NOTES for Joh 1:19-51

Before us is John the Baptist’s testimony about the baptism of Jesus, handed down to us through the disciples; and while the other evangelists relied on the accounts of other people, the evangelist John is himself a witness. Thanks to this, we can come close to how the greatest of the prophets perceived the Greatest of the sons of men.

We become so accustomed to calling preaching a testimony that we begin to regard this description only as a figure of speech. Yet it has the most direct meaning: the preacher must answer for the truthfulness of his words, like witnesses in court, and, like testimony in court, preaching can affect the fate of those who hear it. It may influence a choice that leads to life or to death.

The baptism itself is scarcely described; the evangelist’s attention is focused on the events connected with it that took place in those days. Let us note, however, that when John the Baptist compares the Spirit to a dove, he does not literally liken Him to a created bird, but makes a comparison as he tries to find an image for expressing the inexpressible.

"The voice of one crying in the wilderness". These words, if torn from their context, sound like a cry of loneliness, desperate in tone. A person who cries out in the wilderness will most often be heard by no one. But John is not the one crying in the wilderness; he is its voice. A voice in the wilderness is lonely and cannot fail to be heard, if there is someone to listen.

Absolute loneliness is always waiting. John waits very intensely; in the wilderness of loneliness it is impossible not to hear the steps of the One who can fill any loneliness. Therefore John becomes a hermit, so that he may be the first to hear and prepare the way, so that he may become a voice for those who do not hear on their own.

These words can be a consolation for those who feel lonely. In loneliness one hears better. Maybe God gives us loneliness so that it will be easier for us, amid the noise and rush of modern life, to make out His quiet voice, His call, His knock at the still closed doors of our heart. And if we open, the wilderness will be filled with God's light and joy.

This is what the gift of prophecy consists in first of all: not predicting the future, but seeing through to the meaning of what is already happening. Jesus will later call John the Baptist the greatest of all prophets, and now we read how this greatest prophet sees, in the carpenter from Nazareth who had been unknown until that day, the central purpose for which the Son of God became incarnate on earth. John uses the language and concepts of the Old Testament, thereby bearing witness once again that the New Testament is the continuation and fulfillment of what was promised in the Old Testament, and that both Testaments show us one and the same Revelation unfolding in time, in history.

"The Lamb of God." Of God means belonging to God, not to the world, "kadosh" (holy), intended to be given to God. A lamb is not simply an animal from the flock, but the traditional sacrifice to God, beginning with the sacrifices of Abel (Gen. 4) and Abraham (Gen. 22). The sacrifice of an innocent and spotless lamb was offered for the sake of restoring peace with God, peace broken by human sin. But, of course, no lamb can redeem human guilt by its death. Only a human being, the Son of Man, is able to become the Redeemer; yet because God does not desire the death of any of the people He has created, only the Son of God, eternally begotten yet become man, pure, innocent, and blameless, yet taking upon Himself the payment for the sin of the world, reconciles us to God by His death on the cross.

John, filled with the Holy Spirit, reveals to people this truth beyond human imagining, and we see how some of those who hear him accept this testimony and become disciples of Christ, apostles. If we too accept this testimony, then all our life from then on will be a following after the Teacher and Savior, through death into resurrection and eternal life.

In bearing witness to Jesus, John notes an astonishing feature of the Kingdom in its relation to our world, which is being transformed but is not yet completely transformed. He speaks of Jesus as the One who has gone ahead of him, although He came after him. Of course, traditional Jewish ideas about the Messiah are reflected here as well, since according to those ideas the Messiah was conceived by God before the creation of the world.

But the matter, it appears, is not only Jewish tradition, but first of all the very nature of the Kingdom. From the point of view of our earthly history, the Kingdom comes at the end of time, after that history is completed. For God, however, it is neither "before" nor "after" history; rather, if we resort to the space-time concepts familiar to us, it is "above" it. It is greater than the space and time familiar to us; it embraces them and includes them in itself, after first transforming them and radically changing their very nature. And the Messiah, who brought the Kingdom into the world, belongs to our world only insofar as this world becomes part of the Kingdom.

That is why His coming becomes an event that does not fit within the framework of earthly history, while people who belong to that history entirely can see only a small part of what is taking place. But to those who, like John, understand what is really happening, it becomes clear that the One has entered the world who has enclosed all earthly history in Himself, so that no one is given a place ahead of Him.

