“Hearing this, Jesus said to him, ‘There’s one thing that you lack. Go, sell everything you have, give it to the poor. Then you will have a storehouse in Heaven. And come with me” (Luke 18.22).
Mars Express is a 2023 French, animated, science-fiction film about a private detective and her partner who are hired to find two missing college women, and end up uncovering a conspiracy that will impact Mars and Earth.
I’d never heard of this movie before doing research for this year’s summer theme (a Martian Summer, if you will) and found it on multiple lists of the best “martian” films. And, for me, it belongs on that list. At just under ninety minutes, it follows a missing persons case turns into something with far-reaching impacts while also building out the year of 2200 without bogging the narrative down in exposition. It also looks beautiful.
Aline Ruby, the private detective hired for the case, is a recovering alcoholic and our protagonist; though she is less interesting than her partner, Carlos Rivera—a robotic “backup” of a man who was murdered some years before the story. A murder that remains unsolved.
Robots are everywhere in this future society and come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and forms. This technology has enabled individuals to have their consciousness downloaded, following their passing, and placed into robotic bodies. Carlos, who has an older model that carries his memories and personality, is a little unsettling, least to me, since his neck projects a holographic image of Carlos as he was just before he died. Imagine looking at someone who’s head seems to float a few inches above his neck and you’ll get a sense of how this looks.
Carlos’s holographic projector also displays, at times, system status messages. In one scene, we see him sitting down as the image above him shows the slow progress of a status bar as he attempts to download a software update. We soon after see an image that’ll be familiar to someone with an older cell phone: insufficient memory for update.
The wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is some two-thousand years away from the system updates and digital memory that make up so much of our lives today, and even further from the Mars three-quarters of a century from our own. But he’s got a problem that’s not all that different. He, too, lacks space inside.
Make no mistake, the story of this interaction deals with the dangers of wealth and how it can become an idol—something in which we can be tempted to put our trust and security into. And Jesus’ suggestion the this man sell all that wealth is not a general command to us all but a specific prescription to what ails this man.
Idols take up space. Even those reserved for a household shrine require a room or a corner on which their images and altar can be placed. Shelves must be installed and dusted. The space around them has to be kept clear, which crowds out and prevents making a place for something new.
Wealth, to the extent that this man has, requires storehouses—perhaps very large ones—that necessitate guardians, which create the need for a guardhouse for them to rest between shifts. It requires time for inventory and accounting. And as it grows, as it must, it occupies more space externally and internally. Filling, you can imagine, any empty space within this man’s life.
Jesus, listening to this man’s questions may have seen the spiritual version that we as viewers see above Carlos in the scene above, insufficient memory for update. Update cancelled. Which is unfortunate, and also tragic.
Before, in his life before his death, Carlos was married with a young daughter. At the time he died, he and his wife were separated; though, we can surmise, that Carlos was hoping for a reconciliation, which was no longer possible. His wife, in the intervening years, got remarried, began a new life. It’s this fact more than anything that brings him to the realization that he’s “trying to hold onto a life that’s moved on without him.”
Not only do idols like wealth keep us static, retain us from growing spiritually, but they can also leave us in a space we should have left. Sometimes physical spaces, certainly. But, more so, emotional and spiritual places that leave us looking at a world that seems so strange. A world where old ideas and ways of being no longer fit. And we, as frozen and motionless as our graven images, lose our joy in place of anger and despair.
The challenge Jesus points us to is to hold onto nothing so tightly that we’re afraid to release it. It’s to recognize the idols we have—those things that seem to promise safety and security from this changing and unpredictable world. It is to accept an invitation to leave room within ourselves for something more.
Something that can make us and the world around us new.
Free us from the idols, big and small, that keep us static; so we might grow to experience a life of abundance.