The Vessel Had Spoiled
Reflections On The Lectionary For September 4th
Sometimes the lectionary doesn’t give us very much to work with. Sometimes the texts are uninteresting, difficult to preach on, or otherwise unappealing, and it takes a lot of work to figure out what to say about them—though, to be fair, those can also be some of the most rewarding texts to preach.
Other times, though, the lectionary is rich with possibilities, too many to consider all at once. The lectionary for September 4th is like that. There are two texts in particular—the Jeremiah passage about the potter, and the Philemon text—that are each among the most compelling passages in the bible, from my perspective. So rather than try to think about them together in one post this week, I’ll give them each their own post, and draw in some of the other texts from this week’s readings as I can.
If you’ve been reading A Lover’s Quarrel or anything else I’ve written, or if you’ve heard me teach or preach over the years, you probably know that I love a metaphor. Something in my brain really likes comparing one thing to another, and through the juxtaposition, understanding more about each. I also happen to be married to a professional potter; those are her hands in that photo at the top, roughed up from throwing pots. There is a pottery studio in our spare room between the dining room and the garage. So more than many people might be, I’m pretty attuned to the metaphors embedded in pottery. When those metaphors appear in the bible, I tend to pay attention.
The first thing that’s interesting about this passage from Jeremiah is that “the word” from “the LORD” seems to be a setup for a metaphor. It’s not an accidental noticing of something about the world on Jeremiah’s part; he was told to go to the pottery studio and take a look around and wait for the words to come. That’s what he did, and when he got there, he saw that the potter was hard at work at the wheel. The problem, though, was that “the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand.” Things weren’t going according to plan, the pot on the wheel wasn’t turning out like it should, and the potter found himself starting over.
There are a lot of ways pottery can go wrong: pieces can be thrown too slim and slump over and collapse on the wheel, they can go off-center and tear apart through centrifugal force, or they can simply lose structural integrity from too much water or too much fiddling. Pots can crack while drying, they can be easily broken while still “green” or unfired, or they can explode during firing (usually because of pockets of air or rock stuck in the clay, or thick places in the clay where the potter didn’t thin things out enough). Glazed pots can have problems with running or unevenness, and of course at any point in the process, a drop or even a strong jostle can send the whole thing into ruin. Any problems that happen after the pot has been fired are generally unfixable; many studios have a “shard wall” or “shard pile” where potters dash their broken pots into pieces in defiant acts of detachment. But if a problem happens before the firing, the clay can be recycled or reclaimed, and reworked into something new. That’s what Jeremiah is talking about.
What do metaphors tell us? They can bring out something important about the story that’s being told through the metaphor itself. In Jeremiah 18, the prophet is telling a story about pottery, but he’s really telling a story about “the house of Israel” and its relationship with God. It’s about pottery, but it’s really about Israel and God’s frustration with the nation. The metaphor here is pointing toward the possibility that God, like the potter, might take the slumped and ruined remains of one effort and recycle it into a new one—to make another go of things with Israel, and keep alive the possibility of a beautiful outcome. That’s clearly what Jeremiah hears and wants to convey to the reader: all is not lost, and God is not done with us yet.
But if we pay close attention to the metaphor, we might see something else. When the biblical text thinks about the relationship between God and Israel, it tends to view the two parties in unequal terms. God, for the most part, is viewed as the faithful and longsuffering deity who is patiently waiting for Israel to live up to its end of the bargain. God is understood to have delivered Israel from a number of perils in the past, only to be spurned by the people as they chased after idolatry and licentiousness. Israel, meanwhile, is often understood in the biblical text as profligate, prodigal, wayward, and self-destructive. The nation is repeatedly described as faithless and degenerate, bringing ruin upon itself. This broad narrative usually traces a huge swing in agency: for most of Israel’s early history, God holds all of the agency, and then in its later days (the days of Jeremiah), the people hold all of the agency. In the time of Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and Joshua, the text argues, God acted mightily to save the people, but then in the time of the prophets, the people acted foolishly to walk away from God’s protection. Agency belongs to God, then to the people, in that order, without a lot of overlap.
Jeremiah’s pottery metaphor does something different with agency. Think about the act of creating pottery, and who holds the agency in that process. Perhaps we could ascribe a bit of agency to the materials in use—the composition of the clay or the heat of the kiln—but almost all of the agency belongs to the potter. Of those mistakes I listed above—slumping, cracking, running, breaking—nearly all of them are a function of the potter’s skill and choices. Some clays can be more finicky than others, more prone to certain kinds of failure, but it’s the potter who’s choosing the clay—and, in the days of Jeremiah, it was also probably the potter who was mining and manufacturing the clay. It’s the potter who shapes the clay, molds it into its form, and moves it through the process of creation. If something goes wrong, there’s close to a 100% chance that it was the potter’s error, not the pot’s.
