The light still shines

John opens his Gospel among the grandest sentences in Scripture, and tucked inside them is one quietly astonishing verb tense. The light shineth — present tense, continuing action. Not “shone once, at Bethlehem” or “will shine, at the end.” Shineth. Now. Including this morning, including into whatever darkness you are aware of as you read this.

“Comprehended it not” carries a double sense the old translators loved: the darkness neither understood the light nor overcame it. Both are true, and the second is the one to lean on in a heavy season. Darkness has never once put the light out — not at the cross, where it made its best attempt, and not in any generation since. It does not know how.

Notice, too, what the verse concedes: there is darkness, and the light shines in it — not above it or after it. That is where the shining happens: in. Whatever dark is present tense in your life, the light is present tense in it too. And of the two, only one of them has never lost.