The Potter Who Won't Throw the Clay Away

Jeremiah had been a boy when God touched his mouth and filled it with words. Now he was grown, and for years he had been saying those words to people who did not want them. God's people were burning incense to idols and going their own crooked way.

One morning God spoke to him again. "Get up and go down to the potter's house. There I will give you my message."

So down Jeremiah went, through the narrow streets to where the potters worked. Jars stood drying in the sun, and the air smelled of wet earth and smoke from the kiln.

The potter sat at his wheel. (A potter's wheel in those days was two round stones on one post. The potter kicked the bottom stone to keep the top one spinning, so his hands stayed free and his feet never got a rest.) Kick, kick, whirr. On the top stone sat a lump of wet clay.

Jeremiah watched. The potter wet his hands and pressed his thumbs into the middle, and the lump rose up into walls. Up came a jar, round and tall.

Then something went wrong. Maybe a hard bit was hiding in the clay, or one side grew too thin. The jar wobbled, sagged, and folded over with a wet FLOP. All that work, and now it looked like a loaf of bread somebody had sat on.

Jeremiah waited for the potter to toss the spoiled lump onto the scrap heap.

He didn't. He squashed it into a ball, slapped it back onto the middle of the wheel, and started kicking again. Kick, kick, whirr. His hands pressed and smoothed, and out of that same spoiled clay came a new jar, shaped the way the potter thought best.

Then God's word came to Jeremiah, right there in the yard.

"People of Israel, can I not do with you what this potter has done? Like clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand."

God said more. If a nation he had warned would turn away from its evil, he would not send the trouble he had planned. His people were still on his wheel. So God gave Jeremiah a message to carry back up the hill.

"Turn back, every one of you, from your evil ways," Jeremiah told the people. "Change your ways, and do what is good!"

The people folded their arms. "It's no use!" they said. "We will follow our own plans. Each of us will do whatever his own stubborn heart wants."

(Clay that argues with the potter. The man at the wheel had never had that problem.)

But clay can be reshaped only while it is soft, and Judah had gone hard as a fired pot. No amount of shouting from Jeremiah could get inside a stubborn heart and make it soft again. Soon Babylon's armies marched the people far from home.

Hundreds of years went by, and God's people kept praying, "You are the Potter, and we are the clay."

Then one Sabbath in Jerusalem, a man spat on the ground, made mud with his fingers, and spread it on the eyes of a man born blind. "Go," he said, "wash in the pool of Siloam." The man washed, and came back seeing. Later, when the leaders threw him out, the one who had healed him came looking for him, and the man knelt down and worshiped him.

The God who shaped the first man out of dust was working clay again, with his own hands. They were Jesus' hands, and they could reach where Jeremiah's never could: into a heart, to start it over on the wheel.