The Gospel According to Morpheus--January 2, 2026
"No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known." (John 1:18)
Morpheus was right... sort of.
Maybe you remember the scene from the modern classic sci-fi blockbuster, The Matrix, (which is now more than 25 years old!) in which Laurence Fishburne's character Morpheus tells Keanu Reeves' inquiring character Thomas Anderson (soon to be Neo) tells the young hacker that the thing he's been wondering about and hearing rumors about, this nebulous thing called "the Matrix," can't be explained--it must be experienced. "Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is," Morpheus intones. "You have to see it for yourself."
Only after the choice to be set free from the Matrix can Anderson be awakened and learn the impossible truth--in the movie, that truth is the imprisonment of humanity to artificially-intelligent machines who have reduced human beings to comatose living batteries to power their domination of the world. If that sounds confusing to you, it may be precisely because Morpheus was right: unless you've seen this thing for yourself (like by seeing the movie), it will sound preposterous and obscure. But once you've seen the movie, you get exactly what I'm talking about. Some things in life are like that: you can't be told about them by a secondhand description--you need a first-person direct encounter with them to really understand them.
Well, if you can hold onto that idea for a moment, you'll be in the right head-space to understand what John the Gospel writer is saying about the way any of us comes to know God. We can't see God the way you would look at the sunrise out the window or the canned tomatoes in your pantry: you need God--the Word made flesh, the Son--to reveal God and make God known. Now, at first, that might sound like the opposite of Morpheus' line from the movie: "No one can be told what the Matrix is--you have to see it for yourself." But I think the movie character and the evangelist are both getting at the idea of direct personal experience to really know.
Here's what I mean. In the movie, just hearing a few sentences of description is not enough to truly "get" what the Matrix is, and if you just get a verbal explanation, it will boggle your mind. But if you are awakened to reality and can experience it, then you'll truly "know." I think John intends to say something similar about God: what Jesus brings us is not a new list of factual statements about God, but the very presence of God in the flesh with us. It turns out that God is not an academic subject to be mastered like memorizing state capitals or the periodic table of elements. God is not a something, but a Someone, and that means we are drawn into relationship with God if we want to know God meaningfully.
The Christian faith, then, isn't simply a laundry list of bullet-points you have to believe and memorize; it is about being brought into relationship with the Someone who has always been there, making our existence possible, but whom we finally can know, relate to, and communicate with in our daily lives. In that sense, John is trying to say about God in his gospel what Morpheus is saying about the Matrix in the movie: if you really want to know what God is like, you don't just memorize a catechism or work through logical proofs, but you see the way Jesus washes feet, the way he breaks bread with outcasts, the way he weeps over the death of his friend Lazarus, the way he dies on a Romans cross, and, yes, the way he appears with wounds alive again out of nowhere.
Or maybe we could say it this way: God isn't the sort of Being whom we can pin down and dissect to make observations like a dead butterfly on display in an old museum of natural history. Neither is God an abstract concept we could deduce like a mathematical theorem using only our own intellectual powers. God is only know-able if God chooses to be known, John says, before immediately insisting that God has indeed made that choice and decided to be revealed through Jesus, the Son. "No one has ever seen God," he begins, reminding us that neither a telescope or a microscope can reduce the divine to an object we can grasp. "It is the only Son, himself God... who has made him known." The word John uses here for "making known" is also the world you would use for "unfolding" something--sort of like Jesus holds within himself the infinite fullness of God, bound up within the space of his own human body and mind, and yet that in Jesus' presence, that fullness is unfurled so that we can behold God through Jesus.
That's what makes the Christian faith compelling to me. We are not here to peddle a set of pious propositions or tell me people to learn a collection of religious rules. We are here to point people to Jesus, in whom we are all brought into the fullness of God's own presence. Through Jesus, the unknowable becomes known. Through Jesus, the infinite can be grasped (but not controlled) by our finite minds. Through Jesus, we don't merely learn trivia about God--we meet God.
And we, in turn, are brought into that family of people who know God through Jesus, too. That's what this whole faith and life are really all about.
In the end, I can't tell you who God is--I can only point you to Jesus, in whom you come to know God as a Someone rather than a something.
Lord Jesus, reveal to us the glory of God by coming among us and unfolding God's fullness for us.
