John 1:1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

John’s Gospel opens with a Prologue, a hymn that sums up John’s view of who Jesus was. John asserts, in opposition to the synagogue leaders, that Jesus was a divine being. In trying to explain what he meant, he drew on ideas from the Old Testament that spoke of God’s Word, or God’s Wisdom, present to God before the world was created. God’s Wisdom was ‘the fashioner of all things.’ (Wisdom 7:22) From John’s point of view, Jesus was God’s Word spoken to the people of Israel.

At his birth, Jesus was truly God, but he no longer knew it. In the same way, each of us is born male or female -objective fact – but it take us a long time to grasp even a hazy understanding of what that means. So it was with Jesus. Just as with each one of us, his lifetime was a series of new insights into who he was. As Living Space homily comments ‘He did not have, as some people believed, just the external appearance of a human but was through and through a man “like us in all things”’.

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