Logos - The Prologue of the Gospel of St. John
By scientist and priest Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

If a literary analysis were sufficient to show that a written text is due to a supernatural influence and not to human wisdom and reasoning, the opening page of St. John's Gospel would be the most likely example of divine inspiration. Nothing similar was ever part of any philosophy or mythology. It is just unthinkable that a fisherman from Galilee, 2000 years ago, might have produced it by his reasoning power.

"In the beginning…"It is not a historical start anchored on any specific date, based upon genealogies or human events, but a true origin of existence, previous even to any cosmological evolution. A reference to a state before time began, in the unthinkable "before" that takes us to consider a no-time when matter was absent and no physical process could be described as a "clock" to measure events unfolding in sequence. It is a "beginning" of a logical order, of causality, of the very roots of existence.

When we seek the ultimate reason for all levels of being, we are forced to ponder a beginning without a start, without the flux that marks the contingency of everything finite in our experience. We can only use human terms to refer to the unchanging, the absolute and eternal, but this is the nature of that "beginning" where everything else has to find a reason for its being. It is an echo of the opening lines of Genesis, when "In the beginning" God created the Heavens and the Earth.

In that first stage the only reality to be found is the non-material Godhead existing eternally in its infinite perfection, brimming with the internal life of the Trinity: God is not presented as an impersonal "nature", subject to some kind of mindless evolution. In that beginning there was the WORD -not a noise of some material Big Bang, but a Word- full of meaning, expressing the totality of God's own richness. Only when there is intelligence can we expect to find a word that communicates the ideas that are the proper activity of a mind, of an intelligent person.

The Word, total expression of God's infinite reality, appears as the Image of God's essence, not as a transient sound beamed outwards towards a listener, but as the living self-portrait identical in nature to the Godhead it reflects. A living likeness is a Son, and this relationship defines the personality of the Word without beginning.

"And the Word was with God, and the Word was God". The Greek text uses a turn of phrase that implies -in that simple "was with God"- an intimate face-to-face presence. The Word is the perfect mirror where the Father sees his total being expressed in the Son. And because this relationship is necessarily present, Father and Son coexist as an inseparable unity, where both Persons are so intimately bound that their mutual Love -equal in infinity and eternity- constitutes a third Person, the Holy Spirit. The Godhead cannot be described except in terms of this total self-giving where no independent activity can take place: a single Essence, one Mind and one Will, exists necessarily in three Persons, constituted by their subsistent relationships.

We are truly awed by this mystery, which surpasses all human comprehension. But we should remember that we do not understand even inanimate matter (nobody really understands Quantum Mechanics or Relativity); still less the intricacies of our own mind and body and their mutual relationship. We should not be surprised - we should rather expect it- if we find that the intimate life of God, known by Revelation only, surpasses all our logical categories, inferred from our limited experience of the finite known directly only at the sense level.

Repeating the same idea -"This Word was in the beginning with God"- we are next led to consider its relationship with the created world: "All things came to be through Him, and apart from Him nothing came to be of whatever exists". The Word is the full expression of the infinite richness of the Divinity, reflected in myriad ways in every created being, the pattern and model for all the beauty and order outside of God himself, the "exemplary Cause" partially manifested in all finite beings, spiritual and material, living and non-living.

Just as the dazzling glory of the Sun is reproduced in a minute scale in the glint of every dew drop and in the shining of every speck of dust or every grain of sand, the perfection of the Word is shared with all created beings as the ultimate source of whatever is beautiful and admirable in them.

But the statement "apart from Him nothing came to be" has a still richer meaning. The Word is the omnipotent command that bridges the infinite gap between nothingness and existence. As expressed in the book of Genesis, a Word -"Fiat!": "Let there be"- is all that the Divinity needs to bring forth the vastness of the Universe, the order of the Heavens, the marvellous variety of life on Earth.

