Arise, and go down to the potter’s house
This week we have had two intriguing readings from two of the major prophets, Ezekiel and Jeremiah, the one with the image of eating the scroll of the Lord, the other about being the clay in the hands of the divine potter. These are wonderful images that speak about the nature of the educational project at King’s-Edgehill School. It is about character, about formation, about words taking shape in us and shaping us in turn.
Jeremiah’s famous image of the Potter and the Clay is a profound statement of truth. God is the Potter and we are the clay. He shapes us and not otherwise. It is an understanding that belongs to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The struggle of our age, perhaps, is to overcome the dogmatic skepticism which would refuse to give to the Potter what belongs to the “rational” clay of our humanity, namely the acknowledgment that we are the creatures whom God has made for himself.
Yet, left by itself, that we are the vessels whom the divine Potter has shaped and made would be an unbearable truth. It would be unbearable because Scripture and experience reveal us to ourselves as broken pots – broken through no fault of the Potter, we must add, but because of ourselves.
At this point the image of the Potter and the Clay deepens into mystery. We are broken pots because we have failed to will the intent of the Maker. Something is required of us. We are not simply passive receptacles of God’s will and purpose – unassuming, inert, and unmoving clay. No. We have to will the shape that the divine Potter wants for each of us. It means taking words and ideas into ourselves and making them part of ourselves. It is about how the divine Word takes shape in us to his glory and for our endless good.
And yet, that you and I are but so many broken pots, would remain an uncomfortable but inescapable truth were it not for the grace and mercy of God. This requires of us a deeper humility, a profounder openness to the Poet/Maker and Shaper of Souls.
This is hinted at by Jeremiah. “The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do”. But in the Christian understanding there is something more, the idea of God made man, the Potter who becomes himself the clay.
‘Twas much that man was made like God before, but
that God should be made like man, much more,
as the poet/preacher John Donne puts it. As another preacher, John Hackett, a contemporary of Donne, notes: “How strangely was the wheel turn’d about when the clay did make the Potter; was it not enough to make man after the image of God, but moreover to make God after the image and likeness of man?” The Word made flesh, the clay-shaped Potter, enters into the struggles of our lives and turns the wheel about to shape his redemption for us and in us. He recalls us to the Potter.
We live by the Word of God written and proclaimed, by words and ideas that can transform us.We are in the hands of the Potter who has himself become clay to reshape us “as it seemed good to [him] to do”. It is the nature of redemption itself.
Every time we gather in Chapel we are in the potter’s house. It is all part of the School as the place where you are shaped and formed. By what? By words and ideas, by exchanges and experiences, by all of the things that belong to the life of the School where you are opened out to things that are greater than yourself. By actively embracing the shaping you are becoming more truly who you are. You discover the things that matter and that shape you into maturity and responsibility.
Chapel is an integral part of that activity, a place, as T.S. Eliot says, “where prayer has been valid” and where “the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living”.
In other words, you are part of a greater community but one in which you share in the Potter’s work of shaping you in the things belonging to the ideals of the educational project of the School. You have to enter into that work of being shaped. You have to will it and to live it. It means to honour the Potter. You arise and go down to the Potter’s house, for there “I will let you hear my words”, the words of the Divine Potter which shape you. Embrace the shaping.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy