On Cracked Vessels and Clay Pots

(Featured image credit to Earl Wilcox, from Unsplash)

It is the 13th day of the 2023 season of Lent as these brief thoughts came to mind, and sought to be written. I have been reminded during these last few days of what Stanley Hauerwas once said about the task of Christians, which is, to show that Jesus makes possible lives of truth in a world of lies. Lying, falsehood, according to Hauerwas, leads to the death of human community. We now live in a world full of antagonism, in a world still full of lies – yet those lies and antagonisms are now exacerbated and amplified in real time by the digital world of social media. And once those lies are left out in the ether, they unfortunately stay there to further suffuse the habitats where we dwell. And so to live a life of truth in a world full of lies has become more urgent, and more challenging. It requires more robust spiritual discipline, humility, commitment, and devotion to God’s will for one’s self and others. It is a lifetime journey because we are all, as the Apostle Paul puts it, just made of cracked vessels and clay pots; which is to say that we are prone at times to taking three steps forward but then taking two steps backwards.

Yet the goal of growing in discipleship is to keep striving so that we are formed ever closer to Christ’s image. In Jeremiah chapter 18, the prophet in the midst of the dark nights of his soul, narrates that he heard God command him to go down to the potter’s house, and that there he will receive God’s message for him. So he went down to the potter’s house, and saw him working at the wheel. Jeremiah saw that the clay on the wheel that the potter was attempting to form into a pot was being marred in his hands. Then he saw the potter form it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.

Then God’s word came to Jeremiah: “Can I not do with you as this potter has done? Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand…”

To be formed spiritually is to willingly submit our marred selves to be re-made and re-formed by God who in Jesus Christ fully dwells. And to grow in discipleship means to strive to live into an experience that intentionally follows Jesus so that we can learn and live out his ways. This means, among other things, that when we follow Jesus we cannot remain the same. Following him faithfully changes us, transforms us closer to his image. That journey requires the gradual dying of the many faces of the false self; the scraping, as it were, of the spiritual barnacles that get in the way of our spiritual formation.

In that willful and committed journey towards a new self, we discover – even only in fragments and glimpses – God’s will for us. To live into God’s will for us means the dying of the false self, because both cannot coexist. And so the many falsehoods that accompanied the false self also dies – false hopes, false dreams, false visions, and even false friends. It is the requisite for the flourishing of our relationships and our full humanity. The invitation of Jesus remains clear: “Follow me”, he said.