary it could not stop using. People still spoke of light and darkness, freedom and captivity, but the stories that gave those words their meaning were being quietly dismantled.

Now, here we are. The language remains. The coherence does not.

The Oldest Story About Light

The opening of John's Gospel presents us with what might be the most philosophically dense passage in all of Scripture. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God (YHWH), and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Here, right at the start, we encounter something that would have resonated powerfully with both Greek and Hebrew minds, and which contemporary readers often miss entirely.

The Greek-speaking world knew about the Logos, the rational principle underlying all reality. The Hebrew-speaking world, particularly in its Aramaic expression through the Targums, spoke of the Memra, the Word of the LORD that created, sustained, and intervened in history. John is not inventing a new category. He is pointing to something the biblical writers had been circling around for centuries: the self-expression of Alohim is not separate from Alohim, yet is somehow distinguishable enough to be spoken of in relational terms.

This is not the Greek notion of a second deity, subordinate to the first. That would violate the core conviction of Israel: "Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Rather, what John presents is the stunning claim that the one true God has made Himself known, has become approachable, has entered the very creation He spoke into being.

Through this Word, all things were made (John 1:3). Not some things. Not spiritual things. All things. The galaxies and the quarks, the towering cedars and the microscopic bacteria, the complexity of human consciousness and the simplicity of light itself... all of it flows from this creative utterance.

And here is what strikes me as most remarkable: John tells us that in this Word was life, and this life was the light of humanity (John 1:4). Life and light are not abstractions in the biblical narrative. They are the antithesis of death and darkness, categories the ancient world understood with visceral clarity. To live in darkness was to live in chaos, in the realm where YHWH's ordered creation had not yet penetrated, or where it had been rejected.

The Light Nobody Wanted

The Gospel narrative takes an unexpected turn. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:5). One might pause there, relieved. The light endures. Victory is assured. But John does not pause. He presses forward into territory far more uncomfortable.

The Word came to His own creation. The world was made through Him (every atom, every ecosystem, every human heart). Yet the world did not know Him (John 1:10). This is not ignorance born of lack of information. This is the deeper tragedy of recognition refused. The created order, confronted with its Creator, turned away.

Worse still: "He came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him" (John 1:11). The very people who had been prepared through centuries of promise, through the Law and the Prophets, through deliverance and exile and return... even they rejected Him when He arrived.

One can understand the impulse to dismiss this as ancient religious drama, irrelevant to our modern concerns. Many do. But intellectual honesty requires we sit with the claim being made. If the biblical narrative is true, this rejection is not merely a historical footnote. It is the pattern that defines human response to divine self-revelation. It is our pattern.

I have watched this play out in my own journey. From the structured certainty of one tradition to the more immediate experience of another, I thought I had found the light. And in a sense, I had encountered something genuine. But what I slowly realized was that encountering the light and comprehending its source are not the same thing. The religious categories I had inherited, helpful as they were, sometimes obscured as much as they revealed.

The Scandal of Particularity

Now we arrive at what philosophers call the scandal of particularity. The eternal Word, through whom galaxies spin, chose a specific time, a specific place, a specific people through whom to make Himself known. This offends our modern sensibilities. We prefer our truth universal, abstract, accessible to all through pure reason alone.

But here is the problem with that preference. Pure abstraction does not heal. It does not forgive. It does not enter into the muck and chaos of actual human existence and transform it from within. A principle, however elegant, cannot love you. The God of the Bible does not remain at safe philosophical distance. He comes near.

"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The Greek verb eskenosen (tabernacled) echoes the wilderness wanderings, when Alohim's presence filled the tent of meeting with such glory that Moses himself could not enter (Exodus 40:34-35). Now that presence takes on skin, walks dusty roads, eats fish, weeps at gravesides. The transcendent becomes immanent. The Creator becomes creature.

John is making an extraordinary claim here, one his Jewish readers would have immediately grasped. The Temple in Jerusalem was understood as the place where heaven and earth met, where the glory of YHWH dwelt among His people. But the Temple had been destroyed and rebuilt, defiled and cleansed, and was even then in the hands of leaders compromised by Roman power. What John announces is that the entire system has been replaced. The glory that once filled Solomon's Temple (1 Kings 8:10-11) now walks the roads of Galilee. Jesus (YHWShA) has become the new Temple, the place where God and humanity meet.

