John 1:19–34: The Revealing of Jesus
Introduction
In the last chapter, we discussed the notion that the Gospel of John is written not so much to give a verbatim, purely sequential repetition of the facts, but that John the Evangelist shaped his Gospel to convey to us the themes that he wants to highlight from the life of Jesus. John makes no secret of the fact that his Gospel has not exhausted everything that might be written about Jesus (John 21:25), but he tells us that what he writes, he writes specifically with the goal “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). Nothing is fabricated, but the Evangelist chooses what he writes, and how he writes it, with a clear purpose in mind. Toward that end, John opened his Gospel in John 1:1–18 with a clear identification of Jesus of Nazareth as God.
In that prologue, John the Evangelist also introduced us to another figure: John the Baptist (John 1:6–8, 15). In some ways, the verses about the Baptist might have seemed out of place, but the Evangelist included them for a reason. Namely, the Baptist serves as the first witness to Jesus by identifying him to the wider world. For this reason, the Evangelist considers the Baptist’s testimony to be essential even in the prologue, and the first story we take up after the prologue explains this significance. In John 1:19–34, we read about the subservient, ministerial mission of John the Baptist to herald the coming of the one who baptizes with the Spirit (John 1:33), who is himself the Son of God (John 1:34).
