Today's reading continues the theme of apostasy and punishment for it. Clearly, now that the "point of no return" in the relationship between God and His people has been passed, punishment becomes inevitable. But this punishment turns out not to be quite what we are used to imagining. Strictly speaking, God does not punish His people directly. He simply leaves them alone with the consequences of their own sins (vv. 36-43).

In a certain sense one could say that the warnings God sent to the people (v. 27) had the same character; but then God had not yet left them for good, He had only let them feel the weight of the possible consequences of the sin committed. Now these consequences crash down on the people in full measure. It would seem that such permission can well be considered genuine punishment. But in this case one should speak rather not of punishment, but of a kind of shock therapy, and in a certain sense a forced one.

Indeed, before the situation became what today's passage describes, the people had in essence already managed to break all the relationships that bound them to God. And without such relationships the possibilities for God's intervention in the situation become extremely limited, since He takes the free will of the people He created, and of whole nations as well, with complete seriousness. If the people say a decisive "no" to God, He also treats that "no" with complete seriousness. He will not play at freedom of choice: He truly gives this freedom to each person, while at the same time placing on each the fullness of responsibility for the choice made.

Of course, He could at any moment end the game, stop the experiment, intervene in the situation without regard for anyone's choice. But the point is that for God freedom is not a game and not an experiment, but an absolute reality. Meanwhile fallen man at times would perhaps like it to be a kind of game, so that if something happens everything could be started over. But God gives a person, and sometimes an entire people, such a chance only in one case: in the case of repentance and conversion.

And from His people He waits precisely for such repentance and conversion, in order to give them the opportunity to begin everything from the beginning (vv. 60-63). But this will not be a repetition of the former history; it will be a new stage of it. What was cannot be brought back, and the memory of committed sins is not erased without a trace (v. 63). Only when the Kingdom enters the world and is revealed in all its fullness, transforming everything, will sin disappear forever, and even its memory be wiped away.

The accusations that the Lord, through the prophet, hurls at the chosen people surpass to a considerable degree many earlier angry reproaches, as well as later ones. The Lord does not merely accuse them of sins and compare the apostates to a prostitute; He had already said such things more than once through the prophets. But now the prophetic speech reminds its hearers that the people chosen for union with God, after betraying the Covenant, are no different from the pagan neighbors from whom they try to separate themselves. The very separation from neighboring peoples loses the meaning given by the Lord, a meaning that consists immeasurably more in keeping God's commandments pure and remaining faithful to Him than in ethnic distinctiveness. But now the apostates commit the same pagan abominations, and even worse ones: the higher you climb up a mountain, the farther you fall from it.

But He not only remembers the Covenant with the people; He also preserves it. He keeps faith not only with the Jews of the Old Testament but also with all of us, who constantly violate it. Not according to the merits of sinners, but according to His mercy, He is again and again ready not only to forgive but also to cleanse us from the filth in which we again and again gladly wallow.

Sin will be forgiven, but a sense of shame for the evil committed will remain. It is left not so that former sinners will constantly torment themselves by remembering the past, but as fruitful memory of bitter experience and as a warning for the future.

In its unfaithfulness, Jerusalem, the capital of God's people, proved more sinful than the surrounding cities. The Lord warns that foreign idols will not help it but, on the contrary, will lead it to downfall and destruction. Yet through the darkness of unfaithfulness, idolatry, and deceit, the prophet perceives a promise of Jerusalem's restoration and forgiveness: an image of the Kingdom of which Christ will later speak.