John the Baptist says of Jesus that he did not know Him, although Jesus was his relative. He says that he did not know that Jesus was the Messiah, that Jesus was the very Lamb who took upon Himself the sins of the world, that Jesus was the Son of God.

We presume to judge people without knowing them at all. None of us has the right to say that we know another person, because God can always help someone change and become so different that we will say we never knew that person. But what faith John the Baptist must have needed to believe that the Messiah was Jesus, someone so close to him!

And unless we have such faith, we will never learn to accept those close to us as they are and to love them, nor will we ever be able to change ourselves. We often say that we certainly know ourselves: we know what we can do and what we cannot. But God knows us better. He created us, and He knows that with His help we can do far more, while without God we can do nothing.

John the Baptist says of Jesus that he did not know Him, although Jesus was his relative. He says that he did not know that Jesus was the Messiah, that Jesus was the very Lamb who took upon Himself the sins of the world, that Jesus was the Son of God.

We presume to judge people without knowing them at all. None of us has the right to say that we know another person, because God can always help someone change and become so different that we will say we never knew that person. But what faith John the Baptist must have needed to believe that the Messiah was Jesus, someone so close to him!

And unless we have such faith, we will never learn to accept those close to us as they are and to love them, nor will we ever be able to change ourselves. We often say that we certainly know ourselves: we know what we can do and what we cannot. But God knows us better. He created us, and He knows that with His help we can do far more, while without God we can do nothing.

Here is of what consists first of all the gift of prophesy: not in the prediction of the future, but to clear up the signification of what is already taken place. Jesus will afterward call John the Baptist the greatest of all prophets, and here we read how this greatest prophet begins to see clearly what was dark until this day, the carpenter of Nazareth, that most important, for which the Son of God was made flesh on earth. John uses the language, the notions of the Old Testament, showing therefore one more time that the New Testament is the continuation and the fulfillment of what was promised in the Old Testament, and that both Testaments show us the same thing, developing in time, in history - Revelation.

“The Lamb of God”. Of God - means belonging to God, and not to the world, “oblation” (saint), destined to be giving to God. The lamb – not just an animal of the flock, but a traditional sacrifice to God, beginning with Abel's sacrifice (Gen 4) and Abraham's (Gen 22). The sacrifice of an innocent and spotless lamb was carried out for the restitution of peace with God, this peace which was violated by the human sin. But, certainly no lamb can by its death pay for man's fault. Only a person, the Son of Man is capable of being the Redeemer; and as God doesn't want the death of any of the people created by Him, only the Son of God - been born pre-eternally, become a man, clean, innocent and pure, but Who took in charge the payment for the sin of the world, - reconciles us with God by His death on the cross.

John filled with the Holy Spirit, opens to people this inconceivable {to them} truth, and we see how some of his listeners accept this testimony and become the followers of Christ, the apostles. If we also accept this testimony, all our further life will then be to follow the Master and Savior, through death in resurrection and eternal life.

The news of the Messiah who has appeared in the world spreads in an interesting way. On the one hand, people follow Him in order to look at Him. "Where do you live?" "Come and see." And it cannot be otherwise, for it is not enough to hear about the Kingdom; one must absolutely see it oneself, with one's own eyes. One must spend time near the Messiah and trust Him, as one trusts a person into whose house one enters. But in order to take the first step, one must hear. Hear the joyful news that the Messiah promised by God has truly come. And freely make one's own decision about how to respond to this news.

After all, in the final analysis, a person is still free. In the fallen world each of us is bound by a thousand bonds conditioned by the laws of this untransformed world, while in the Kingdom we entrust ourselves completely to God. But God leaves to us the question of choosing in which world to live and which laws to follow.

Of course, when the choice has been made, God will intervene and help, if the Kingdom has been chosen. It cannot be otherwise: whatever we choose, we will not enter the Kingdom without God's help, without the Savior's direct intervention, however much we may desire it. But the very possibility of such intervention is conditioned above all by our own choice. God will not break into our life by force.

