THIS Sunday offers a choice between two mighty Gospels. We can mark the Epiphany with Matthew 2.1-12, and the journey of the magi. Or we can keep what sounds like a more humdrum option: “Christmas 2”. But Christmas 2 gives us the mightiest Gospel of all: one so fundamental to the Christian identity that it used to be read in most celebrations of the fuller form of Roman Catholic mass as the Last Gospel. It is often referred to as the Prologue, or “introduction”, of John.

Trying to say something useful about this extraordinary text is intimidating. It cries out for thorough, detailed, explanation of this “Word”. Shreds and tatters of Greek ideas about truth and being flutter past the clutching fingers of my mind. Fragments of Jewish thought clamour to make their contribution to the edifice of meaning.

And yet this Gospel must be “preached”. It is not only to be heard, but also explained and explored, so that we can take it to heart and live by it. When I first studied ancient Greek history, I felt as if every fact that I tried to absorb had no backdrop, no context. I was impatient to get over this ignorance. But I eventually had to accept that it would take time to orientate myself.

It takes time to learn the meanings of John’s Prologue, too. His Gospel came from a community of Christians. Although it was written by a human being, its teaching — as with other scripture texts — is “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3.16). So, perhaps, instead of ploughing ahead with Greek Stoic philosophy, or Jewish Alexandrian theology, we can ask a simple question: What is the problem that John 1.1-18 sets out to address?

Most of the New Testament consists of two kinds of writings. There are narratives — like the Gospels — which tell a story with characters, a plot, and dramatic features such as reversal and recognition. Stories, as I have said more than once here, are a powerful way to communicate truth to us, because they get ideas across in terms of human experience, arousing emotions of pity, fear, and love.

Then there are conceptual writings. These wrestle with the meanings in the stories: we meet Paul as he tries to make sense of the promises of God under the old covenant; and James, arguing an ethics of compassion based on Christ’s example and teaching; and the anonymous author of Hebrews, who quarries ancient writings for ways of understanding what God has wrought in Christ, and who Christ is.

John’s Prologue puzzles us, because it is a chunk of theology stuck on the front of a book that otherwise looks like a story. The closest parallels to it in the Synoptic Gospels are the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, both of which attempt to stake a theological as well as a historical claim for Jesus.

But the genealogies must be the least-read sections of any of the Gospels: dull stuff for us, who take Jesus’s Davidic descent as a given. Their content is of scholarly rather than spiritual interest. John’s Prologue, on the other hand, draws us with its poetry, attracts us with its vision of a world beyond this visible one that we inhabit, and finally captivates us with a single sentence that brings all three of these elements into a single point of light: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

The problem that John’s Prologue is doing its best to solve is “Who is Jesus?” If we imagine ourselves hearing the ultra-familiar words for the first time, we may be surprised that they begin with what is most opaque and mysterious: “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” This Word’s identity then begins to be disclosed in stages, through references to earthly existence, still in mysterious, non-specific terms. At last, the truth is first hinted at, then confirmed: he has glory like a father’s only-begotten son, and then he is fully revealed as “God the only-begotten Son”.

Jesus’s name is recorded only at the very end of the prologue, together with another fragment of identity. He is Messiah: “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Now we are fully prepared for finding, in all that follows, the Word, the Son, the Christ — and, yes, the human being, too.