This is either the greatest truth ever spoken or the most audacious lie. There is no comfortable middle ground.

John tells us this incarnate Word was "full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). Not truth alone, which might crush us with its weight. Not grace alone, which might devolve into permissiveness. But both, held together in perfect tension. Truth that exposes our darkness with unsparing clarity. Grace that meets us in that darkness and offers a way out.

Children of God

The gift being offered is staggering in its scope. "To all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of Alohim" (John 1:12). This is not metaphor. This is not spiritual window dressing. The same Word that spoke light into primordial darkness now speaks new identity into human hearts.

But notice the mechanism. This new birth is "not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of Alohim" (John 1:13). Human effort cannot manufacture it. Ancestry cannot confer it. Willpower cannot achieve it. This is divine initiative meeting human receptivity. We cannot create the light. We can only open our eyes to it.

Here John echoes something crucial from Israel's story. At Babel, humanity scattered because of pride (trying to make a name for themselves, trying to build a tower to heaven through their own achievement). The result was division, confusion, the fracturing of human community into competing tribes and tongues (Genesis 11:1-9). Now John announces the reversal. Those who believe in His name, not their own name, not a name they constructed for themselves, become children of Alohim. The scattering is undone. The division is healed. Not through human striving upward toward God, but through divine descent, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us.

I remember a conversation years ago where someone asked, quite earnestly, how this squares with human freedom. If Alohim initiates, where does our choice enter in? The question assumes a zero-sum game between divine sovereignty and human agency, as if these are opposing forces rather than complementary realities. But the biblical writers seem unbothered by this supposed paradox. They simply hold both truths: Alohim calls, and humans respond. The invitation is real. The choice matters.

What you cannot do (not if you want to remain coherent) is claim the identity transformation while refusing the source of that transformation. You cannot become a child of Alohim by rejecting the Word through whom that adoption comes. This is not arbitrary divine fiat. This is the nature of reality itself.

The Word Has a Name

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not suggesting that everyone who struggles with the claims of Christianity is acting in bad faith. I am not implying that genuine questions about the historical Jesus or the reliability of Scripture are somehow illegitimate. The examined life, as Socrates reminded us, is worth living precisely because it refuses easy answers.

What I am suggesting is this: the light John describes is not generic spiritual enlightenment. It is not vague moral improvement. It is not the human spirit finally discovering its own latent divinity. It is the specific, historical, flesh-and-blood reality of YHWShA of Nazareth, the one in whom the fullness of Alohim dwelt bodily.

The ancient Targums, those Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Scriptures used in Second Temple Judaism, consistently rendered the Name of God as "the Word of the LORD." When Genesis says, "God said, 'Let there be light'" (Genesis 1:3), the Targums often read, "The Word of the LORD said..." This was not innovation. This was recognition that Alohim's self-expression (His Word, His Memra) was the means by which He interacted with creation.

The Wisdom literature of Israel speaks of this as well. Proverbs 8 presents Wisdom as being present at creation: "The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old...when he established the heavens, I was there" (Proverbs 8:22, 27). By the Second Temple period, Jewish thinkers had developed this into a rich tradition about God's Wisdom being the agent of creation, the means by which the transcendent God engaged with His world.

John is telling his readers, both Jewish and Gentile, that this Word, this Wisdom, has now done something unprecedented. The Word has not merely spoken creation into being from afar. The Word has entered creation, has taken on the very materiality He once called forth from nothing.

And here is the oddity that modern readers often miss: this does not divide God into multiple persons, as later theological formulations would sometimes suggest. Rather, it reveals that the one true God has made Himself accessible in a way that transcends our categories. The God who is utterly other has become utterly near. The transcendent has embraced immanence without ceasing to be transcendent.

This matters because John's community faced real pressures. They were being expelled from synagogues. They were trying to explain to both Jewish and Greek audiences how a crucified man could be the Messiah, the manifestation of the one true God. The Prologue is John's answer to all these challenges at once. Jesus is not a demigod, as Greek mythology might suggest. He is not a second God, as that would violate the Shema. He is the Word made flesh, the one through whom and for whom all things were created, now dwelling among His creatures to bring them home.

