NOTES for Bar 2:17-18
At all times, in all religions (at least, those that grown out of the yahvisme) existed two answers to the question what to do with the sinner. The sense of the first one was simple: the sinner has to die for his sin. However those who answered to the question like that, could not always explain what they wanted to achieve, by depriving the sinner from life. Mostly it was about a lesson given for all the rest: they say, people will see and will be careful to sin. Such punishment will not influence on the fate of the one who sinned: if he even understands something at the last moments of his life, he won’t already succeed in any case to correct anything. Sometimes it was also said that it was useless all the same for the sinner to live, that it is really better for him to die than to continue sinning.
The other answer was the proposal to give to the sinner the chance for the correction, the chance to repent, to be converted, and to begin everything all over again. The partisans of such an answer were persuaded that, as long as man is alive, he is not yet hopeless, he still has the possibility of changing, and this possibility should not be neglected at all. As for the sin, the partisans of the new chance were convinced, that God will sort out Himself in due time the sins of everyone, and it does not belong to man to precipitate God's judgment. The prophet looks at the situation on a little unexpected side.
He speaks not about the fault of man, but about the possibility of the communion with God. He puts the question even a little, at first sight, paradoxical: what pleasure does God have in the death of man? The deaths do not praise God, indeed, in those pre-Christian times, death was not the transition into another spiritual state on the way of the Kingdom, as it is today for the Christians, but the leaving into the world of darkness, where if God's presence is there, then it is so weak that man (more exactly, what remains of him after death) can generally hardly notice it.
A living person always has the possibility to repent for the committed sin and to be converted to God, and who knows, maybe the sinner of today will become another genuine righteous, a man of God. One can speak about the utility of man to God only very formally. On the other hand one can speak about the unconditional love of God for man. This love obliges God to use every possibility, any chance, even according to the human standards, completely imaginary to help the man to be converted and to begin again a new life. Life, of which the center and the sense will become the glorification of God, and thus, the testimony of Him and His Kingdom that revealing itself to man, makes him its witness.