Editor's note

Where Matthew opens his Gospel with a genealogy and Mark with the cry of the Forerunner, John begins before the world was. He echoes the first verse of Genesis and goes behind it: in the beginning, already, there is the Word. The Fathers read the Prologue as the deepest sentence the apostolic Church spoke about Christ before the councils were called. It is sung at the Paschal Liturgy each year, the new creation announced in the words of the old.

Editor's note

On the night the Lord was betrayed, after he had washed the disciples' feet and given them the bread and the cup, he laid one charge on them that has been remembered ever since as the mark of his own. The commandment is not new in that love had not been commanded before, the Law of Moses was full of it, but new in its measure. The standard is no longer the love of neighbor as oneself, but the love with which he has just loved them.

Editor's note

John alone records the prayer the Lord prayed aloud in the upper room before he went out to the garden. The Fathers call it the Prayer of the High Priest, because in it the eternal Son consecrates himself for the offering and asks of the Father what the offering is to accomplish in his disciples. He prays not only for the Eleven but for all who through their word will believe; and his petition is that they may share, in the Spirit, the unity that he has with the Father from before the foundation of the world.

Editor's note

John writes his first epistle from Ephesus near the end of his very long life, after every other apostle has been killed. He is the last witness to the Lord he saw, heard, and touched, and he writes as a father to his children. The whole letter circles around three verbs: to know, to love, to abide. In the central chapter he gives the sentence on which the whole Christian theology of God rests: not that God is loving, but that God is love. Whoever lives in love, the Theologian says, lives already in God.