A Ramble About the Matrix

I rewatched “Matrix” again tonight. Part of my reasoning was to see if my kids would be able to handle it yet (not yet). As a teaching tool for philosophical and even spiritual concepts, this particular movie is the gift that keeps on giving and wonderfully illustrates even some of the most difficult of such concepts to explain.

For those who have never seen it before, in the movie, human beings are grown in fields of pods from which they are never actually born, but their brains and senses are directly hooked into a computer generated world they believe to be reality. This world is called “the Matrix”. They do not know they are in this computer generated world. Their brains are being directly fed the sensory information which the machines and AI software wants them to experience, and the vast majority of these human beings never wake up to the real world. The exception is a small group of renegade humans who are awake and freed from the pods and the Matrix's control, and who use pirate computers to hack back into the Matrix in order to tell people the truth and wake them up, bringing them back to the all human city deep underground in the real world. (For all those in the know, yes this is an overly simplistic explanation, but it will suffice for now.)

On occasion, I go back through and do rough translations of different books and portions of the New Testament. I don't do it to publish anything, but rather for my own devotional practice. As I was translating through the last supper discourse in the Gospel of John recently, there was one, fairly common, average word which stuck out to me again and again. That word in Greek is “kosmos.” Where Bible translation is concerned, it is normally translated as “world.” But this isn't exactly the best translation. Most translations continue to render it this way because this is how it has been rendered in English since the beginning of English translations from Greek with Tyndale's work..

The word itself actually, literally means “an ordered system.” It can also mean “ornament,” but translating it as “ornament” in the New Testament would usually result in some weird readings. When used in the sense of the world, it means the world-system of people, rules, governments, etc. and how it all works together as an ordered system controlling those living within and under it. As I was doing the translation, and coming up on this word, do you know what it reminded me of this time?

Yep. The Matrix. Right down to the renegades that were woken up and disconnected from the main computers that controlled and policed the Matrix to keep everyone asleep. Jesus said that He was sent “into the world” (“eis ton kosmon”) by the Father. As Jesus was saying to His disciples that once they were “of the world” (“ek tou kosmou”), by analogy, they were once connected to the Matrix like everyone else; but Jesus came and selected them to be “not of the world” just as he was not of the world. He, being originally disconnected from the Matrix entered it in order to disconnect them from the Matrix and turn them into renegades with a mission of disconnecting others from it.

In the Matrix, many of the people who were connected to it were so dependent on it for their reality that they would fight to protect it, right alongside the “agents”, the computer programs that were responsible for rooting out the renegades and deleting them, keeping everyone asleep and oblivious. It was made clear in the movie many times that everyone who was still connected to the Matrix was a potential agent, as they were able to inhabit the conscious presences of those people still dependent on it. This, in many respects, is a good picture of the world-system which Jesus disconnected His disciples from, although He taught us to have a very different response to these potential threats than the violent one the renegades in the movie gave. He taught us to have compassion on them and forgive them for their offenses against us. Like in the movie, most of these still connected people are oblivious to what they're doing, but also like in the movie, each one has the potential to become an unwitting agent for the system they're dependent on.

Unlike in the movie, once disconnected His followers have to really fight to keep from being re-connected. In the movie, once you were out, there was no going back. And while that may be true to a large extent in terms of understanding, there are many professing Christians who act just as connected to the “kosmos” as those who are not professing Christians. There is an underlying observation in that...