Living in the Tension

So where does this leave us, standing in the early twenty-first century with our smartphones and our skepticism, our therapy culture and our tribal politics?

It leaves us precisely where John's first readers found themselves: confronted with a claim that demands response. The light has come into the world. Darkness has not overcome it. The question is whether we will receive it or reject it.

This is not a question that can be answered purely through intellectual analysis. Though the mind must be engaged (Alohim did not give us rationality only to demand we abandon it), the response required is deeper than assent to propositions. It involves the reorientation of the whole person toward the source of light itself.

I am not a political partisan. I do not belong to the left or the right, to Republican or Democrat. These are earthly kingdoms, and they inevitably conscript biblical language for tribal purposes, turning the scandal of particularity into the banality of culture war. But the Kingdom I confess transcends these categories entirely. It is not a program for social reform, though it transforms societies. It is not a personal spirituality disconnected from public reality, though it begins in individual hearts.

It is the in-breaking of Alohim's reign into a world that has spent millennia perfecting the art of self-rule. And that reign came not through military conquest or political maneuvering, but through the Word made flesh, through the light that darkness could not extinguish even when it nailed that light to a cross.

Because here is what we must not miss: the story does not end with crucifixion. John's Prologue makes enormous claims about Jesus, claims that would have seemed absurd to anyone watching a Roman execution. But these claims were vindicated when Alohim raised Him from the dead. Easter morning is God's "yes" to everything Jesus claimed about Himself. The resurrection is not simply resuscitation. It is the launching of new creation, the beginning of the renewal of all things.

Without Easter, the Prologue would be just beautiful poetry, tragic and haunting. With Easter, it becomes the truest thing ever said about reality itself.

A New Family

Becoming children of Alohim is not merely individual salvation, souls plucked from earth to heaven. It creates something new: a family that transcends all previous categories of belonging. The Roman world divided people rigidly by status. Citizen and slave, patrician and plebian occupied different moral universes entirely. The Jewish world maintained clear boundaries between Jew and Gentile, clean and unclean. Every society has its hierarchies, its insider and outsider designations.

Jesus creates a community where these divisions are overcome. Not erased, as if our particularity does not matter. But transformed and included in a larger unity. Notice John says "children of Alohim," plural. This is a family enterprise. Those who believe in His name find themselves siblings with people they would never have chosen on their own (different ethnicities, different social classes, different histories of pain and triumph).

This should unsettle us more than it does. If we find ourselves comfortable with everyone in our Christian community, if everyone looks and thinks and votes like us, we might question whether we have truly grasped what John is saying. The Word became flesh for all people, and those who receive Him discover they belong to each other whether they like it or not.

The Invitation Stands

The biblical narrative offers something our fractured age desperately needs but stubbornly resists: coherence. Not the false coherence of ideology, which flattens complexity into slogans. But the deep coherence of a story that makes sense of our moral intuitions, our hunger for justice, our inability to stop using categories like truth and goodness even when we have theoretically abandoned the ground on which they stand.

You may find, as I did, that the religious traditions you inherited (whatever they were) sometimes obscured the simplicity of this invitation. They added layers, built systems, created hierarchies of access. These are human responses to divine revelation, and like all human things, they mix insight with error, light with shadow.

But beneath these layers, the invitation remains. The Word who was in the beginning, through whom all things were made, in whom life and light reside... this Word became flesh. He entered the darkness. He offers the right to become children of Alohim, born not of human striving but of divine initiative.

The light still shines. It has not been overcome. The world still does not recognize it, still turns away from its Creator. But to those who receive Him, to those who believe in His name, the gift remains available: new birth, new identity, new life in the Kingdom that transcends all earthly kingdoms.

We are living, John would tell us, in the overlap of the ages. The old age is winding down, its power broken by the death and resurrection of Jesus. The new age is breaking in, even now, wherever people receive the Word and become children of Alohim. This is not a distant future hope. It is a present reality we can participate in, agents of the Kingdom that has come and is coming.

The choice is before you, as it has been before every generation. Will you remain in the familiar darkness, or step into the light? The path you choose will indeed shape your future. But more than that, it will reveal what you have always been seeking, whether you knew it or not: the source of life itself, the light of the world, the Word made flesh.

That's the invitation. And perhaps, in a world so fractured and uncertain, that is precisely the story we need.