The Cyber-Gospel
of The Matrix I think I would have been more surprised by the premise of this film if I had not been sitting in a psychology class back in 1979, listening to some pre-alternative type questioning his existence. “How do we know what’s real and what’s not? I’m not sure I actually even exist. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m part of someone else’s dream!”� The popularization of drugs and Eastern mysticism in the ‘60s seems to have opened America up to exploring alternative realities as a cultural pre-occupation. In the past 30-35 years, there has been a growing cynicism about government conspiracies and cover-ups; disenchantment with science as our messiah (cloning);� paranoia about the prominence of computers in our lives (Y2K) and aliens who walk among us (“Trust no one!”); and a deepening nihilism that’s been given emotional context in the music of everyone from Nirvana to Nine Inch Nails. The world was ripe for a film that seems to challenge our very existence and asks us to throw away our dreams. Oh, well. I don’t listen to the messages in these movies, anyway. I just go for the special effects. The Matrix (from the Latin word for “womb”) opens in Room 303, with the police converging on some kind of lone-gunman computer hacker. The film offers that sparse, bleak ambiance used to convey the sterility of the cyber-industrial future in every movie from “Aliens” to “Dark City.” (This film adds blue and green textures to the usual shades of brown and grey, to make it a bit more interesting to the eye.) The Men in Black show up, claiming the hacker is more dangerous than the police understand. What follows is a get-away by the hacker (who’s name turns out to be Trinity) that seems to defy time and gravity in ways that leave us concluding that she is an alien or from the future. Neither conclusion is exactly correct, but both are not far from the truth. The scene ends with us shaking our heads, not quite understanding what we’ve just seen, or why, or whether Trinity escaped or was smashed into a bloodless oblivion. Patience. The mysteries will be revealed. We are then introduced to Neo, an independent computer pirate (played by the usually lifeless Keanu Reeves - either he’s becoming a better actor, or the film was so good, even he couldn’t detract from it!)� Neo is being drawn to meet a mysterious underground figure named Morpheus. The Men in Black (called “Agents”) get to him first, but Trinity and the crew rescue him and bring him to Morpheus. Neo is then told his world is not real, and they can help him escape his unseen prison. Neo chooses to join them, and is instructed in living life in a bleak, but free, alternative universe. Morpheus is convinced that Neo is the One, some kind of Messiah that will deliver all the dreamers from their sleep and destroy the fabric of the Matrix, but no-one else seems quite certain, including Neo. Despite betrayal by a character named Cypher, Neo leads a phenomenal special-effects laden mission to rescue Morpheus from the Agents. Everyone gets out, except Neo, who ends up in a show-down, battling an Agent who just won’t die; running for his life, and returning to Room 303, he catches a bullet in the chest and dies. But, surprise! Trinity’s love brings him back, at which point, he fully realizes his potential and blows away the bad guys. Neo IS the One, after all. The movie ends as he begins his mission to set the captives free from the Matrix. I’ve heard numerous comments and assessments of the film: great special effects; a rip-off of Geiger’s art-form or Gibson’s cyber-punk ideas; interesting social-political implications; great special effects; Trinity was cool; couldn’t sit through a movie with Keanu Reeves in it; great special effects!� Somehow, I always see more. [And whether it’s actually there, I put it there, or God put it there for me...well, that’s just another way to question the reality of my existence, I suppose.]� In this case, I saw a cyber-industrial parable of the gospel that has already led me to see the film three times in less than a month - something I didn’t even do with Star Wars! The Matrix is a metaphor (a parable) for the contrasting realities of the material world and the spiritual realm (which we call the Kingdom of God). We are first led in this direction by the interesting use of names: Trinity (obvious); Zion (the last human city - salvation); Neo (new, born-again, or first-born); the ship is called the Nebuchadnezzer (a pagan king who became a believer through the proper understanding of his dreams); Morpheus (the Greek god of dreams);� Cypher (meaning zero, empty, a person of no significance, a non-entity). Trinity reflects a number of Godly qualities (strength, assurance, faith, loyalty, grace and love), but in her first meeting with Neo, she represents a disciple of God - a witness - who builds trust with him by sharing the experience (testimony) they hold in common: “I know why you’re alone, Neo. And why night after night, you sit by your computer. You’re looking for Him. I know, because I was once looking for the same thing. And when He found me, He told me I wasn’t really looking for Him. I was looking for an Answer. It’s the question that drives us mad. You know the question, just as I did.” (Neo: What is the Matrix?”) The answer is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you. And it will find you. You know it.. Morpheus often fills the role of God, the Holy Spirit - the teacher, the enlightener, the comforter. He takes the Search one step further: “You may have spent the last few years looking for Me, Neo. But I’ve spent my entire life looking for you. Are you still looking, Neo?” (Neo: “Yes.”)� Then go to the Adam(s) Street Bridge....” Neo is a Seeker. In fact, when we first see John Anderson (Neo), his computer is on search mode. He is drawn to Morpheus, whom he has never seen. Like all true Seekers, Neo is looking for more from life than the empty existence he has experienced so far. And although he is a bit of a misfit, a rebel, and a sceptic, deep down he is searching for the Truth. What is the Matrix? What is the meaning of Life? What is his purpose? What is the point? His compulsion is explained and confirmed by Trinity. She is a Seeker too, but she’s found her Answer. Or rather, it found her. And she gives Neo hope that he will find his Answer, as well. The goal of the true disciple/witness� is not to force the Gospel on the unsuspecting or unwilling, but to seek out the Seekers, and confirm to them that their search is not in vain. Jesus is the answer, but He knows that every one is asking the question in their own way. . Morpheus emphasizes that the search is actually prompted by God. We may be seeking Him. But He is searching for us, like the Father in the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11ff). We seek, because He first sought us. We love, because He first loved us (1 John 4). Neo gets a call from Morpheus warning him that the Agents are closing in on him. As long as he listens to Morpheus, he succeeds in eluding his captors. But he is frozen by his fear of the heights, of the difficulty, and of the apparent flimsiness of the scaffold (the Cross) to save him. He drops the phone, loses his connection, and falls into the hands of the Enemy. Gracefully, God is persistent and patient with us. Neo gets another chance, if he will meet Trinity at the Adam(s) Street Bridge - the foot of the Cross, the nexus of the cross-roads in his life. This is the place where God offers a bridge between Man (Adam) and Himself. But Neo is treated a bit roughly - the Gospel is harder than he anticipates. And he wants to back out. Trinity stops him with this warning: “You don’t want to go down that road again, Neo. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you wanna be.” Like the Israelites, Neo is tempted to return to Egypt as soon as things get a bit rough. But in his heart of hearts, he knows there is nothing back there for him. Trinity and the disciples then help Neo remove a bug from his system. He is surprised to find the bug is real. He thought it was just a product of his imagination. Like sin, it became so much a part of him, he didn’t even know it was there. Neo finally meets Morpheus face to face, and is confronted with the difficult Truth of his reality. Trinity warns him to be honest. It is the only way to really hear God. Morpheus proceeds to tell Neo what he has been trying to get at in his seeking: “Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life - that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that’s brought you to Me. Do you know what I’m talking about?” (Neo: “The Matrix?”) “Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the Truth.� (Neo: “What Truth?”) That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage� -� born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.” This is the heart of the gospel. We are NOT alright. The world is not alright. Something is terribly wrong and it drives us mad trying to get at it. The world is not what it seems. We are not what we ought to be. We are living in a dream, a delusion, and we are slaves to the deception. We cannot wake ourselves from the nightmare, but if we are willing to take the risk to face the Truth, He will wake us up to a new world. Like Neo, each of us must make a choice. Neo is offered a blue pill that will allow him to return to his delusions, or a red pill that will change his life forever. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” Neo takes the red pill. He is not sure what lies ahead. But he is certain he does not want what he’s left behind.� What choice will we make? To sleep? Or to live? The Cyber-Gospel
