DeConick A.D

137
JOHN AND THE DARK COSMOS
around him is a grand illusion of false memories and fabricated darkness
that he alone has the telekinetic power to dispel. He can create by thinking
a thing into existence—even a new world, at the film’s finale, when
light rises across the bay and drives out the last of the aliens.
The dark city in Proyas’s film, where alien demons control a world of
darkness in which humans are bound, and where an extraordinary human,
John Murdoch, wields alien powers to conquer the demons, is not unlike
the dark cosmos portrayed in the Gospel of John. In the fourth Gospel,
the world is depicted as a realm of falsehood and darkness. It is a world in
which people live unaware of the sinister behind-the-scenes battle that is
being fought over the human spirit. The contenders are the extraordinary
Jesus and the demons who are led by their sinister liege, the world ruler.
Jesus and the demons duke it out throughout the Gospel, as Jesus wields
his superhuman power, overcoming the darkness with his light and, in the
end, casting out the demonic world ruler (John 12:31–32, 14:30, 16:11, 33).
Jesus the Descendent Light
In the Gospel of John, Jesus is an extraordinary human because he possesses
a powerful spirit from another realm, from a transcendent place
outside the dark human cosmos (John 17:14). “I am from above,” he
declares (8:23). Before incarnating as Jesus, this powerful spirit resided in
a celestial realm where he lived with his Father. His Father is a God whose
identity remains hidden until Jesus comes to earth and reveals his existence
to humans (1:18, 3:27, 31–33, 6:38, 41–42, 46). Jesus announces that
although the world has not known the Father, he has. He has made the
Father known to the world so that the Father’s love might be experienced
by Jesus’ followers (17:26).
This powerful spiritual entity is described in the opening verses of John
as God’s Reason, his very Logos, or the Word (1:1). As the Logos, he is
the author of life and light (1:3–4). He creates by bringing the thoughts of
God into substantive form. The Logos descends out of the spiritual realm
from a Father who is himself described in the fourth Gospel as pneuma
(spirit) (4:24). The Logos “became flesh” and lived among humans as
one of us (1:14).
The Gospel of John has no birth story, so the author of this Gospel
did not envision the incarnation through virgin birth—or any physical