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"The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not. (John 1.5)

Light and darkness, truth and lies, good and evil Jesus and the world; woven throughout the Fourth Gospel are the oppositions and contrasts that swirl around "the Word become flesh". From the very start John sets light and darkness within the frame of the cosmic drama between the Eternal Creative Word and the history of a universe called into being – "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made."

There is brilliant irony in John's choice of words as he describes the opposition of light and darkness. The word translated "comprehendeth" could equally mean "overtake", "overcome", "extinguish". Darkness cannot smother light, cannot extinguish it at source, cannot overshadow it, cannot put it out. All that is clear enough. But 'katalambanein' is also about comprehension, understanding. Using contemporary language John could equally say, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot get its head round it"; or "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness just doesn't get it."

Hence my preference for the older English translations which, quite intentionally, use the ambiguous "comprehendeth it not". Light cannot comprehend, understand, make sense of, light. Light baffles, confuses and finally dazzles darkness. Darkness, ultimately and finally, is at a loss as to how to defeat, extinguish, overcome, negate, the true light of the world. In that one verse, concentrated and compressed into that one negative term, "The darkness comprehendeth it not", is the diamond truth that glitters with unintimidated clarity all the way through the Gospel of John.

Light is inexplicable to darkness however brightly shining and clearly demonstrated; love is a closed mystery to hatred however embodied and eloquent; life is vitalised by the life that is the light of all people, and death is at a loss; truth shines with a persistence and permanence that no amount of lies can occlude, obscure or obfuscate. And the reason? The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has no idea that its own strategies are self-destructive, or that its existence is an absence not a presence. Darkness is blind to its own penultimacy, hostile to the creative purposes of eternal love, and invincibly ignorant of the fundamental truth that God is light and eternal light is prior and primary to all else, even its opposite.

Much of this I have thought and prayed, in a contemplative engagement with the texts of John's Gospel while working this tapestry, called "The Darkness Comprehendeth It Not." I began stitching on the edges and moved to the centre, all the threads mixed and varied and no thread self-coloured, each being mixed mostly of three colours of two strands each. The strong colour spectrum of the rainbow ellipse is deliberate, a striking and unsettling contrast, even though its darkest colours though muted, are woven through the darkness. The rayon threads of the rainbow are startlingly bright, and glimmer against the duller cotton; this is an attempt to capture the incomprehensible brilliance of the light that shines in the eternal Word become flesh, and whose light illumines all of life.

The pervasive recurrence of red signals the cost and consequence of light penetrating into the darkest places, and the promise of redemptive love expensively and expansively present no matter what. The rainbow evokes a whole spectrum of scripture, from Noah in Genesis, to Ezekiel's vision to the throne scene in Revelation 4. In Genesis it is promise, in Ezekiel majesty, in Revelation the it flares in the throne room, and in the midst of the throne, "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world". The red that permeates the darkness serves metaphysical and theological notice on all other accounts of reality and all other attempts to impose or banish the meaning of human existence. Stated with unabashed wonder by that other John in John's Gospel, the Baptist sees eternal truth incarnate in human history, "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."

The rainbow ellipse encloses much more muted shades and shadows, while nearer the centre still the metallic gold and silver inner ellipse surrounds the inner space in a chain of light. God's created world, fragile but fraught with divine purpose, fallen but not forsaken, is central to the redemptive purposes of the Father. The surrounding darkness is not absolute, but relative; the encircling rainbow is God's yes to his own purposes and the purpose of the Word become flesh, "I have come that you might have life, and have life more abundantly."; and that inner chain, the shining glory of love, truth and life resurrected, encircles a universe in which redemption is gift, reconciliation is accomplished, and life triumphs over death. And in that universe, the light goes on shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not, and will not, overcome it.,

None of this was thought out in detail beforehand, but evolved over the 10 weeks of working the tapestry. Looking at it now, as a finished piece of needle art, it offers another way of exploring the disconcerting ambiguity of John's text. Given the power and works of darkness in our own time, John;s words come to us again and again as words that see the world through a different lens.

Darkness is real; evil, lies, violence, cruelty, greed, death, all are real enough. But they are not ultimate, and their power is not final. Each has its antithesis, so that goodness, truth, peace, compassion, generosity, life, these are of the light, and these are the true reality…"and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."

