Jeremiah 18:1-11 “You/We are the Potter?”

 (Lectionary for September 4, 2016)

“Thou art the potter, I am the clay.” How many times have I sung that mournful tune in churches, camps, and conferences? Dirge-like, we all join our voices as we try to open ourselves to the potter God who, we proclaim, is the One who shapes and molds us “after God’s will.” Let me be honest. Often while I am singing (and sometimes swaying) with the assembled group, I am thinking of what I plan to say next to them, rather more than I am thinking about God’s molding of my nasty clay. I am more like those who respond to Jeremiah’s salient metaphor of God the potter when they say in Jer 18:12, “No use! We will walk in our own plans, each acting according to our evil hearts.” I fear, as is too often the case in my life of prayer and worship, I sing the songs far better than I actually do what they intone and enjoin. I would far rather be the potter, however poor an artist I may be, than allow God to play that role in my life. But might it be that I have configured this pot-potter relationship too simply?

That picture of the prophet entering the house of the local potter in Judah at the behest of YHWH is a striking and unforgettable one. I have thrown a pot on a wheel only once in my life, and it looked far more “thrown” than “thrown,” if you get what I mean. My coils failed to adhere, my rising shape unrecognizable as pot or cup or anything that resembled a known human object. I am definitely not a potter in any way or shape or form. I have watched my wife at the wheel, and she has some skill at it, but it is only when we have both viewed an expert, a professional potter, that we can see what Jeremiah is getting at more fully.

We can only guess at the look of an ancient pottery house. We do have evidence of the look of the wheels, but we have no actual potter’s houses, as far as we know. They would be small, I imagine, perhaps a studio-like space no more than ten feet square, a tiny window, merely a hole in the wall, in one side of the mud-sided walls, a door covered with sheep’s hide on the other wall facing the window. In the room’s center, the wheel, a heavy round stone, attached to a flywheel sunk into the dirt floor, stabilized by a bar with a hole drilled through it, fixed to the fly wheel below by a tenon and held up above the bar to allow the stone to rotate. The potter would sit on a platform while he/she turned the wheel. The apparatus could be either a single or double wheel device, the latter perhaps offering a more stable environment for better, more well made pots. To such a place was Jeremiah urged to go by his God.

He watched the potter at work. The potter was a very important member of the ancient society, since from those hands came objects that every household needed, cups and plates and jars of many sizes to serve the household in its daily round of storing, serving, and eating. The work of the potter would have been well known to all, but this trip to the potter’s house was not intended for browsing the stock or for purchase. Jeremiah was only to watch and learn. He observes the potter at work, noting that on occasion the pot rises without difficulty or error, but at other times, the pot is spoiled (as my weak efforts were!), forcing the artist to smash the clay back into a mound and start again, the wheel spinning faster and faster under the expert guidance of the potter’s stable hands. Soon a lovely shaped form appears, as if by magic, and the potter stops the wheel to see what has been conjured.

Then YHWH speaks the lesson to the prophet. Sometimes, says YHWH, I decide to “pluck up, break down, and destroy,” but if the nation (the pot) “turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the evil I intended to bring on it” (Jer 18:7-8). At other times, says YHWH, I may decide to “build and plant” a nation, but “if it does evil” I will change my mind and decide to do evil against it. And then YHWH springs the bad news to Jeremiah: “Look! I am a potter shaping evil against you. Turn now, all of you, from your evil way; amend your ways and your doings” (Jer 18:11)! Jeremiah was warned at his call when a boy that YHWH was going to do both “plucking up” and “tearing down” as well as “building” (Jer 1:10), and that Jeremiah was going to have a hand in both divine actions. The time for “plucking up” has arrived. But even with this dire warning ringing in their ears, the Judeans are having none of it. “No use! We will follow our own plans,” they shout, and once again they refuse to listen to Jeremiah at all.

Like all biblical prophets (save the nasty Jonah!) Jeremiah is a rank failure. He shouts and cajoles and weeps for forty years or so, and gathers about him only a tiny crowd of followers, hounded by large mobs of furious citizens. So it is with genuine prophets; they are by definition difficult to hear and easy to dismiss as the unpleasant folk that they are. I am, however, today struck by the repetition in this passage of that fascinating idea that YHWH “changes the divine mind.” That is one of the important things we need to learn from Jeremiah’s trip to the potter’s house; just like the potter, God can and does change God’s mind about what has been and will be created.

This Hebrew word, “to change one’s mind” (nicham) occurs in some very interesting places in the Hebrew Bible. Two spring to mind. In Ex 32:14, YHWH “changes the mind” concerning the threat to destroy the calf-building Israelites at the base of the sacred mountain, because YHWH is talked out of that act by the silver- tongued Moses, that same Moses who at the burning bush claimed that he “never could speak well” as part of his vain attempt to escape the call of YHWH. Turns out the old boy spoke well enough to save his evil compatriots from a God bent on destruction!

And then at Job 42:6, the loud mouth from Uz, “changes his mind” in the face of YHWH’s revelation to him of a world far different than Job had ever imagined, a world where the weather and the wild animals, even the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan, were significant parts of a gritty, wild, and wonderful creation of which the arrogant Job was finally only a part. Job does not “repent” in some abject act of contrition (despite the ridiculous translations of the NRSV among others); he changes his mind, that is, he decides he can now live in the world that YHWH reveals, not as YHWH’s enemy, but as YHWH’s companion and co-creator.

But if God does in fact “change the divine mind,” what does that mean for our understanding of the true nature of God? God, it appears, is potter, building up, breaking down, starting anew, spinning and spinning the divine wheel with newness and freshness flying off into the cosmos, making the world new every morning. But perhaps it also means that we are potters, too. Our role is not merely to watch the spinning wheel of God, but to join God in the act of creation, spinning our own wheels, driven by the continual search for justice and righteousness, at times making a clean and beautiful pot, at others an unholy mess of clay that cries out to be molded again.

Thus, I think the song we sing is not completely correct. We are not only clay, but potters, too, and God is not only potter but divine clay, too, and all of our wheels spin and spin, shaping our pots toward the world we want, a place for all to live in peace and harmony, blessed with pots enough to live well and in safety.