There is no need for any previous building material, no opposing force, no independent co-creator. The Word is totally effective, without effort or delays in achieving its meaning. And not only the first moment of existence is due to the power of this command: things that cannot begin to be without it cannot continue in existence without its sustaining activity. In the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians, Christ is the immovable foundation upon which everything rests: "all things have their consistency -their enduring strength - in Him" (Col 1, 17)

In the typical cosmogonies of other cultures matter is presented as eternal, the original and chaotic "something", a necessary prelude for whatever evolves from it, beginning with the gods themselves. The variety of gods and their rivalries and fights are then invoked as the reason for the different structures and events. By contrast, the God of Genesis achieves his purpose without help or strife, through his Omnipotent Word. This is the efficient Cause of the totality of whatever exists.

Nothing can exist "apart from Him" because, in God's plan, only the Word -raising all of creation to the level of the Divinity- is the sufficient reason to explain why the creation takes place. The Word is the ultimate final Cause. Thus this statement is a prelude to the saying of Christ in the Book of Revelation: "I am the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End". The Word made Man is the reason why God creates and the crowning point of God's work.

A new theme is now introduced in this Prologue of the fourth Gospel. The Word is presented as the embodiment of Life and Light, two complementary aspects of the same flowering of God's activity. "In him there was Life, and this Life was the Light of all Men". The Living God, as opposed to the lifeless idols of the gentiles, shares his Life with us in an outpouring of life-giving clarity.

Life is found in its very source, in the Word, which expresses God's intimate vitality as the Son, the living likeness of the Father. Its manifestation to the human race illuminates our very existence, showing its value and its purpose. This Light dispels all darkness, filling the aimless vacuum of a human existence reduced to the level of perishable matter, both at the death of every individual and at the final stage of cosmic evolution.

But the theme of life-giving light is now developed as a paradoxical fight with darkness and the implicit death that accompanies it. "Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not accept it!" In the first day of creation, Light shone on a dark and chaotic world, the formless abyss of Genesis, and from that initial outpouring the order and beauty and life of the following days could be understood as the work of an intelligent and loving Father. But the coming of the Word to give life and light is rejected; the darkness is not simply a lack of light, but a negative force that cannot bear its shining presence: the darkness either ignores the light, closing its eyes to it in a guilty blindness, or fights against it because the light shows its own sinfulness which is opposed to God.

John now has a brief aside to avoid misunderstandings on the part of people aware of the impact of John the Baptist and his preaching: He is acknowledged as God's messenger to announce the Light, meant to lead to Christ. "He was not the Light, only a witness to speak for the Light". In contraposition to John, "the Word was the true Light that enlightens all Men, coming into the world".

But if the Baptist, holy and admirable, was only a forerunner of the true envoy of the Father, it is clear that other "lights" -perhaps the hidden "wisdoms" of esoteric groups, present already in the early times of the Church- must be dismissed as false glints meant to lure the gullible. The true divine clarity was present in the world only with the coming of the Word.

He was present in the world, a world that owed to him its very existence, and the world did not recognize its maker! More amazing still in its blindness: the people chosen as God's special portion, his own privileged heritage, refused to receive him. "He came to his own, and his own did not accept him!" One can almost hear the anguished cry that echoes Christ's lament, mixed with tears, upon the Jerusalem that did not recognize the day of its visitation.

Possibly, when the Gospel was written (while John was in Ephesus, according to St. Ireneus) the destruction of Jerusalem was already a painful reality, still recent and clearly seen as the fulfilment of Christ's prophecy. But as a consequence of the dispersal of the vanquished children of Abraham, the Gospel was announced also to the Gentiles, and they too were able to see the Light: "But to those who did accept him He gave power to become children of God".

By opening their eyes and receiving the message of truth, all those, of any race or nation, were raised to a new level of life, exercising a divine activity, with eternal value above anything that a creature can achieve by its efforts. "Believing in his Name" is the key to share God's very Life. It is possible to see in this way of speaking a reflection of the reverence due to the ineffable name of God: John does not mention the name of Jesus here, even if he does in the narratives of the Lord's preaching and activity. For a devout reader of the Bible, "the Name" has an immediate connotation of the divine.

