NOTES for Jer 17:1-27

“Cursed is the person who trusts in man”—in our endlessly tangled relationships with God and the world, we are unable to help one another reach the surface; in this we can rely on no one, including ourselves. We can hope only in God, but the distance to Him is inscribed “with a diamond point on the tablets of the heart”: the human being is incurably sick with the inability to love. This is a rather pessimistic picture, but it closely resembles the truth. And from this despair a new hope grows (one cannot live entirely without hope)—not hope in our own faith and love, but hope that God Himself will come and put everything right. And He came and put it right—then, on the Friday when the curtain in the temple was torn, the curtain that separated humanity from a fatal encounter with the Holy One. The door toward life has stood open for two thousand years.