John 1:34-37 - Look, the Lamb of God!

1:34

We now read that John the Baptist declared that Jesus is “God’s Chosen One”, and that his disciples followed Jesus. John the apostle is making it as clear as he can that John the Baptist was pointing to Jesus, not himself. As I have said a couple of times already, part of the reason for this emphasis is to counter wrong ideas about John the Baptist, but this is not the only reason. John was important in his own right as a herald of the coming Messiah. He was sent to “prepare the way”. He can also be seen as the culmination of the Old Testament prophets. All of them were ultimately pointing ahead to Jesus. Jesus is the fulfilment of all prophecy.

1:35-37

We now see two of the twelve meeting Jesus. Sometimes this is presented as being at odds with the picture presented in the synoptic gospels of the call of the disciples, especially Peter. This is not a fair nor sensible way to look at things. First of all we need to realise that none of the gospels are presenting a complete picture with all the data. They weren’t trying to do that, nor was it possible. The writing on scrolls imposed severe practical constraints on the length of documents (We should be very grateful for that! See how much information is conveyed in a relatively short space. Many would do well to learn from that!). In the synoptics Jesus is calling the disciples to “Follow Me”. In this section it is more an encounter with Jesus, a meeting with Him. One thing we can learn is that when Jesus did command the disciples to “Follow Me” it was probably not their first encounter with Jesus. 

John was with two of his disciples, one of whom we learn was Andrew. The name of the other is not give, some think it was John, but that is conjecture and may or may not be the case. When they saw Jesus, John declared “Look, the Lamb of God!”. On hearing this the two disciples followed Jesus. This demonstrates that they had learnt well from their teacher! John had been telling them that one greater than he was coming, and so when he pointed out who that One was the two disciples followed the One.