Jn 1:1-18
1In the beginning was the Word,/ and the Word was with God,/ and the Word was God./ 2He was in the beginning with God./ 3All things came to be through him,/ and without him nothing came to be./ What came to be 4through him was life,/ and this life was the light of the human race;/ 5the light shines in the darkness,/ and the darkness has not overcome it. ...
9The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
10He was in the world,/ and the world came to be through him,/ but the world did not know him./ 11He came to what was his own,/ but his own people did not accept him.
12But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, 13who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.
14And the Word became flesh/ and made his dwelling among us,/ and we saw his glory,/ the glory as of the Father’s only Son,/ full of grace and truth. ...
THE WORD: Before Vatican II’s reform of the liturgy, the Gospel reading—the Prologue of John’s Gospel—was read at the end of the Mass. It was something like a “gospel of blessing.” Something of the old tradition is retained when the reading is assigned at the last day of the year. We ask blessings for ourselves with the magnificent hymn of the Incarnate Word who came to dwell among us—which Christmas is all about.
Unlike the Synoptic gospels, the Fourth Gospel traces the origin of Jesus of Nazareth “in the beginning,” in the sphere of the divine. There, “turned toward” God, and “what God was” was the Word—ho logos in Greek. There has been a lot of discussion about the meaning and provenance, and background in history, of the Logos. The expression can be found throughout the religious literature of antiquity, in the Greek-Hellenistic world, and later in the various Gnostic systems. But the probable background to it is the Wisdom of Israel. In Jewish thought, the Logos was closely associated with Wisdom. Over the centuries, Wisdom had been personified. She existed with God even before the world was created, and she was God’s agent in creation (Prv 8:22-23; Sir 24:9). But while Wisdom was not an entity outside of God, the Johannine Logos is a separate “person,” who would “become flesh,” a human being. Jesus of Nazareth was the preexistent Logos and would speak of himself as “being from above” and “sent by the Father.”