The faith in the Name -acceptance of the Light of his Truth, made into a personal commitment- has a transforming power comparable to a graft of the divinity itself into the human stock. Thus "to become children of God" is much more than to receive a legal recognition of adoption that would not imply new activity or a different kind of life. It has to mean that there is a sharing in the very nature of the heavenly Father, and consequently developing a new set of divine functions of knowledge and love, proper of the Trinity.

To stress this new sonship, John goes into detail to distinguish its source from every human line of descent. It is not due to bloodlines or limited to biological or racial relationships within a political environment or a traditional social setting. It is a birth "from God", that entitles the believer to address God as "Father" and leads to enjoying his happiness forever.

This amazing change in our nature is achieved by the most unimaginable gift of the divinity itself to the human race: "The Word became flesh". The eternal Son of God became a Man, part of our biological world, a "rational animal", joining matter and human spirit to the Godhead. Against the mistaken efforts of philosophers (ancient and modern) to maintain the unsullied "otherness" of the Divinity, John uses the most graphic and shocking language. "The spirit became matter" would be a contradiction, since it would imply an impossible change from one nature to another. But the Word, as a Person in the Trinity is still a divine Person who is born in our world with a true human nature that does not destroy or change the divinity. Thus it is the Son of God who eats and cries in Bethlehem and eventually dies on the Cross. Perfect in his divinity and perfect in his humanity, the God-Man inseparably joined both natures.

The Word became flesh and "pitched his tent among us": not a palace or a throne, but the humble tent of a nomad, sharing our poverty and the fickleness of our daily existence. He is "Emmanuel", God-with-us, without courtiers, privileges or social rank. The apostle is still reliving the experience of walking with Christ through the dusty paths of Galilee, partaking with him of the humble bread and fish of the poor, seeing him tired and asleep in the boat amid ropes and nets.

For an Israelite, seeing God was necessarily so traumatic that death was sure to follow immediately; still, amazed at his experience, John can now write "we saw his glory, the glory proper of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth". It is probably a reference to the Transfiguration, when the face of Christ shone like the sun (a possible reference to the Shekina, the "glory of Yahweh" manifested to Israel) and, while receiving the homage of Moses and Elias, he was proclaimed by the Father as "the beloved" (also an indication of rank as "first born") in whom God's favor rests in a unique and total way.

"Full of grace and truth" is also a proclamation of Christ's message underlined by the claim that nobody else could ever dare to make: "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life". The triple statement has been developed in the Prologue, and -after another appeal to the Baptist's testimony- is now re-stated in its full and exclusive meaning: "We all have received from his fullness, grace upon grace". What a happy proclamation of gratitude! The brimming grace found in Christ overflows upon us in a constant and inexhaustible outpouring of generosity and mercy, always due to the infinite goodness of the giver who loves without limit and without previous merit on our part: as the same St. John says in his first letter, God's love is not a response to our love, but rather the first and only source of this happy communion.

Summing up the unique role of Christ, always above that of any past patriarch or prophet, John says explicitly "though the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ". There is a deep contrast between the Law, with its connotation of an external juridical order, imposed by authority and the fear of punishment, and the "grace and truth" that quickens and enlightens our innermost being in an atmosphere of family love. The channel for this flow of life from God is Jesus Christ, and only He; in the words of the apostle Peter "There is no other name given to mankind in which we can be saved" (Acts 4, 12). He is not "a way to God", but "the way", the only one in God's plan of redemption.

Thus the prologue ends with the clear reason for the message it contains: "No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is in the Father's bosom, who has manifested him".

What a charming and beautiful way to express the intimate life of the Trinity as the source of all our happiness! Through Jesus Christ we have found the fullness of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, we have found Grace and Light and Life beyond the most daring dreams of any human reasoning.