NOTES for Jer 2:1-3:5

Prophecy is born from tension, from the mismatch between what is and what ought to be. God expects from people "friendship as in youth" and "love as before a wedding," but receives unfaithfulness, rejection, and forgetfulness. Why does this happen, and what is to be done about it? These questions are the hardest to answer, because God does everything to draw the human person, while that person "leaves the fountain of water in order to make himself a dry cistern," like a woman who leaves her husband's house and looks for adventure in the camp of despair and death. Forgetting God cannot be explained rationally. It is madness, and yet it is reality.

And all that remains for God is to speak to people through His prophet: to warn about coming disasters, to denounce, to plead, to call them to Himself. And here God's success becomes the prophet's happiness, and failure, in turn, becomes grief. The prophet does not trade in ideology as "opium for the people" and does not engage in demagogy. He loves people with God's love and weeps over them with God's tears.