Navarre Bible Commentary:Memorial of Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen,Bishops and Doctors of the Church

St. John the Baptist and the Pharisees by James Tissot

John 1:19-28

Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE)

The Testimony of John the Baptist

19 And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”20 He confessed, he did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” 21 And they asked him, “What then? Are you Eli′jah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” And he answered, “No.” 22 They said to him then, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” 23 He said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”

24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. 25 They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Eli′jah, nor the prophet?” 26 John answered them, “I baptize with water; but among you stands one whom you do not know, 27 even he who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” 28 This took place in Bethany beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

Cited in the Catechism:  In promulgating the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Blessed John Paul II explained that the Catechism "is a statement of the Church's faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church's Magisterium."  He went on to "declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion" (Fidei Depositum). Passages from this Gospel reading are cited in the Catechism, paragraph 575 and 719.

Commentary

1:19–24. In this setting of intense expectation of the imminent coming of the Messiah, the Baptist is a personality with enormous prestige, as is shown by the fact that the Jewish authorities send qualified people (priests and Levites from Jerusalem) to ask him if he is the Messiah.

John’s great humility should be noted: he is quick to tell his questioners: “I am not the Christ”. He sees himself as someone insignificant compared with our Lord: “I am not worthy to untie [the thong of his sandal]” (v. 27). He places all his prestige at the service of his mission as precursor of the Messiah, and, leaving himself completely to one side, he asserts that “he must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30).

1:25–26. “Baptize”: this originally meant to submerge in water, to bathe. For the Jews the rite of immersion meant legal purification of those who had contracted some impurity under the Law. Baptism was also used as a rite for the incorporation of Gentile proselytes into the Jewish people. In the Dead Sea scrolls there is mention of a baptism as a rite of initiation and purification into the Jewish Qumran community, which existed in our Lord’s time.

John’s baptism laid marked stress on interior conversion. His words of exhortation and the person’s humble recognition of his sins prepared people to receive Christ’s grace: it was a very efficacious rite of penance, preparing the people for the coming of the Messiah, and it fulfilled the prophecies that spoke precisely of a cleansing by water prior to the coming of the Kingdom of God in the messianic times (cf. Zech 13:1; Ezek 36:25; 37:23; Jer 4:14). John’s baptism, however, had no power to cleanse the soul of sins, as Christian Baptism does (cf. Mt 3:11; Mk 1:4)

“One whom you do not know”: Jesus had not yet publicly revealed himself as Messiah and Son of God; although some people did know him as a man, St John the Baptist could assert that really they did not know him.

1:27. The Baptist declares Christ’s importance by comparing himself to a slave undoing the laces of his master’s sandals. If we want to approach Christ, whom St John heralds, we need to imitate the Baptist. As St Augustine says: “He who imitates the humility of the Precursor will understand these words. […] John’s greatest merit, my brethren, is this act of humility” (In Ioann. Evang., 4, 7).

1:28. This is a reference to the town of Bethany which was situated on the eastern bank of the Jordan, across from Jericho—different from the Bethany where Lazarus and his family lived, near Jerusalem (cf. Jn 11:18).

1:29. For the first time in the Gospel Christ is called the “Lamb of God”. Isaiah had compared the sufferings of the Servant of Yahweh, the Messiah, with the sacrifice of a lamb (cf. Is 53:7); and the blood of the paschal lamb smeared on the doors of houses had served to protect the firstborn of the Israelites in Egypt (cf. Ex 12:6–7): all this was a promise and prefiguring of the true Lamb, Christ, the victim in the sacrifice of Calvary on behalf of all mankind. This is why St Paul will say that “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor 5:7). The expression “Lamb of God” also suggests the spotless innocence of the Redeemer (cf. 1 Pet 1:18–20; 1 Jn 3:5).

The sacred text says “the sin of the world”, in the singular, to make it absolutely clear that every kind of sin is taken away: Christ came to free us from original sin, which in Adam affected all men, and from all personal sins.

The book of Revelation reveals to us that Jesus is victorious and glorious in heaven as the slain lamb (cf. Rev 5:6–14), surrounded by saints, martyrs and virgins (Rev 7:9, 14; 14:1–5), who render him the praise and glory due him as God (Rev 7:10). Since Holy Communion is a sharing in the sacrifice of Christ, priests say these words of the Baptist before administering it, to encourage the faithful to be grateful to our Lord for giving himself up to death to save us and for giving himself to us as nourishment for our souls.

1:30–31. John the Baptist here asserts Jesus’ superiority by saying that he existed before him, even though he was born after him. Thereby he shows us the divinity of Christ, who was generated by the Father from all eternity and born of the Virgin Mary in time. It is as if the Baptist were saying: “Although I was born before him, he is not limited by the ties of his birth; for although he is born of his mother in time, he was generated by his Father outside of time” (St Gregory the Great, In Evangelia homiliae, 7).

Source: The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries. Biblical text from the Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

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