Merry Matrix to You and Me

With billions of dollars in retail spending in an effort to create cozy homes and bringing festive food to the tables, we have spent the last weeks “waiting” (although it’s more often running around) for the celebration of Christmas. But what exactly do our celebrations have to do with the story of … a refugee baby born into a time of genocide brought on by the oppressing force occupying his home country?

There’s nothing wrong with comfort, candle lights and family gatherings. But in advenire, anticipating the coming of the Kingdom of God into this world, we are actually preparing for something profound and overwhelming. Jesus wasn’t born to bring some sweet, ethereal peace to this world as most Nativity depictions might suggest. He came to defeat the powers that ruled this world – violence, oppression, greed and darkness.

The Kingdom of God that arrived with the baby in the manger is not a heavenly place we will go to after we die. It is a reality that exists here and now – a parallel world we could call it. But hey, before you think I’ve gone off the deep end with imaginary worlds; even the makers of The Matrix knew about it!

In The Matrix, the heroes discover that the world they thought was reality is in fact only a decoy, a surface. The actual reality is in a parallel world, one “truer” than the decoy but neither as comfortable nor as easy to grasp than the one they were used to. One world promises them security and power, the other one promises little other than being the actual reality.

Christmas is the ultimate Matrix Story. The Christian faith is not so much about beliefs and even less about rules. It’s about a person. A King, to be precise, with His own Kingdom that is very much alive this day. In fact, “Christ the King” Sunday, the last Sunday in November, was established in the early 20^th century as a statement that we Christians pledge our allegiance to an actual King and not to any worldly government, no matter how it is governed. It reminds the Church that while we live in this world with its necessary governments and political structures, we are in fact of a different Kingdom, of which Christ is King.

Here’s where we depart from the Matrix – because although Christians have tried for centuries, we cannot just choose one and ignore the other. Those two worlds exist in a tension with each other. And the tension between the world we live in and the one we’re of cannot be resolved.

But if you’re like me, you don’t like tension. We like things neatly resolved and packaged. This world or the other, left or right, right or wrong. We might try to distance ourselves completely from “the world” by becoming a hermit or joining some cult, or we might want to merge the worlds by reducing Jesus to a noble activist for a better world. But it won’t work.

In fact, I believe Jesus was teaching that joy was to be found in living in the tension of those worlds. Not blocking one out, not merging them, but finding your identity and security in being part of His Kingdom, while living compassionately in the world around us.

Jesus lived this by being at the same time fully God and fully man. He engaged with the struggles of this world by being born into a region occupied by the cruelest empire of the time, becoming a refugee while still a baby, and living his whole human life full of compassion, but without ever trying to outwardly “fix” things by, let’s say, overthrowing the Romans, assassinating Herod, or even reforming the political system of the time. He changed this world by using the weapons of His own Kingdom: love, forgiveness, humility and hope.

You might say, this is all very well, love and forgiveness and all, but what about God demonstrating His victory in this world? We want justice to be visible, and we want the bad guys to be held accountable. We don’t want to live by hope and love, we want results. Oh, how we sometimes wish He would just come and set things straight.

The politics of Jesus, however, work on an entirely different level – and His rules are never forced on anybody. The difference between Jesus and us is that He knows that in the end, love will win. He has not only read the end of the Story, He has written it – and then He came to live it, in the form of a helpless baby who would turn the world rightside up. He would bring a peace so far beyond a simple absence of strive that we can sense it to be a Person, not just a noun. We understand it to be a Love that isn’t just a bit nicer during the Christmas season, but that gives itself in ridiculous generosity.

And even when we think that evil is ruling again, when we feel like the only thing making this Christmas season bright are the candles, He reminds us that His plan did already work out. The realm where forgiveness swallows up hatred, where love heals the cruelest of wounds and where hope has the last word might be a world we are not always aware of in our everyday life. But it’s a reality, and those who choose to live in it are changing the world for the better, forgiving and hoping and loving one step at a time.