NOTES for Jer 23:23
Childlike naivete can at times be very sincere, including when it concerns relationships with God. A scene: a girl about four years old is walking with her mother, who is scolding her for bad behavior. The girl wants to say something in reply, but restrains herself. Her mother says, "Well, say it, say what you think." The girl says, "Later, in the underpass." Both approach the underground passage and go down below. The girl says to her mother, "You are nasty." The mother says, "Why couldn't you say that to me up above?" The girl answers, "Up above God will hear."
The answer of a four-year-old girl could seem amusing and naive if we ourselves were not in many ways like her when it comes to our relationship with God. The fall, humanity's distancing from God, does not begin by chance with the human being hiding from God. Hiding in order to conceal his sin. Perhaps not because of fear of punishment at all, but because he does not want to admit his own inadequacy either to himself or to Him.
Deep in the soul, the overwhelming majority of us believing people would like God never to see our sins. We would like Him to be nearby and look at us when, as it seems to us, we are good and ready to meet Him. For example, during prayer. Or when we are doing something good. But it is better to sin somewhere in a dark corner. Or in an underground passage. Or in the desert, in the forest, in short, farther away from altars and temples.
It seems to us that if God is far away, then He does not see and does not know, that in this respect He is like us: we know little or nothing about those who are far from us at a given moment. With God everything is different, and He reminds us of this through the mouth of His prophet. His nearness means not that He learns something new about us that He did not know before, but that we have found ourselves at the center of His attention, have drawn this attention in some way, that He is going to intervene directly in our life, to enter it in order to change something in it.
And here we quite naturally want to look better than we really are. But God has no need for us to "look" a certain way. He needs us simply to be. As we are. And to let Him into our life. As it is. So as to give Him the possibility of making it, with our participation, of course, what it should be according to His design and plan.