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Sunday
This week’s Old Testament reading features Jeremiah employing a somewhat strange analogy that goes in a different direction than I anticipate. The passage sent me scanning my mind for literary works featuring pottery.
Jeremiah (18:1-11) begins with a situation that every potter can relate to:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.
I thought of a scene from A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which features a gifted potter and his apprentice. At one point this apprentice invites into the workshop one of the daughters of the family that has taken him in. First we encounter Dorothy watching Philip at work:
Philip was at the wheel, his wet hands inside the moving, growing clay wall of a pot. Dorothy stood in the doorway and watched him. She touched the tips of her own fingers with other fingers, trying to imagine, in her skin, how this work would feel. It was precise, and extraordinary. Philip came to the end of turning, finished his rim, smoothed the sides with a wooden baton, and lifted the bat from the wheel. He said to Dorothy “Hello, then,” without turning round. She hadn’t been sure he knew she was there.
“Would you like to make a pot?”
Dorothy said she would. Philip found a smock for her, and ceded his seat at the wheel. He took a ball of clay, and slapped it on the wheel, and centered it for her. “Now,” he said, “pressi down, so, with both hands—use your thumbs—and feel it come up.
Then we get a reenactment of Jeremiah’s scenario:
Dorothy pressed. The clay was wet and clammy and dead, and yet it had a motion of its own, a response, a kind of life. The wheel turned, the clay turned, Dorothy held her fingers steady inside the red-brown cylinder which rose, with narrowing walls, to the rhythm of the turning. Dorothy was delighted. And then, suddenly, something went wrong—the rhythm faltered, the clay walls frilled, slipped and collapsed inwards, and where there had been a tube there was a flailing blob. Dorothy turned to Philip to ask what she had done wrong. She was half-laughing, half-crying. Philip was laughing. He said “That always happens.”
Jeremiah’s analogy shocks because the Lord threatens to do to Israel what Dorothy does to the pot, only deliberately in God’s case:
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.
So I guess God is telling Israel that either it will get its act together or it will end up as a flailing blob. On the positive side, those who turn from evil will end up as a beautiful pot.
Imagine this pot as the one described by the 15th century Indian mystic Kabir, an important poet to both Hindus and Muslims. In this lyric a simple clay jug contains the mysteries of creation:
Inside This Clay Jug
By Kabir
Trans. by Robert Bly
Inside this clay jug
there are canyons and
pine mountains,
and the maker of canyons
and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside,
and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is here,
and the one who judges jewels.
And the music
that comes from the strings
that no one touches,
and the source of all water.
If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:
Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.
For Jeremiah, a clay pot works as a symbol of Israel, which God can shape or destroy. For Kabir, each of us is that pot. Inside us is mysterious music, the source of all water, and “the God whom I love.”
