Before Vatican II, the prologue to John’s gospel was read at the end of mass, presumably to stress its centrality to our core beliefs. Professor Raymond Brown describes it as “a hymn, a poetic summary of the whole theology and narrative of the gospel.” He goes on to say that John sees a cycle of events: “The Son descends from heaven to our level and ascends back to heaven bringing us up to the Divine Level.”
The first gospel to be written was Mark, who introduces Jesus at his baptism. Luke and Matthew go back to describe his infancy from very different perspectives. The gospel of John, however, written probably between AD 90 and 100 after a longer time of reflection, goes back to the beginning of time when “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” We are taken back to Genesis and the story of creation, when through God’s Word all things came into being.
The first reading from Ecclesiasticus speaks of wisdom, which in pre-Christian thought was personified as a woman. In the Word of the prologue we have a union of wisdom and God’s Word, a divine person, uncreated and existing with the Father.
The imagery of darkness and light are used by John to describe the absence and presence of the divine. As we kneel before the crib, we marvel at a God who chose to come among us as a tiny baby, joining with love his most vulnerable brothers and sisters.