The strangest book in the New Testament of the Christian Bible is the Book of Revelation, written by an apostle named John after he was banished to the island of Patmos, about 70 years after the death and reported resurrection of Jesus. It contains a vision of the future and the "final judgment", in colorful, even phantasmagorical terms quite unlike the narrative gospels or the admonitory letters of Paul. While Jesus is a character in this book, he is only quoted once -- at the very end, in words completely unlike the preceding prose.
These words come abruptly at the end of a dialogue between John and an angel, and are simple and declarative. Suddenly, Jesus speaks for himself. But as with many sayings of Jesus, this one focuses on a topic that he raised again and again in the gospels, his identity: "I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star." Many theologians have taken this literally, to mean that Jesus was saying that, as God, he preceded the Jewish king David, and as incarnated, he came from David's bloodline.
The "bright and morning star" has been interpreted usually to be a reference to Venus, which rises before the sun in the morning, heralding the day -- supposedly suggesting the metaphor of Jesus as the herald of a new dispensation in human events. But why would John, much less Jesus, after such a cinematic if allegorical glimpse of the future in Revelation, frame the last statement of the "Son of God" in such a prosaic and obvious way? What follows is a different interpretation, which is not theological -- but historical, or rather at the intersection of history and faith.
First, some background. In the gospels, Jesus is quoted as having said about himself, "Before Abraham was, I am." Who is the "I" that he meant? Today Catholics and many Protestants believe that the "I" is God, of which Jesus was the incarnation, so to them this was a statement meant to identify himself as God. But Jesus frequently referred to himself as the "Son of Man" and never directly as the "Son of God". Indeed, Jesus continually told his followers to "go and do likewise," as if his healings and miracles were not earthly stunts of a divine being but actions that others could also learn how to do, if they understood what Jesus taught. That seems consistent with the references in the New Testament to Jesus as the "Spirit of Truth." Paul identified that as the "Comforter" that Jesus said he would leave with the world after he left -- a spiritual presence, not a once and future physical visitor.
If Jesus was not an incarnation of God, was he the "root" of David in the sense that the spirit of Truth -- which he clearly embodied in his words and actions -- has always been present in human experience, to arouse and propel forward anyone who acts on the opportunity to express his or her sense of ultimate truth, as David did and many of the old Jewish prophets did, and as the human Jesus did later? And what about Jesus being "the offspring of David"? Why would Jesus (or John) have merely repeated his geneaology in this final statement by Jesus in recorded history? It's an oddly factual remark, coming from the pen of John the Revelator, who is otherwise describing streets of gold and ferocious beasts, to try to capture the wonder of his revelation.
I think something else was intended -- that Jesus, in the Revelator's words, meant this: His mission, his presence here, was not some deus ex machina intervention in human affairs, like an animated pop-up ad on humanity's web site, miraculously reordering the direction of history. It was a natural development of the good in human life that had slowly gathered force until that time. Hadn't Jesus always said that he was "the son of Man"? Hadn't there been, against all material odds, a never-dying undercurrent of hope and love in human minds and hearts, before Jesus? Couldn't that have had a part in preparing for a fuller blaze of Truth in human experience?
I have been reading about and considering the identity of Jesus for more than 40 years. What appears to me is that in his time here, he made real in our midst what had been normative in the thought of many people who felt that life was not a series of endless repetitive material cycles but that there could be better ends in view for ourselves or at least new points of departure. In that sense, Jesus was the "offspring" of the best in human endeavor -- the fruit of the faith and love arising naturally from all men and women of goodwill who had been central to the human story up to that tiime, and are still today. Moreover, this spirit of Truth comes, whether or not from a creator God, from all those who are "the image and reflection" of a God whose existence many of us posit and affirm, and whose action Jesus said was grounded in love. As St. Augustine expressed it, "He loves each of us, as if there were only one of us." In this perspective, each of us is qualified to play a role in how this Truth is manifested, and a role in how it is applied. We are not refugees being saved, or patients being operated on, or abductees being taken up in flying saucers or heavenly raptures. We are the agents now of this Truth that can show itself, in our minds and daily lives and in the history of what is to come, as we make actual our full potential.
So what about "the bright and morning star"? Was Jesus, who tended to understate his role, now saying that he was some sort of cosmic celebrity? By the time John wrote Revelation, it was already evident that Jesus was having an impact on history. His stardom for many hardly had to be emphasized. Was he saying that he was heralding a new era? His disciples had already said that. But what would this phrase have meant, if it had surprised or even stunned John? Just this, I think: The morning star doesn't only come before the sun rises. It appears at the very beginning of an entire day. At the beginning. Not at the end -- not at an "end time", but at the dawn. In the true scale of what will be achieved in the human story, of what will be illuminated, we have only just begun. It has been only 7,000 years since the invention of writing, only 500 years since the advent of mass literacy, and only 300 years since the first modern scientists began to chart the universe systematically. Jesus -- and the other great spiritual originators of monotheistic thought -- came near the outset of all that remains in human history. There is an effectively endless time ahead for the ideas, the work and the goodness of who we are inherently to be expressed. For millennia, when it appeared, the morning star helped sailors navigate for only a half hour or so, before it was overtaken by so much light that it wasn't needed for that. But that interval is enough. If all history were a single day, there would be another 47 periods of that length yet to come -- the functional equivalent, for children (which we are) of eternity.
The spirit of the truth that it is our role to discover and apply is itself opening the door in human consciousness to vastly more light than anyone can yet imagine.
(photo by ajwazzer, on Flickr)
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