Of course, sometimes He can nudge, draw attention, remind, as Jesus reminds Nathanael of something. But Nathanael too, apparently, was seeking and waiting for the Messiah quite sincerely, and his words about Galilee, from which nothing good was to be expected, were a tribute to a tradition whose correctness this man sincerely believed. But he was honest before himself and before God, and such honesty opens the heart to God. Then one can nudge a person in the right direction, for he is not resisting God's guidance; he is simply mistaken. And a mistake, even the most serious one, is not fatal; only the stubborn refusal to see and correct one's mistakes is fatal. Everything else can be set right. And if the way into the Kingdom is still narrow, then we have only ourselves to address with complaints about it.

Beginning from the day of Pascha, with rare exceptions, we read the Gospel of John almost straight through, and one after another come astonishing and deep passages, each of which makes one want to speak in superlatives. Today too we read the story of the calling of the first apostles, a story that is, of course, colored by paschal joy. The most significant words in it therefore appear to be those of the apostle Andrew the First-Called: "We have found the Messiah." The apostles then could not even imagine what they would have to live through and what they would witness. But thanks to them and together with them, we too, having lived through the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, can now say: "We have found the Messiah." And most importantly, He has found us.

Perhaps the key words in the Gospel according to John are "encounter" and "disciples." Almost all the situations the evangelist describes are situations in which Jesus encounters different people who then become His disciples. What is an encounter? The Teacher saw each of us even before we learned about Him, but one last step, which is also the first, remains for us: to come to His home, to find out where He lives, and then to tell those we love about Him. Then we too will become "witnesses" of what we have seen and heard, witnesses of His coming into the world from the Father. Then He will become for us the ladder by which the world above and our world communicate.

We do not know what Jesus said to His first disciples during those two days; we do not know whether He preached, whether He taught them, whether He saw into their past and their thoughts. We know that He had not yet performed miracles, if the miracle in Cana is the first. We know that He lived with them as a man in flesh and blood, was near them, ate, drank, talked, slept. And all the while He was God. And after this Andrew believed that they had found the Messiah, and immediately began to bear witness to Him. But not everyone believed them; Nathanael, for example, did not believe. Because they spoke about Christ, but had not yet become so like Him that, looking at them, one could say that they had met the Messiah.

This is what Christ calls us to: to become like Him, to imitate Him and His life so that, looking at us, living beside us and communicating with us, people may believe in the God in whom we believe.

This Gospel passage is endlessly precious as an example of very personal relations with God. What happened there under the fig tree? We do not know, and this is very important, because this mystery is known only to Nathanael and God; here there is the sharpest personalism. And for Nathanael it was something very important. There is no need to guess what it was, but we should notice that as soon as he talked with Jesus about it, he believed. This means that this fig tree becomes a symbol of conversion.

Each of us has his own fig tree, and we treasure it and draw spiritual strength from it. But it is not the only thing that matters; what became fundamentally important for Nathanael's conversion was that he and the Lord spoke about it. Moreover, the Lord was the first to speak. This too is very important. Our prayer is always a response to the Lord's call. Until this is so, it is not prayer, but rather self-persuasion.

Few believers can say that their faith is their choice. If that is so, then it is not faith but a system of convictions. We are always found by the Lord, as the apostles were found by Him, and, obeying an unknown power, we leave everything and follow Him.

Let us imagine a scene: a person today has undergone conversion, come to believe in Christ, and joyfully hurries to a friend to announce that he has found what can solve all their problems. The friend naturally expresses distrust. The convert then says to him... and here the scene freezes, like a still frame. What can he say? Like Philip, “Come and see”? Where should he go, and what should he look at? Where and how can today’s Nathanael encounter Christ? Can we, the Church, the Body of Christ, reveal Christ to him in such a way that he exclaims, “You are the Son of God!”? For he is called not only to see Christ in us, but even more: to see heaven opened.

Evangelist John's narration about the vocation of Nathanael is one of the most wonderful passages of the New Testament. The most important moments of this narrative concern not only Nathanael, but in some degree, to any person too. When Philip told Nathanael that he and his friends found the Messiah, Nathanael expresses doubt and answers by a widespread joke. But when Philip tells him: "come and see", - We see that Nathanael gets up and goes to see. And it is an act, which deserved the approval of the Lord Jesus, because He says of Nathanael: "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile ". There is in the life of every man moment, when someone has to achieve a certain act, if he really wants to find God, to meet Him. This means for the majority of the modern persons that it is necessary to get up and go to Church - indeed all know that people believing in God and knowing Him gather in the Church. And this signifies for most of us the necessity of freeing ourselves from our ideas according to which we shall find nothing interesting in the Church.