It's a while since I enjoyed a book so much. Beautifully written, honest about life experience and those inner levers that move us, the story of a search within the heart and mind, and out there on the moors of Assynt and around the Green Loch. It's also a memoir of Norman McCaig and that rich vein of mid to late 20th C Scottish poets whose work gives affirming depth and gently questioning pause to the experience of Scottishness.

What makes any one book especially enjoyable? If I start with this one, still fresh in my memory and much of its narrative drive and the sense of the characters still clear and defined, it has much to do with the writer's use of language. Other things, of course, matter. Content, structure, the pace and interest of the narrative drive, the attractiveness of the genre whether memorable memoir, perceptive life reflection, idiosyncratic tour guide, knowing and generous literary criticism – these are all important contributory factors.

But this book is well written. There are sentences that are all but unimprovable. There are longer descriptive paragraphs of landscape, or of observed human behaviour, or of remembered events that turned out to be life-changing, that invite the reader into areas of intimate experience and in which the writer trusts the reader to understand, or at least to respect what he is trying to put into words. All of this Greig does in this book, and to read it is to enjoy the use of words, to appreciate the necessary nuance and entrusted confidence required of a writer to bare his soul, and bear the consequences; that entrusted confidence has to find an answering sympathy from the reader, and when it does there is joy in the reading.

Woven into the narrative fabric of the book are episodes of Greig's own journey to the place where this book was written. These autobiographical reminiscences are neither self-indulgent nor superfluous. They are stranded together with recalled conversations with Norman MacCaig in Edinburgh, with the shared memories of the three friends who find their way to the Green Loch on a fishing quest, and with occasional poems and personal reflections of a writer at home with philosophy and with fly fishing and much in between.

But enjoyment of a book also has to do with its reflexive impact, with what it does to the reader. Reading at its best and most effective is a transformative experience of having our minds opened to new possibilities and perspectives; of being invited and at times compelled to think again about what we thought we were clear about; of being taken into confidence as someone tells us a truth they have found to be both new and necessary for a richer life; of being included in the story of three friends, their interwoven lives, and their hopes and failures, regrets and gratitudes.

In both these senses I enjoyed this book. The writing is warm and humane, learned without being fussy, moves easily from autobiography to landscape description, is written by a lover of Scotland and one who knows the feel of heather and hailstones, likes the taste of whisky and chocolate, is realistic about what a small country is and can be. Along the way Greig is disarmingly frank about his own journey through heather and hailstones in his personal life.

I bought it as a second-hand hardback and am glad of that, because there's something substantial in a HB book. It's a statement of intent to revisit a book made more durable to ensure the writing is protected and preserved for future reference. Often I compile my own index for a book I've read – this one has several page references well worth re-reading.

Public libraries cost money. In fact, public libraries are expensive. No surprise then that when it comes to cutting the cost of public services our public libraries and their budgets are also up for grabs. I posted an article on Facebook this morning lamenting the loss of 900 public libraries in England and Wales in the past decade.

I introduced the link by widening the discussion beyond economics, budgets and public fund priorities. Or at least I wanted to suggest that public fund priorities, i any responsible deomcracy, have more criteria than financial savings on what they cost. The return on investment in public libraries can't simply be measured by balancing annual costs with annual footfall. If a library running at a loss provides the books that set a young Stephen Hawking asking questions, or provides internet access so that over the year hundreds of job applications have been filed online and 30 people are now in employment, how is that computed over and against cost? Or if a single parent finds some respite by their child attending story time, or a book group run by older people on a weekly basis provides friendship, human contact, mental stimulus and a few hours warmth and comfort – what price these things?

And we've hardly started talking about the importance of reading, books and ideas as the sub-soil of a healthy culture. Libraries provide resources for self-education, encourage social exchange, create space and resources for cultural stimulus, offer a public service dedicated to helping people learn, problem solve, interact, dream dreams and fund hopes. Public libraries are a recognition that knowledge should not be privatised or priced beyond the poor; they ensure a local supermarket for ideas, enabling and nurturing imagination, and if all that isn't enough, libraries are repositories of civic mutuality and social capital.

The observation that libraries close because of lack of use is, in my view, an argument based on limited data and even more limited criteria for their usefulness, value and necessity as one of our most important public institutions. Even if it is true that library footfall is down, as noted above, that is only one criterion of value, and one quite insufficient to justify widespread closure and removal of a resource vital to a community's social, intellectual and cultural life.

