We're All Crackpots Anyway: What "Jars of Clay" Look Like

A couple of weeks ago I attended the first session of a ceramics class. I haven't played with clay since junior high, so it was a lot of fun to try it out again. My skills have not improved since seventh grade, I assure you. (A point further brought home by my near failure on the pottery wheel last week. It's a good thing this class isn't for a grade.)

Anyway, we started out making "pinch pots," which our instructor explained were among the very first clay pieces ever made by anyone anywhere. Why? They're simple, and they hold stuff.

Here's a pinch pot:

The example piece she showed us had several cracks in it, so as she explained, "that's what you'll be making," she qualified, "but obviously, not broken. We're not making broken pots." We all laughed.

But I thought about it a little.

Of course you wouldn't set out to make a broken pot. That would be silly, against all logic. You'd put all your energy into something that never even had a chance of being useful. How pathetic.

Hm.

Many things can cause a pot to break: impurities in the clay itself, a weak joint, a too-thin wall, being dropped, etc. If there was one word that could be applied to clay pottery across the board, it would be fragile.

Clay and humanity have quite a few similarities:

• We were both taken from the earth (Genesis 2:7)
• We are both filled with impurities (Romans 3:9–18)
• We are both moldable—but the less water we contain, the less malleable we are
• We're fragile
• We're unable to shape and mold ourselves

Do you get that third point? As clay begins to dry out, it gets harder and more brittle—more easily broken and more difficult to shape. The same thing happens to us when we haven't been going often enough to the well of Living Water—the Word of God. As our hearts dry out, we get harder and more brittle, and have a harder time being shaped, molded, corrected.

When that happens to clay, it gets tossed into a bucket of slop, and is eventually put through a machine called a pugmill, which crushes it down, mixes it with water, and reconditions it. The resulting material is called "reclaimed" clay.

When we get dried out, we go through our own pugmill. Trials (and often consequences of our sins) can crush us until we go back to the Well for Jesus and are "reclaimed." (Now, to those who might read some kind of loss-of-salvation thing into that, remember: the dry clay never ceased to be clay; it just needed fixing. The same goes for us: We don't cease to be God's children, but we have some serious fixing to do.)

However, let me come back to the point I originally started with. When God created humans, they were perfect like everything else in the created world. Adam and Eve's sin broke that mold, so that forever on out we've all been made broken to begin with.

Why, you ask, didn't God create a new mold? Because man was created "in God's image," and there's no two ways about that. The first mold was perfect, and we've had to live with the consequences of our first parents' sin. God wasn't the one who messed up; we did. So we're all broken pots. (And if that doesn't check your pride, I don't know what will.)

What good is a broken pot? It can't hold anything, which (as we noted above) is a key feature of a clay pot.

Now, between the molding of clay and its finished form comes the firing process, which takes the clay beyond the point of pugging (I believe). So the metaphor has to shift a little. We're broken, yes. But God has provided a way to be mended, and it's the same Source as the Living Water that kept the clay wet earlier: Jesus. He can take those broken pieces and put them back together in a way that they'll never break again.

Wholeness and healing, reconciliation and redemption—that's what Jesus offers. And then we can be useful, really for the first time. But the thing about a broken pot is that no matter how well it's glued back together, the cracks themselves still show. The evidence, the scars, of our brokenness will always remind us where we came from. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians,

"But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us" (4:7).

We hear this verse often enough. But the verse that precedes it, in my mind, makes it so much the better:

"For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ" (4:6).

The Spirit we receive upon accepting Christ's atoning sacrifice and forgiveness is this light, shining out of our darkness. And those cracks we mentioned? That's how the world can see the light—shining out of the cracks of our brokenness. We are jars of clay, and broken ones. Remember Gideon against the Midianites (Judges 7)? His 300 men carried torches in clay jars, which they had to break as part of the Lord's plan to take their enemy by surprise. Only when the jars broke was there light to see.

Just like jars of clay, we are breakable, fragile people. And we can't hold the light unless Christ puts us back together. But then, He uses the cracks in us to shine His light on the world.

Maybe it's not so bad to be a broken pot after all.

(But don't tell my ceramics teacher.)