Christ Beyond Our Categories--June 3, 2025

Christ Beyond Our Categories--June 3, 2025

“It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” (Revelation 22:16)

Did you ever take a panoramic photo with your smartphone?  These impressive cameras that we all carry around now in our pockets have a feature in which you can start taking a photo with your camera aimed to the left, and then as you slowly turn straight ahead and then to your right, you can take in a whole wide vista that gets put together in one composite image.  That feature by itself is cool if you are going to use it for taking a photo of a large vista like the Grand Canyon or a range of mountains, or a widely spread group picture. But there's also a funny trick you can do with the same feature: you can use it to show up twice in the same photo.  If you have someone standing on the left side of your photo, and then when you, the photographer, pivot toward the center, that person can leave their position, run behind you, and take a place on the right side of the photo, just in time for your camera to get there and catch them standing in place on the opposite side of the scene.  It makes for a photo in which the same person can be on both sides at the "same time" in the same photo, because of how the camera moves and turns through time to take the whole scene in.  And if you've never tried doing that, it really is a fun little feat to pull off.

Well, I mention this technological trick because of that end-product: an image in which the same person shows up twice, impossibly, on opposite sides of the same photo.  And in a sense, that's the claim that Jesus makes for himself here in this closing section of the book of Revelation, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  Jesus identifies himself as both "the root" and "the descendant" of David, the legendary king of Israel's ancient memory.  And at first blush, I suspect we might want to tell Jesus that he can't be both: he must be one or the other.  Logically, you can't be the source (or root) of something and also the outcome (or descendant, or offspring) of that same thing, right?  Pick a lane, Jesus!  We hear this "root" and "descendant" of David talk, and immediately assume it can only be a binary choice: you can be one thing or the other, Jesus, but you can't be both.  Except that's exactly what Jesus claims for himself: that he cannot be fit into just one of our two categories--he is both at the same time. He is simultaneously the root of David, and David's descendant, even if that blows apart our black-and-white, one-or-the-other binary thinking. (It is worth remembering, of course, that Christianity does this non-binary both-and kind of thing quite a bit, actually, since we confess Jesus to be both fully divine and fully human, the Bible to be both divinely-inspired and written by individual human beings, and God's nature to be One and Three at the same time.  So maybe if we are having a hard time with Jesus blowing apart our categories in this one verse of Scripture, we need to reconsider a few other major elements of our faith.)

Okay now, once we have un-furrowed our brows and decided we are willing to consider that Jesus puts himself on opposite sides of the photograph, so to speak, as both the "root" and "descendant" of King David, we can ask the bigger question: So what?  Why does this matter?  What does it mean to say that Jesus is both the Source or Root of David and also the long-awaited Offspring of David who was anointed (the Hebrew word is "messiah") to be David's successor? Why, of all the things Jesus could say about himself in these closing verses, would Jesus identify himself like this?  And why would he deliberately pick two contrasting (even seemingly contradictory) descriptions?

Well, for starters, a good rule of thumb for theology is that if your picture of God is something you can completely explain, diagram, and dissect with your own mental powers, it's a pretty good sign you have switched out the real living God for an idol of your own fashioning.  The real and living God will have to be beyond our understanding and outside of our grasp.  But secondly, I think Jesus has it in mind to say that he is both the One we were hoping for (the promised and coming Messiah, or Christ, for Greek speakers), but also that he isn't just a lesser copy or updated edition of an earlier original.  Jesus isn't just David 2.0, and he doesn't have to fit the mold of David or fill out his sandals, either (which, not to be besmirch the dead, had blood on them, given David's violent track record and long list of colossal failings).  Jesus isn't just trying to measure up to some nostalgic view of "the good old days" under King David, because he is actually older than David.  If, as Christians have claimed for the past twenty centuries, Jesus is none other than God in the flesh, then Jesus not only predates David, he predates history itself--even the universe!  Jesus is both there at the beginning of all things, the Word by whom God spoke all the cosmos into existence, and he is at the end of all things, as the One who fulfills all the ancient promises made over the centuries.  He has a rightful claim to be "king" like David, but he is also free to utterly reinvent what it means to be a king, since his reign is one of foot-washing and sin-forgiving, and his throne turns out to be a cross.  And all of these things can be true at the same time, rather like having a figure appear at both the left and right sides of your panoramic photo.  It seems impossible, but there it is right before your eyes.

We need both things to be true, it turns out.  We need to know that our faith is not just aimed wistfully backward at some glorious past we cannot get back to any longer, but we also need to know that the One in whom we place our trust is more than just the latest flavor-of-the-week novelty.  We need to be assured that the One we stake our lives on is more than just the great-great grandson of a previous famous leader (that sounds like nepotism to me), but also that the One who leads us is pulling us toward the future, not merely backward to "how it used to be."  We need someone who can stand at both sides of the photograph at the same time.

That is to say, we need someone who can rightfully claim to be both the Root and Descendant of David.  We need Jesus.

What do you know? God has given us exactly what we need, even if it turns out that what we needed all along would never fit in any of our either/or binary categories.

Lord Jesus, you who are both the Beginning and the End at the same time, come and be for us what we need, even if we cannot comprehend your fullness.