Symptoms
The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9 NASB
Desperately sick – You probably thought this verse was about the propensity of human beings to sin. You might have been taught that we have this terrible, fatal illness called disobedience. It really doesn’t matter at this point whether it was inherited or it was a deliberate choice. The result is a desperate disease. The problem is that Jeremiah (and God) recognize this malady but most human beings don’t. We are infected and oblivious. Maybe that’s because we don’t recognize the symptoms. If we knew what to look for we might discover our illness. That raises another issue. If Jeremiah is right, then this disease affects all humanity. That means the symptoms can’t be noticeable just to the religiously minded. It won’t do much good to tell people they have to become believers before they can recognize they are sick. The full implications might not be understood until Jeremiah comes into view, but certainly we should be able to notice something.
With this in mind, I’d like to direct your attention to a remark by Abraham Heschel.
The threat to freedom lies in the process of reducing human relations to a matter of fact. Uniqueness is suppressed, repetitiveness prevails. We teach our students how to recognize the labels, not how to develop a taste. Standardization corrodes the sense of ultimate significance. Man to his own self becomes increasingly vapid, cheap, insignificant. Yet without the sense of ultimate significance and ultimate preciousness of my own existence, freedom becomes a hollow phrase. The central problem of this generation is emptiness of heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual. The central problem is that we do not know how to think, how to pray, or how to cry, or how to resist the deceptions of the silent persuaders.[1]
He wrote this more than sixty years ago. Brené Brown says pretty much the same thing today.
“We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us.”[2]
“The culture of blame permeates our lives. We are constantly blaming and shaming ourselves and others.”[3]
What if I told you that the symptoms of a desperately sick heart are shame, conformity, busyness, decreased sensitivity to others, lack of vulnerability, insignificance, blame and the loss of personal freedom? What if I never mentioned religious words like sin? Do you think you would recognize Jeremiah’s insight in these symptoms? Oh, and do they apply to you?
Topical Index: desperately sick, ʾānaš, sin, symptoms, Jeremiah 17:9
[1] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 251
[2] Brené Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 137.
[3] Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t), p. 213.
