Dec 31 The Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

 Dec 31 The Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

Gospel and Thought for the Day - Vatican News https://www.vaticannews.va/en/word-of-the-day.html 

Gospel in Art: Optional commemoration of Saint Silvester I, Pope https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/54028

Reading of the day

A reading from the first letter of John

2:18-21

Children, it is the last hour;

and just as you heard that the antichrist was coming,

so now many antichrists have appeared.

Thus we know this is the last hour.

They went out from us, but they were not really of our number;

if they had been, they would have remained with us.

Their desertion shows that none of them was of our number.

But you have the anointing that comes from the Holy One,

and you all have knowledge.

I write to you not because you do not know the truth

but because you do, and because every lie is alien to the truth.

Gospel of the day

From the Gospel according to 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 to be through him,

and without him nothing came to be.

What came to be through him was life,

and this life was the light of the human race;

the light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness has not overcome it.

A man named John was sent from God.

He came for testimony, to testify to the light,

so that all might believe through him.

He was not the light,

but 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 to be through him,

but the world did not know him.

He came to what was his own,

but his own people did not accept him.

But to those who did accept him

he gave power to become children of God,

to those who believe in his name,

who were born not by natural generation

nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision

but of God.

And the Word became flesh

and made his dwelling among us,

and we saw his glory,

the glory as of the Father’s only-begotten Son,

full of grace and truth.

John testified to him and cried out, saying,

“This was he of whom I said,

‘The one who is coming after me ranks ahead of me

because he existed before me.’”

From his fullness we have all received,

grace in place of grace,

because while the law was given through Moses,

grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God.

The only-begotten Son, God, who is at the Father’s side,

has revealed him.

The words of the Popes

“The Word was made flesh” is one of those truths to which we have grown so accustomed that the greatness of the event it expresses barely makes an impression on us. Effectively, in this Christmastide in which these words often recur in the Liturgy, we at times pay more attention to the external aspects, to the “colours” of the celebration rather than to the heart of the great Christian newness that 

we are celebrating: something that utterly defeats the imagination, that God alone could bring about and into which we can only enter with faith. The Logos, who is with God, is the Logos who is God, the Creator of the world (cf. Jn 1:1) through whom all things were created (cf. 1:3) and who has accompanied men and women through history with his light (cf. 1:4-5; 1:9), became one among many and made his dwelling among us, becoming one of us (cf. 2:14). (…) Thus it is important to recover our wonder at the mystery, to let ourselves be enveloped by the grandeur of this event: God, the true God, Creator of all, walked our roads as a man, entering human time to communicate his own life to us (cf. 1 Jn 1:1-4). And he did not do so with the splendour of a sovereign who dominates the world with his power, but with the humility of a child. (Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, 9 January 2013)