Treasure in a Cracked Cup

Paul's first letter had told the church in Corinth that death was losing. Not long after, some new teachers came to town, with letters of praise from important people and speeches that rolled like thunder. They had plenty to say about Paul.

"His letters are strong and weighty," they said, "but in person he is weak, and his speaking is nothing to listen to. And look at all the trouble he gets into!"

Paul heard about it in Macedonia, where things were hard for him too. "Fights outside, fears inside," he wrote. So he sent Corinth another letter.

"We have a treasure," Paul wrote, "but we keep it in jars of clay."

Every house in Corinth had clay jars, and clay cups with chips in their rims. (People sometimes hid their money in a plain clay pot and buried it in the field. A thief would walk right past it. Who steals a pot?)

The treasure was light. On the first day of the world, God said, "Let light shine out of the darkness!" That same God, Paul wrote, had shone into their hearts, so they could see his glory in the face of Jesus.

"We are clay on purpose," Paul wrote, "so everyone can see the great power belongs to God, not to us."

"In these clay jars we are pressed on every side, but not crushed. We are puzzled, but we don't give up. We are hunted, but God never leaves us. We are knocked down, but not destroyed."

Paul meant every word. Once, in a town called Lystra, a crowd threw stones at him until they thought he was dead, and dragged him outside the city. When his friends gathered round, Paul got up and walked back into town. (The people who threw the stones were not expecting that.)

"The God who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us too," Paul wrote, "and bring us, together with you, to stand with him. Our outside is wearing out." He had the scars of five whippings on his back to prove it. "But on the inside, God is making us new, every single day."

Then he weighed it all up, like a shopkeeper weighing grain. On one side went the whips, the stones, and the nights without sleep. On the other went the glory God was getting ready, glory that lasts forever.

"These troubles are light, and they last only a little while," Paul wrote. "The glory is so heavy that nothing compares with it." (Paul had been stoned and left for dead. If that counts as light, the glory must be very heavy.)

"So we don't stare at what we can see," he wrote. "What we can see lasts for a while. What we can't see lasts forever."

A clay jar can carry light, but it cannot make any, and sooner or later every jar wears out. Years later, chained up in a Roman prison, old Paul wrote that he would soon die.

But the light had come from someone who took every one of those blows with no "but not" to stop them. He was pressed until he was crushed. His friends ran off and left him. On a cross he cried, "My God, why have you left me?" and there he died. Then God raised him up, and ever since he has been setting his light inside jar after jar: in Corinth, in towns Paul never heard of, in houses all over the world tonight.

Whenever an old cracked cup glows, the light people see is shining from the face of Jesus.