We live in an age in which algorithms seem to know us better than we know each other, indeed better than we know ourselves! How did that search engine seem to anticipate what I was looking for? How did that website seem to know that this item, which I did not know existed until just now, would be something that I feel like I must now buy? How does that social media or news site manage to put up one more piece of information that keeps me online long after I had decided that I had enough. If our preferences and decisions can be predicted, given enough variables, we can come to question whether we genuinely have any free will at all, or if our actions, like those of machines, can be perfectly predicted if someone or something has enough data about all the variables affecting us at any given moment.
Before we push back too quickly against the suggestion that we have precious little free will, let us acknowledge just how accurately so much about us can be predicted by machine algorithms. This shows that, up to a significant point, we are determined, or perhaps even enslaved by the realities that we inhabit. BUT Jesus Christ offers a greater life: his own life, the life of the supremely free God which is revealed through Jesus’s thirty-three-year life on earth. THIS is the truly free life, and it does not look like what we would have expected. Perhaps that is the point. Let us let go of our false notions of what constitutes true life and true freedom and look anew at Jesus, asking him to help us to be born of the Spirit in Him, so that sharing his life, we might be enabled to live a fullness of life beyond the grasp of any algorithm. For in today’s reading (John 3:7b-15) Jesus declares: “the wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”