I'd also like to hear the views of librarians about so called 'lack of use'. Public spending priorities are themselves culturally driven, and in turn become cultural drivers. That means politics. Given that public libraries are effectively experiments in literary socialism, it would be easy to find a rationale to close or limit library resources. If a primary driver is saving public expenditure on the assumption that people should provide their own internet access, books, and other social and educational benefits libraries provide. But that is also a political standpoint.

Going back to the question of lack of use. I am aware of various reviews of footfall in libraries here in Scotland, inlcuding Aberdeen city and the Shire. These tend to be about numbers using them, not the socio-economic makeup of the number of people who still use libraries and their facilities, and for whom they are essential resources. Interestingly a couple of broadsheets had column inches devoted to the growing importance of public libraries in a time of austerity, especially for children and young people who cannot afford to buy books, or who don't have internet access.

I wonder if part of the problem is that those making the decisions to keep or close libraries neither use them nor need to use them. I hold as a matter of deep social ethics and therefore justice, the rights of people regardless of economic or social circumstance, to have access to educational resources, basic internet facilities, and sources for ideas, imagination and intellectual development. A library is so much more than premises stuffed with books; and the social importance of a public library is as a net contributor to community health, social wellbeing and intellectual resources for human development.

My own educational journey began and was given decisive impetus through the various public libraries I used and haunted in my growing up years. My love of literature, instinctive curiosity, intellectual taste and interest range are traceable to books borrowed and devoured; to reference books lifted and thumped on the desks under reading lights; to friendly knowledgeable librarians who could spot a reader a mile away. And yes these are now bygone days, and if libraries are to survive they will need to adapt the services they provide, develop the space and resources, be innovative in services and seeking new valued roles in the community. But they will do this as libraries, as repositories of learning and wisdom, as factories for ideas and dreams and hopes and strategies, as spaces where people meet and social exchange becomes part of that deep education which is at its best in the humanising context of shared interest, the pursuit of learning, the joy of reading, and as a reliable source of essential internet access for those we dare not leave behind, and that for our sakes as well as theirs.

This station of the cross is the work of Alexander Stoddart. It's a studio model, a gift to me on my retirement as Principal of the Scottish Baptist College. It now sits alongside Karl Barth's Dogmatics, and those massive volumes in Part 4 on the Doctrine of Reconciliation.

On this Good Friday I'm preaching at the ecumenical joint service in Montrose on the text of John 19.5, "Behold the man!" The image of this station will be the focal point of the various slides, hymn words, and the programme built around John's careful choice of words.

John has five different verbs for the act of seeing. The one used by Pilate is the one that requires more than a glimpse, and much more than a surface scanning. It means to gaze, to look long and hard, it implies moving from sight to insight. This sculpture helps me to do that.

The anguished weariness of Jesus; the tender grief of Mary; that empty space, deliberately void of image and meaning; except for the heap of rubbish and detritus at the foot of the cross; the partial cross-beam from one of the other crosses, reminding the viewer that Jesus was not crucified alone, but in the company of those rejected, despised and disposable. 

Behold the man, the eternal Word made historic flesh, the light and life of all that exists entering the darkness and the finality of death. In such weakness is the power of God; in such a ridiculous spectacle of a crucified king the wisdom of God; in the judicial execution of one of the small people, the exposure of the transience and ultimate failure of empire, violence and power lust. Behold the man. 

Preaching this morning on dealing with difficult people. I wrote this prayer as the conclusion to the sermon. It's based on the fruit of the Spirit.

Lord Jesus, help us to LOVE others as you have loved us.

Lord Jesus, where there is the sadness of hurt, help us to bring the JOY of laughter.

Lord Jesus, when we are provoked, may your PEACE stand guard over our hearts and minds.

Lord Jesus, when others speak hard words that hurt us, give us PATIENCE so that we don’t make things worse by speaking as we have been spoken to.

Lord Jesus, help us to find ways of showing KINDNESS to those we find it hard to love.

Lord Jesus, may our thoughts and actions spring from GOODNESS and not from self-interest.

Lord Jesus, your love never gives up on us, no matter how often we hurt you; make our love for others as FAITHFUL as your love for us.

Lord Jesus, you are gentle and lowly in heart; give us that same GENTLENESS and strength of character when we have to deal with difficult people.

Lord Jesus, by the power of your Spirit, give us SELF-CONTROL, in our words, in our thoughts and in the passions of our heart.

May the fruit of the Holy Spirit blossom, set, and ripen in our lives, through your grace and by the obedience of our faith, Amen.

