Monday Morning Reflection on Revelation 1:1-11
Every Eye Will See Him
There's a small word in the very first verse of Revelation that’s doing a lot of work. The word “of” indicates not only the authoritative origin of the revelation John is given, but the content of it as well. It’s Jesus, front to back. It’s the word from him that’s about him - and it’s just the word we need. I want to walk through five ways this opening passage names him, because I think most of us could use a Monday reminder that the person running this week is not a general idea. He has a name, and several titles, and every one of them was earned.
He is the Faithful Witness. That word "witness" — martus in the Greek, the word we get "martyr" from — started life in the courtroom, describing someone who testifies to the truth. Over time, in a world hostile to the gospel, it came to describe something costlier: someone who testified to the truth to the point of death. Jesus is named this first, before any other title, because he has already done what this book will ask of a suffering church. He didn't ask us to go somewhere he hasn't been.
He is the Firstborn of the Dead. Not merely the first person to be resuscitated — others were raised before him and died again — but the first to walk out of death permanently, in a body no longer subject to decay. His resurrection turned the tomb into something closer to a womb: the place where new creation was born into the world. And there's an old legal weight behind "firstborn" that we can miss. The firstborn son held the right of inheritance, the responsibility to redeem the family when trouble came. Jesus is our elder brother, and the throne is his by right.
He is the Ruler of the Kings of the Earth. Not the ruler-to-be. The ruler, now. It's tempting to read Christ's kingship as something we're still waiting on, a promise deferred to some future coronation. But Matthew 28 and Daniel 7 both say otherwise: all authority has already been given to him, in heaven and on earth. Whatever leader or empire looks unshakable in this morning's headlines, Revelation opens by reminding us who is actually seated over them.
He is the Redeemer. John says he has freed us by his blood, and that word "freed" carries the shape of the exodus behind it — a people delivered out of slavery through the blood of a lamb, brought through the sea into a covenant of their own. What God did once for Israel at Passover, Christ has now done once for all at the cross. There's a reason an old hymn can say there's a fountain filled with blood that washes every stain away — because that's precisely the claim being made in these opening verses. His blood doesn't just cover; it liberates.
And he is the Son of Man Coming on the Clouds. Here's where it's easy to flatten Revelation into a single future event and miss what John is actually doing. Daniel's vision of the Son of Man coming on the clouds gets fulfilled in more than one movement: Christ went up on the clouds at his ascension, he will come back on the clouds at the end, and — this is the part worth sitting with today — he comes to his own struggling churches even now, in the middle of history, in discipline and in mercy. "I will come to you," he tells the Ephesians a few verses later. Risen. Ascended. Reigning. Returning. All four, true simultaneously, right now, this Monday.
That last one matters for how we carry this week. If Christ comes to his churches now, and not only at the end, then the trouble many of you are walking into this morning - conflict, weariness, uncertainty, temptation - isn't off his radar. It's exactly the kind of thing he shows up in the middle of.
Because make no mistake, this is a suffering people's book, and it always has been. Christ's own victory came through apparent defeat, not around it — the cross before the crown, the Lion who reigns turning out to be the Lamb who was slain. One older theologian described the church's whole existence this way: hemmed in by hostile power from without and false teaching from within, and yet never abandoned — her fellowship in the coming kingdom is, itself, a fellowship of suffering and patient endurance. That's not a bug in the Christian life. It's the shape Christ's own life took, and ours follows the same contour.