I did not know him
Although they must have known each other to some degree there remained a still greater reality about Jesus and his mission that was unknown to John until Jesus came to him for baptism. This should not surprise us, for however much we know about God there is always still more that we do not know. It doubtlessly surprised John, who, whatever he might have expected, could not have guessed at the reality that Jesus himself was to fulfill.
A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me
because he existed before me.
Jesus was the Word who existed in the beginning with God, and who was himself God. He was the one who existed before Abraham, the coming of whose day Abraham rejoiced to see (see John 8:56-58). It was fair to say that whatever anyone expected of the Messiah, this was something greater still.
On whomever you see the Spirit come down and remain,
he is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.
The giving of the Holy Spirit was something long desired and promised in the Old Testament. Being filled with the Spirit was something that marked David and would therefore mark the Messianic Son of David. Most people were, however, preoccupied with the idea of a military Messiah, and thought that his chief gift would be freedom from Roman rule. But in fact, the Son who existed from before all ages with the Father came primarily in order to give the gift of his Spirit to the Church.
And Moses said unto him, Art thou jealous for my sake? would God that all the LORD'S people were prophets, that the LORD would put his spirit upon them! (see Numbers 11:29).
And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions (see Joel 2:28).
I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh (see Ezekiel 36:26).
So far we seem to have a coherent if unguessed picture of who the Messiah would be. The idea that he was preexistent was easy to reconcile with the idea that he would be the one who could do what God himself had promised in giving the Holy Spirit. But there was a third characteristic or thread of this Messianic tapestry with which John the Baptist also had to come to terms, and it did not fit so neatly with the other two.
Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
Great? Check. Preexistent, in a way that characterized God himself? Check. One that would do what God himself promised to do in giving the Holy Spirit? Check. Lamb of sacrifice? One of these things does not (seem to) belong.
John had to come to terms with a Messiah who was more strikingly different from anything he could have imagined. He could not just contemplate maximum greatness as he understood it, multiply it to infinity, and then achieve a picture of the Messiah that was actually revealed. The otherness of God, the unknowable nature of his being, revealed itself not only in his greatness, but also and perhaps especially in the lengths to which his love was willing to go for the sake of his creatures. We would later see Peter having difficulty coming to terms with this comprehensive picture of Jesus.
And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” (see Matthew 16:22).
When we look at the whole picture of Jesus we might discover that we have some ideas about greatness and power, about God himself, that are twisted. We are surprised and cannot easily hold together the idea of an all powerful God with the self-emptying love of the lamb of sacrifice. Like John, we need the help of revelation to see how these can make a coherent whole. This revelation can teach us what it taught John himself. God is powerful, true, and beautiful. But all of this is grounded in the reality that, "God is love" (see First John 4:7). And the love that God himself is, expressed through the human nature of Jesus, would settle for nothing less than to become himself the lamb of God who would bear our sufferings, carry our sorrows (see Isaiah 53:4-7), and set us free from sin.
to you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy
By his sacrificial death as the lamb of God and by his gift of the Holy Spirit Jesus Christ himself sanctified us in our baptism and set us apart to be holy, wholly consecrated to him. In being set apart in this way are meant to realize that we are called to imitate Jesus himself in his self-giving love. We are called to still be in the world, but not of it, in order to love the world, as God himself loves it. We receive the Holy Spirit not to conquer military forces, but to comfort others, to love our enemies, and thereby conquer the forces of the devil. God himself comes to dwell within our hearts. But he is not content to be bottled up inside us. He desires to use each of us to reach out to others. The main way that we are meant to resemble God and to reflect his holiness in the world is not by becoming powerful but learning to love as he first loved us. When we begin to learn this the words of Isaiah that first applied to Jesus will apple to us as well.
It is too little, the LORD says, for you to be my servant,
to raise up the tribes of Jacob,
and restore the survivors of Israel;
I will make you a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.
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