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 every society sometimes come moments, when no one already believes in anybody. It is of course first of all about traditional institutions, which in this case were "the wise, the priest and the prophet": because in the Jewish society in the time of Jeremiah, they were personified, respectively the authority of the society, the priesthood and charismatic religious leadership. We can discuss about the reasons of the fall of the traditional authorities, especially that the situation in this respect has never and nowhere been unambiguous. But independently of the reasons, the result was always the same: people stop believing not only in the traditional institutions and their representatives, but also to each other.

They become incapable to unite for something, they find themselves in the state to unite only against somebody, who proposes something, who calls to something or generally at least something that appears in a spiritual and public sense. It is quite obvious that the crisis in this case is not ideological, but spiritual. The atomization of the society is only the external manifestation of a serious spiritual disease. Often this disease is connected to the depreciation (before all, a spiritual depreciation) of the very institutions, with which the crisis begins in the society in general. But the spiritual disease is never or almost never limited only with the representatives of these institutions, it begins only with them, then capturing the whole society.

The reason is always, as it was in the Judea in the time of Jeremiah, the negligence of God's commandments and the hostility toward those who try to remind about them. Of course, there is multitude of problems in a society, where the commandments and the law given by God are forgotten, and the more there are problems, the less the public personalities and the rulers of mind remember about God. The one who remembers in such situation about God becomes the general enemy: all to what he calls seems to most useless or, at least, inappropriate.

Everybody wants to get rid of such person in the hope that, as soon as he will disappear, will be solved all the problems that are not solved because this person speaks all the time about God and about His law, evaluating everything with God's measure, which was revealed to him. Of course, when they shall really get rid of him, the problems will not at all be solved. It is quite possible that it will only get worse. But at this moment most will already forget their hatred toward God's witness: indeed, to the fallen man memory is usually short. And the society, having got rid of the righteous man, will remain with its problems, like snowball. Problems, from which, it was quite possible, that God could deliver it [the society], if it had listened to His witness.