There is a great deal of beauty to be found in the image of God as the potter and our lives as the clay. We bear the marks of the fingers of the one who made us. Each of us is in some fine way unique, and therefore precious. Our lives are all made from the same clay, not being unspeakably different from one another. And then, at last, long after we have been fired into a vessel, at the end of our lives, our remnants go back into the clay, to be grog that enriches the lives of others still to come, turning our imperfections and our broken pieces into sites of strength.
God invites Jeremiah to watch the potter work, and to see all of this and more, far more than we could ever fit into words, and to know that God is always with us, individually and collectively, much as the potter is with the clay. Jeremiah sees how the potter’s hands dance with the clay, how its plasticity and coarseness rise and fall. God speaks to Jeremiah with this image, and then Jeremiah hears in this moment a terrifying message.
Jeremiah takes away a message that in God’s hands, we can always be thrown away. God could have one thing in mind for us, and then do another. Jeremiah sees in the non-attachment of the potter not a sign of a continuous process, filled with hope and dream, but fragility. This is the way that one who has known abuse at the hand of an unreliable parent sees the world.
Jeremiah hears a message here more fitting for the corrupt, autocratic head of a failing nation than for God: maybe I was going to do something good for you, but if you displease me, then I will take all of that away. Jeremiah fears that we are disposable to God.
***
It can seem very hard for people, nations, cultures to change. We learn to tell ourselves that things actually can’t get any better, and so we have to live with them as they are. We take our current faults and struggles and we let them ossify into things which limit our lives and devour our home. We watch wealth flow up from the poorest of the poor and towards the richest few, and we shrug. We watch conflicts oscillate between fragile peace and unspeakable cruelty, and we sigh. We watch our closest relationships play out in the same disappointing ways they always have, and we give up altogether.
God is trying to show Jeremiah the image of the potter working as an antidote to apathy, to inspire a willingness to work towards change. The potter does not give up so easily. Clay can be worked many times, and even when it ceases to be workable, the potter does not let one scrap go to waste. What is dissolved in the wash bucket becomes slip. What is overworked is processed back into the rest. The potter always sees potential, hope, and goodness in the clay.
***
Jesus tells us that where we go astray is not in the process of making our lives and our world, but somewhere far before we even set out to pursue that which God calls us to. He is absolutely right that before we do anything, we sit down to calculate the costs, and to make sure we will achieve our aim. We don’t want to risk humiliation, or the ire of the diocese, and so our projects must be costed, planned, and accomplished in a good and workmanlike manner. Here, we get stuck.
Sometimes you don’t know how you’re going to do something until you start doing it. You are working with new clay, and your hands have not yet learned how to dance with this unique constellation of minerals and moisture. We have to blunder around a little bit, experimenting and making things we don’t intend to be the finished product, just to learn how it is that we will find our way, and what kinds of work it may be possible for us to do.
This takes from us the possibility of working according to inspiration, and it impairs our ability to judge things by their fruit. We cannot plant a thousand wild seeds and see what grows; we must, instead, plant only proven winners, and end up with a monocrop of mediocrity. Worse than that, it creates attachments and inertias that make it impossible for us to really live.
***
If we go and sit and figure out exactly what our lives, our ministries, and our world are supposed to be like, and only then go out and see what it is like to enact them, we are doomed to suffering.
Life moves like wild clay that is full of all kinds of variation and strangeness. If we are convinced that we must make it look some certain way, we will curse our hands for the ways it all goes wrong, or, worse still, perhaps we will even curse the clay. This is not how God would work as the potter, but it may be how we end up. We may even give up, entirely. We will either spend our lives failing to make the vessels we are sure we are supposed to make, or collapse in disappointment and destroy the potter’s wheel itself, so that we never have to suffer the frustration, disappointment, and humiliation of the process ever again.
We see this in the politics of nihilism and selfishness, we see it in the number of problems in our world that we give up on, and we see it in lives which are filled with regret rather than curiosity.
***
Christ tells us, instead, that we have to completely let go of any kind of expectation or fixed image. We even have to hate the idea of a jug or a bowl, a mother or a father, a success or a failure. All we have is participation, all we have is the process. We are clay, our lives are clay, our society, too, and all of us are potters. If things are not going the way we expect them to, then we have to shift our expectations. We have to dance with one another and not be annihilated by surprise. We have to listen, feeling very gently and deeply, to what the clay is really saying.
To be a disciple of Christ, and, really, to live a life that isn’t ruled by disappointment and illusion, is to let yourself go into those places where you are not fully in control, and you know it, and where something really transformative might just be possible.
This is what it is like when we live not as a mad king setting out to make a mad war, but like when set out to make a meal together out of uncertain ingredients, but with a commitment to sharing whatever it is that we do have. This is not the building of some grand building, but the willingness to make camp with strangers. Things may not always go perfectly well, but in the other way, nothing ever really goes as planned. Better to truly live with one another in all our messiness, than to evermore be serving the narrow, failing plans you made so very long ago.
***
May you feel your life being firmly held in the hands of a God who loves you. May the potter’s touch bring reassurance, and calm, and home. May you, in turn, let your fingers work the clay of your life into whatever you are called to be, and not just that which you fear you will only fail to make. May you know that you, and the whole world, can always develop and change, can blossom and grow, not by will alone, but through the process and the touch of the artist within you, and the loving touch of the very artist who made you.