NOTES for Jer 18:1-23

Coming into contact with the mystery of God reveals the human inability to describe that mystery adequately. He is known through paradox. The image of the potter and the clay that he shapes as he wishes paints a picture of God's complete sovereignty over His creation: everything that happens to us depends entirely on Him, and He Himself chooses what to fashion from our lives. Yet at once we see that a person is the maker of his own happiness: his whole life depends on his right conduct. God and man shape the destiny of the world together, taking part in each of its moments, and this is an unfathomable mystery. As Easter approaches, we remember it in a special way: the mystery of our salvation, in which God conquered death, raised all people in Christ, and awaits our response, our joining the new life revealed in His risen Son.

In any society there are times when no one trusts anyone any more. This concerns, of course, first and foremost the traditional institutions, which in this case were ‘the sage, the priest and the prophet’: in the society of Judah in Jeremiah's time, they embodied the authority of society, the priesthood and charismatic religious leadership respectively.

The reasons for the decline of traditional authorities are open to debate, especially since the situation in this respect is never clear-cut anywhere. But whatever the reasons, the result is always the same: people stop trusting not only traditional institutions and their representatives but also one another. They become unable to unite for the sake of anything; they can unite only against someone who proposes something, calls for something or simply has any spiritual or social standing at all.

It is quite clear that the crisis here is not ideological but spiritual. The atomisation of society is merely the outward manifestation of a serious spiritual illness. This illness is often linked to the discrediting — above all, spiritual discrediting — of the very institutions with which the crisis in society as a whole begins. But spiritual illness never, or almost never, remains confined to the representatives of these institutions: it only begins with them, then spreads to the whole of society. Its cause, as in Judah in Jeremiah's time, is always disregard for God's commandments and hostility towards those who try to remind people of them.

Naturally, in a society that forgets the commandments and the law given by God, a multitude of problems arises, and the more problems there are, the less often public figures and influential thinkers remember God. Anyone who reminds people of God in such a situation becomes everyone's enemy: everything he calls for seems unnecessary to most people, or at least out of place. Everyone wants to get rid of such a person, hoping that as soon as he disappears, all the problems will be solved — problems that remain unsolved because this person keeps talking about God and His law, measuring everything by God's measure, which has been revealed to him.

Of course, when they really do get rid of him, the problems will by no means be solved. Things may well only get worse. But by then most people will already have forgotten their hatred of God's witness: fallen human beings usually have short memories. And society, having rid itself of the righteous person, will be left with its snowballing problems. Problems from which God might well have delivered it, had it listened to His witness.