Today we hear a very different account of the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, from John’s gospel (John 1:29-34). John still references Jesus baptism but he structures his account very differently (as is the case with pretty much everything in his gospel).
Here there is no interaction between Jesus and the Father, the story is presented entirely from the perspective of John the Baptist. John (the evangelist) wants to present John the Baptist as fully in the line of the great prophets, seen as witnesses to God in this world – and also showing Jesus as overtaking that old order. So we have both continuity and a radical shift in God’s relationship with humankind.
John has already set the context with the extraordinary opening of his gospel: In the beginning was the Word… He presents Jesus as both eternal and completely new in the moment of his appearance to the Baptist by the Jordan. The Baptist says “I did not know him” – which is odd given they are cousins. But the evangelist isn’t talking at the level of the mundane – by “know” he means in a deep sense, “know him as the Son of God”. This is important, not to tell us something about John the Baptist, but to make us reflect on how we ourselves “know” Jesus – we know him through the eyes of faith. Even if we were physically blind we could still see him and know him, as John elaborates at length later in his gospel.
The other major difference in this gospel is how it presents the baptism story as the link from John the prophet to the disciples of Jesus. The first disciples are not found fishing by the Sea of Galilee, they are John’s disciples whom he pushes to follow Jesus. John wants us to feel the Baptist pushing us also.
It’s not enough to be baptized with water, to be cleansed. We have to be baptized by the Holy Spirit. We have to be transformed into new beings. We “have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy, with all those everywhere who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus”, as Paul puts it in his greeting to the church in Corinth when he first writes to them (1 Corinthians 1:1-3). He could equally have been writing to us.