John 1:30 “A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.”

This is how John the Baptist described Jesus. How does Jesus “surpass” John? He was John’s younger cousin by six months. He came from a less prominent family. Jesus’ stepdad was a simple carpenter from a small town, while John’s dad was a priest who worked at the temple in Jerusalem. At this point in time Jesus was practically unknown to the world. John had a ministry that was drawing large crowds and had caught the attention of the top leaders in Israel. John could have been tempted to put himself ahead of Jesus. After all, his ministry came first.

Tons of people didn’t see Jesus as any greater than themselves. They still don’t. He’s a great man, they may believe. But history is littered with great men. You can take your choice which ones to pay attention to, and which ones to push off to the dusty corners on the outer fringe of your memory. They may feel safe, we may feel safe, neglecting Jesus or ignoring him, because we don’t really see him. But it isn’t safe. We need John the Baptist to help us see Jesus, and to see his place compared to ours.

“He has surpassed me,” the Baptist says, “because he was before me.” I will admit that John doesn’t come right out and say, “Jesus is the eternal Son of God and Creator of all things.” The people weren’t ready for that. But he is implying it. In what way was Jesus “before” John? He was born six months later. Jesus himself later says of John that “of those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist” (Matthew 11:11).

Still John insists that he isn’t even worthy to tie Jesus’ shoes. Jesus was “before” John in the sense that he existed as the God and ruler of heaven before the beginning of time, and so, long before any human beings were conceived and born. His place far surpasses John, when we see Jesus as he really is.

Where do we stand? In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis addresses the people who want to reduce Jesus, who pronounced himself the forgiver of sins, to the status of “Great Moral Teacher.” “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. … Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Obviously many people either ignore Lewis’s logic, or they simply don’t care about it. They insist on seeing Jesus as something less than he is. That is the nature of unbelief. It is as much (or more) a problem of the heart as it is a problem of the mind.

See Jesus, and see his place, especially see his grace, and you see that he is not someone for us to neglect or ignore. Trust the one who far surpasses us all.