Like many other Christians I am now wary of the word "Evangelical" as a descriptor. The hijack of this historic word by the Christian Right in the United States has rendered the word problematic. Historically the descriptor Evangelical was a defining term that did not set out to be exclusive. Yes, it is specific, has its own criteria both agreed and contested, but it was always within those critieria a diverse and trans-denominational movement.

The recent events in the United States did not just happen unexplained and unanticipated. They are part of a contiuum of events that began around 70 years ago in post was America, and in a society seeking new purpose, new motivations, and a renewed sense of destiny.  This book traces the history of American Evangelicalism, and the author is very aware that the geographic adjective is a major qualifier. The developments in the United States are culturally conditioned and therefore have a different history, genealogy and social context. The result is a form of Evangelicalism deeply rooted in American culture and drawing nutrition from the American worldview, including exceptionalism, hunger for cultural conquest and economic dominance.

It is a long story, and Molly Worthen is a writer who has done her research, read the history, listened to the witnesses, analysed the data, and argued her central thesis with elegance and eloquence. This is a highly readable, widely sympathetic, and unflinchingly honest account of those 70 years, and without being gratuitously unfair or partisan in her conclusions.

What is impressive about this book is the conscientious use of sources and the application of sound analysis and historical imagination in teasing out the various strands that intertwine in the history of a movement so fluid, diverse and contested. There is no caricature, even of those who might seem targets for such crude and dismissive treatment. Billy Graham and Bob Jones, Carl Henry and Charles Fuller, Cornelius Van Til and R J Rushdoony, Francis Shaeffer and Tim Lahaye, Harold Lindsell and Hal Lindsey, Jim Wallis and Al Mohler are amongst the dramatis personae in a story where the rhetoric was often that of combat and battle, threat and crisis, culture war and battle for the Bible, and polarised in sloganised opposing camps as conservative and liberal. 

The central thesis, the engine that drives this book, and which Worthen believes is the key to understanding the conflicted passions and persuasions of the protagonists, has been the crisis of authority surrounding the nature and status of the Bible. The most contested term has been inerrancy, and the stakes were set so high because the Bible was seen as a bulwark against communism, liberalised ethics, erosion of family values and latterly issues of abortion, pro-life and homosexuality. Once concede the absolute and final authority of the Bible, and the true faith was exposed to fatal compromise, doctrinal dilution and ethical relativism.

All of this Worthen chronicles with informed commentary. In doing so she explores the developments in education, seminary training, and the move towards winning control of the institutions of learning, publicity, denominational policy and mission and establishing public intellectual, ethical and theological values congruent with the political and missional aims of what has come to be known as the Christian Right. The chapter exploring the developments in the Southern Baptist Convention in the last decades of the 20th Century are particularly instructive. While Worthen does not bring her treatment up to the present time, the trajectories she traces, and the narrative flow of the story she tells, sheds considerable light on the motives and political goals of American Evangelicals and their relationship to the centres of power in Washington.

Along the way Worthen shows familiarity and a sure grasp of the implications of eschatology in the worldview and political visions of evangelical premillenial dispensationalism. She is especially sharp in observing the connections between such eschatology and responses to social issues such as poverty, oppression and systemic injustices such as slavery, racism and gender issues.   

The crisis of authority in American Evangelicalism she traces to the long battle to establish the Bible as an authority above and beyond secular reason. She points out the uncomfortable process whereby the methods of achieving this have historically relied on rational categories and the desire to show the Bible as scientifically accurate. All this while at the same time reserving for the Bible a privileged and overriding authority not only in matters of faith, but as an account of sacred history and acts of God which are in theory scientifically explicable. Lurking beneath both the surface tensions and the deep fault lines of conservative evangelicalism is the question of who controls the definition, who defines the content of evangelical belief and who therefore is the gatekeeper as to who is out and who is in.

Worthen does a great service to evangelicals who want to understand what has been going on in the American evangelical cultures of the past 70 years. This book is helpful especially to those who do not buy into the Christian Right worldview but who nevertheless would call themselves evangelicals. Inerrancy is not and has never been the universally accepted or only way of construing the final authority of the Bible. Indeed Worthen's book would have been more valuable still had it included some consideration of the varieties of interpretive approaches used by evangelicals of various hermeneutic hues. But what she has given is an authoritative account, critical but not unsympathetic, nuanced but clearly argued, and leaving her readers better informed as to how on earth in a country proud of the separation of church and state, a self-defining Christian movement has won such influence at the heart of political power.

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.