The Lord says "I saw thee" to Nathanael, who made this step in order to meet with Him. Most Christian thinkers from the time of the patristics lean to believe that Nathanael had "under the fig tree" a certain experience unknown to us (and may be to the evangelist also) of meeting with God, His mysterious touch. Maybe Nathanael felt at that moment the love and the beneficence of the Creator... Maybe he has seen God's Bounty, and thanked for them... Or maybe he simply perceived, how beautiful the world, which God created is... Every person can have such moments, when he feels that "the being" doesn't limit itself in what one see. And when you understand that there was indeed Jesus of Nazareth near you at that moment - you find the Source of life.

It often seems to us that the Lord calls us at the wrong time. We try to tell Him that we still have a pile of things to do, that first we want to do this and that. When He calls us to do something active in His Name, we reproach God with His own words: "Mary has chosen the good portion," and accuse Him of allegedly forcing us into busyness. When God calls us to put aside all our tasks in order to stand in prayer, in order to commune with Him, we sometimes even answer Him with a quotation: "Faith without works is dead." We plug our ears against the true voice of God by using His words that were also addressed to us, but at another time.

These words said by the Lord Jesus-Christ to Nathanael, mean that "henceforth", from the moment of Christ's arrival into the world, a drastic change takes place in the universe. The fall of man led to the fact that heaven became closed for us, an abyss between the world of lights and the world of darkness. In Jacob's dream (see Gen. 28:12), this abyss is been covered by a mysterious ladder, on which the angels can ascend and descend, all this is in a dream, but there is no ladder in the reality, and the appearance of angels into this world is an exceptional event. Traditionally, Christians consider the Jacob's ladder as a symbol, an anticipating image of the Pure Virgin, through Whom the Christ comes.

Here the Lord Jesus says that this ladder became reality, heaven opens, and the manifestation of God's will and power on earth becomes a norm. This "ladder", the "bridge" joining God with His creation, is Jesus Christ Himself, the God-Man. He is the Son of God, coming down from heaven, since He is the Son of Man, ascending to the Father, and when His ascent (Ascension) will come true, a bilateral movement will be open between heaven and earth, and the Holy Spirit will come down into this world, as his patrimony upon the apostles at the Pentecost. The vision of the opened heaven is really bestowed to people: John the Baptist during the Lord's Baptism, three apostles during the Transfiguration, the first deacon Stephen before the torture, apostle Paul during the prayer, apostle John the Evangelist in the Revelation and several other saints saw it {opened heaven}; maybe it's like this for us too, but even more important is what the Lord Jesus says: “Blessed he that believed without seeing”.

In John's Gospel, very little is said about the ministry of John the Baptist. This is especially strange if we remember that its author is a man who, before following Jesus, was for some time a disciple of John the Baptist. On the other hand, perhaps for this very reason the evangelist did not consider it necessary to say much about John's personality: it was evidently well known not only to him, but also to those closest to him, so there was no need to write much about John the Baptist. What had to be brought out was the main thing in his ministry, and the main thing was how John the Baptist himself defined the meaning of his ministry, expressing it in Isaiah's words: to prepare the way of Yahweh. By this the prophet meant that his task was to prepare the people for the Messiah's coming. And to prepare for His coming meant, as John the Baptist himself testified, to wash and be cleansed from sin.

Of course, in the prophet's calls one can see something reminiscent of the many brotherhoods of those whom historians of religion call "hemerobaptists," "constant bathers." Such were the Essenes too, who practiced regular purifying washings. If in traditional Jewish practice washing was always connected with cleansing from a specific sin committed by a person, the Essenes (including the Qumranites, with whom John was evidently connected in his younger years) did this regularly, believing that life itself defiles a person.

But in this case the resemblance was only external: unlike the "constant bathers," John did not think that cleansing was an endless process. He was only convinced that a person could be cleansed completely only when the power of God fully transformed his nature. And he was also convinced that the coming Messiah would be able to do this. The prophet evidently saw his own task as reminding people that religiousness alone is not enough, and that a person who, according to traditional ideas, is considered clean and fully sound is not so in God's eyes. Therefore one must be ready to take the next step on the path of resisting one's own sinful nature. A step that opens the way into the Kingdom.