Take a look at Jeremiah 18:4: “The vessel he was making was spoiled in the potter’s hand.” In English this reads like a passive verb, “was spoiled,” which reflects a Hebrew verb form (nifal perfect, if you’re keeping score at home) that usually is either passive or reflexive. In this case, the passive verb makes a lot of sense as a translation; it describes the condition of the pot at the moment Jeremiah arrived at the potter’s house. It had been spoiled. From a storytelling perspective, this is a nice touch. From a metaphorical perspective, it raises some questions. From a grammatical perspective, the use of the passive voice here creates an action with no actor—an effect with no cause. It’s a roundabout way of saying things; “the vessel he was making was spoiled in the potter’s hand” is a longer and less direct way of saying “the potter had spoiled the vessel,” with the extra words going toward letting the potter off the hook. This is a normal way for potters to talk about pottery, ascribing agency to the pots themselves or to unnamed forces. It’s also a normal way for lots of us to talk about our own failures. “This post on Substack isn’t really coming together” is easier to say than “I am not able to write well enough to make this post on Substack make sense,” because it spares my ego. “My eggs were cold” is a more polite way to say “the kitchen doesn’t seem to be getting food out efficiently today.” We can shift the agency around to spare our own feelings and the feelings of others.
That’s one thing when we are talking about pottery (or writing, or eggs), and it’s another thing when we are talking about God. In this metaphor, the passive voice is doing a lot of work. The potter’s actions in the second half of 18:4—“he reworked it into another vessel”—make it clear that the agency behind that new pot belongs wholly to the potter (or, in the metaphor, to God). But the passive verb in the first half of the verse make it sound like the potter (God) didn’t have much to do with the first pot’s failure. In reality, of course, the same potter was at the wheel the whole time. If the success of the second pot belongs to God, so does the failure of the first pot.
This way of reading the metaphor is a pretty big challenge to traditional theology. Suggesting that God failed in the act of creation, or that God’s actions were not always perfect, doesn’t fit very well with views of God as faithful, blameless, and always righteous. Process theologians might embrace this story as a way of talking about how God, too, learns from experience, and how we engage co-creatively and iteratively with the divine in the making of our world and our lives. I like that view.
Christians tend to skip over all of this and read the story simplistically as a story of Christianity’s inevitable success in the wake of Judaism’s inevitable failure, but that’s a disingenuous and careless reading, both theologically and narratively. If, as Christians claim, the same God is present throughout history, as active in Genesis as in Revelation, then the actions of this God matter. We cannot read it as the story of Christian triumph over Judaism without committing heresy and blasphemy, in a kind of Marcionite erasure of God’s work with Israel.
What, then? How should we read this metaphor? For me, it might be possible to read it as an interruption in that pattern of agency, or a refutation of it—a rejection of that pattern in which God saves the people, then the people reject God. Instead of understanding the relationship between God and the people as one where God always does the right thing and the people always do the wrong thing, this metaphor of the potter’s house might complicate the story, asking what role the potter might have had in “spoiling” the vessel. This question of God’s agency and humans’ agency is larger than the story of the nation of Israel; it’s a fundamental question about how the world works. If the world is to be understood as God’s creative project, and the world has some problems (which I think we can all agree on), then the old story of human sinfulness (the passive-voice “the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand”) might not be the whole story. Could it be that God has learned along the way? Could it be that God’s creativity can fail, and need to be retried? Those are big questions, but they are laid out plainly in Jeremiah in the metaphor of the potter’s house.
The redemptive and hopeful thing about this view is that God, like a good potter, did not give up. A beginning potter, or one who had no interest in learning anything, might have tossed the clay aside, or walked away from the wheel in defeat. But experienced potters know that failure is a larger part of the creative process than success, and that the slumped and ruined clay of a spoiled pot has more to teach than a hundred perfect ones. The God (the potter) who is described in Jeremiah is one who is interested in learning, turning failures into insights and reworking the past into the future. This is a God who fails, and that might seem like a terrifying prospect. But more frightening still is a God who cannot learn, who cannot admit to deficiency, who cannot renew creative effort with the knowledge gained by experience. Jeremiah describes a God who reworks the clay again and again until a vessel “as seemed good” sits upon the wheel.