My job is a long way from my home. I consequently spend far too much of my time on public transport.  More to the point, I spend far too much of my time on public transport in the dark.  Two and a half hours travel at either end of the working day means that for much of the year, I spend all the short hours of daylight indoors in a museum, with the darkness perpetually closing in.

Light, and its battle with darkness, is at the centre of one of the most complex and theologically dense passages in the Bible.  It comes at the start of John’s Gospel, where the writer tries to express the creative relationship between God the Father and Jesus.  It is a difficult idea to get across, but to convey something of the wonder, beauty and power of the life that has been created, John simply writes: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’.

The battle between light and dark, John is saying, the struggle between life and death, is not an equal one.  These are not evenly matched, opposing forces. The news is much better than that.  The fact is, light, in the person of Jesus, wins.

This is at the very heart of what Christians believe, and the beauty of spring for me, after the months of darkness, is not the secondary stuff – green shoots, bursting buds, gamboling lambs, eggs and baby rabbits – but the hopefulness of the bare fact of light.  Waking to it early in the morning, watching the city and countryside bathe in it, sitting in it when I get home in the evening reminds me of the fundamental truth: that just as spring will always end the dark chill of winter, so light cannot be overcome. It energises and invigorates us.  It defeats the darkness. It brings life.

The picture is of Herne Hill station at about 5.15am. Strangely, this was taken on a luxury day – getting the train to Victoria instead of cycling in the rain.