Today's reading helps us better understand what exactly led Jeremiah to reproach the newly minted Yahwists for...
Today's reading helps us better understand what exactly led Jeremiah to reproach the newly minted Yahwists for apostasy. It is no accident that the theme of the prophet's preaching becomes faithfulness and constancy. He compares the people of God to an unfaithful wife who has betrayed her husband and, while complaining about her husband's anger, nevertheless has no intention of changing anything in her life (vv. 1-5). But God does not reject His people even when the people turn away from Him. Return is always possible, but on one indispensable condition: acknowledgement of guilt (vv. 12-13).
Such acknowledgement opens the path to genuine spiritual renewal, which will change the entire life of the people and become a forerunner of the coming of the messianic Kingdom (vv. 14-19). But outward conversion without acknowledgement of guilt only makes the situation worse (vv. 6-11). The issue here is not revenge by God, who wants to enjoy the triumph of His own rightness, but something that belongs to the very foundations of spiritual life: choice and responsibility. Spiritual life begins, properly speaking, with the choice that a person or an entire people makes, and first of all with the choice of a spiritual path: will it be the path indicated by God, or a path chosen by a person according to his own understanding?
But choice also presupposes responsibility, a person's readiness to answer for the consequences of the choice made and, first of all, acknowledgement of the seriousness of the choice as such. This is exactly why acknowledgement of guilt for a committed sin is so important: it presupposes that a person takes his own choice seriously, even when it was made wrongly. God is ready to forgive mistakes, even if they were made repeatedly. And even in cases where these mistakes were by no means made through ignorance, where one must speak precisely of spiritual mistakes and not simply mistakes of reason or feeling. But then the fact of acknowledging that there was a mistake becomes fundamentally important, because thereby the seriousness of the intention is acknowledged, and therefore the seriousness of the choice itself. If a person or an entire people wants to turn to God but refuses to bear responsibility for a former mistaken choice, and how else can one explain the refusal to acknowledge guilt for a sin completely obvious to everyone, then conversion becomes impossible. The one turning back is thereby signing his own irresponsibility and, consequently, spiritual insolvency. Thus refusal to take responsibility for a committed sin makes repentance and the sinner's return to God impossible.