of The Matrix The Matrix is a modern cyber-parable of the Christian gospel - the Good News that although this world sometimes seems hopeless and meaningless, there is another world we can reach out for. In Part One of this analysis, we saw Neo come to the place where he had to choose which world he would live in - the dream world or the real world:� “This is your last chance, Neo,” warns Morpheus. “After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” Neo takes the red pill and begins the process of Awakening. As Neo’s conversion begins, he sees a mirror, with a fractured reflection of himself. As he gazes into the mirror, it becomes clear and he sees an unfractured portrait of himself. He reaches out and touches it and it takes him over. The reflection becomes him, so that no matter what part of him he looks at, he sees himself. In the Bible, Paul says “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, just as I also have been fully known” (I Corinthians 13:12). Neo begins to see himself clearly for the first time. He sees his sin - the cracks in his facade, but he also senses the beginning of the healing process - the cracks are already disappearing. As Neo’s conversion begins, he becomes aware that he now has the capacity to look honestly at himself. Now Neo literally begins the process of being born again. As he’s jacked in and dialed out, he wakes up in a womb-like tank, connected to numerous tubes which have been spoon-feeding him the bare essentials to live, but also sucking the life out of him (and millions of others) to feed the energy of the Machine. He is freed from the tubes, ejected from the “womb” and flushed down a tunnel (birth canal) and deposited (baptized) in a pool, which washes off the gunk of his former existence, and also virtually drowns him. As Paul says, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? We have been buried with Him through baptism in death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6: 3-4). Baptism is the symbol that we have put to death our old life, and we rise out of the water into a new life, a new reality, a new Kingdom. Neo’s dream-like existence is now dead, and unconscious of what he is about to experience and become, he is lifted up into in the light, into a new world, a new consciousness, as a new man. He is no longer John Anderson (the name the Matrix gave him), but truly Neo - born aNew. As Neo wakes to the new world, at first he is confused and disoriented. He is helpless as a baby. He must learn to walk again. His muscles (his will) have atrophied and must be stimulated to work as they should. His senses are so sensitive, it’s painful to use them: “Why do my eyes hurt?” he asks. “Because you’ve never used them before,” replies Morpheus. Neo has been awakened, but he must learn to function again. He must learn to feel and walk and run, and to truly see the world around him for the first time. And this will take training. At first Neo’s new world seems rather UN-real to him, and he begins to doubt that he has entered a new world at all.“This can’t be...” he begins to protest. Be what?” Morpheus responds. “Be real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel and smell and taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world you knew...it exists now only as part of the neural-interactive simulation we call the Matrix. You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. THIS is the real world. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!” What Neo sees is a post-apocalytic scene of dark destruction. The surface of the planet has been completely devastated. Man has virtually destroyed the “real” world - the only way they can make it tolerable is to live in a dream world, a fantasy of success and comfort. Ultimately, Neo must face the truth of his devastated life, before he can hope to restore the desert of his soul to any semblance of real life. This is why Jesus says, “I came that you might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Morpheus begins to train/disciple Neo. His training takes place on the Nebuchadnezer - a ship named after a pagan king who became a believer once his dreams were properly interpreted to him. He is being trained to return to the Matrix. Like the disciples at the Transfiguration of Christ (Matthew 17), it is tempting to cling to a state of spiritual euphoria. As much as we may want to move straight to heaven (Zion), we must first complete our destiny in the world. We are disciplined and trained to fulfill our destiny and the will of God - which is to find and rescue others from the Matrix. Back into the world we must go. Morpheus takes Neo to a simulated training matrix to teach him how to move in the Matrix (the world) again. “None of this is real. It is a basic construct like the Matrix. Your hair, your clothes - they are what we call a ‘residual self-image’- it is how you saw yourself in the dream world, the Matrix,” explains Morpheus. Many of us come into the Kingdom with this residual self-image - old tapes of who we believed we were, with all the limitations and doubts and fears and failures. If we are going to succeed as new creatures (2Corinthians 5:17), we must learn to refashion that image and see ourselves as God sees us - with all the gifts and potential and destiny He gave us and intends us to use. After Neo fills his head with the basic training manual (the Bible) - he wakes up to a startling revelation: “I know Kung Fu!” This is not ordinary combat - this is not ordinary warfare. Neo is learning spiritual warfare (Ephesians 6). He must learn to operate in the Matrix without being bound by its laws - of gravity, time, materialism, or power. He must learn to be “in the world, but not of it” (John 17). This is what Paul meant when he said, “For though we walk in the flesh (the matrix), we do not war according to the flesh (the matrix), for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh (the matrix), but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses/the pulling down of strongholds”(tearing down false constructs - the matrix) (2 Corinthians 10:3-4). Neo begins to learn a number of lessons about life in this new reality. He must learn not to let his old reality limit his new one. “I am trying to free your mind, Neo. But all I can do is open the door. You have to walk through it.” Wecannot inherit anyone else’s faith. We cannot simply live on the expectationsof others for the rest of our lives. We must experience God for ourselves. We must grow ourselves and become Christ-like in our own way, at our own pace. Were you looking at me, Neo? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?” Like Peter when he walked on the water, but was distracted by the waves (Matthew 14:25-33), Neo has some faith - he even begins to walk on water (defying gravity and time in the training room). But the bright, sensual attractions of the world can still distract him from his spiritual focus and power. The key to discipleship is discipline. And certain disciplines cannot be dispensed with, if we are to survive spiritually in the Matrix. Although Neo is superbly gifted, he cannot make the leap of faith that is required of him during his first test. Although he has already taken great strides, his fears keep him from going as far as he is capable. (The fear of heights he experienced earlier in the movie still plague him.) Faith does not come from acknowledging the possibility of faith. It comes from living and experiencing faith in the crucible of life. Believing is not merely mental assent or wishful thinking. This is not the Little Train That Could. Believing is knowing. And Neo does not yet know. One final thing Morpheus imparts to Neo is his role and his destiny. Morpheus believes that Neo is the One. “The Oracle prophesied His return, that His coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, and bring freedom to our people. That is why there are those of us who have spent our entire lives searching the Matrix, looking for Him. I believe that search is over....” As in our world, the Oracle (the prophets, the Scriptures) predicts the comingof a Messiah that will free people from the slavery of the Matrix. But we must find the One. So Neo is brought to the Oracle to see if he is the One. He is brought into a room with other ‘potentials’. They seem to represent other religions/philosophies: a Euro/American girl, two Jewish girls, a child reading an arabic (Muslim?) book, and a Hindu/Buddhist/Zen boy who tells him: “You can’t bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, try to realize the Truth.” What Truth?”Neo asks. “There is no spoon,” the child replies. The fact that this is too Zen for some, does not remove it from the actuality that there is a metaphysical element to true spirituality, and to true Christianity. To ignore this, is to give in to the deception of our old life in the Matrix. The Oracle seems to confirm Neo’s reservation that he is not the One. “Being the One is like being in love. No-one can tell you you’re in love. You just know it, through and through, balls to bone.” Neo is told he has the gift, but he seems to be waiting for something. At some point, he will have to make a choice between his life and Morpheus’ life. “One of you is going to die. Which one, will be up to you. I hate giving good people bad news. But don’t worry about it. As soon as you step outside that door, you’ll start feeling better. You’ll remember you don’t believe in any of this fate crap. You’re in control of your own life. Here, have a cookie....” Discovering Neo’s true destiny and his role in his new world occupies the rest of the film - and proves to be his greatest adventure. He is also going to learn about the Agents - the Enemy - the demons of the Matrix. But what he thinks he knows about them is nothing, until he actually encounters them face to face. That is the focus of Part Three: Access Complete. |