Today’s appointed text is a classic, a Lenten standard. The story of Jeremiah at the potter’s house. It reminds me of another classic, one we will read this coming Sunday, the third Sunday in Lent: the story of Jesus cleansing the temple, his Father’s house.
In the first story, the prophet sees what he had to see to hear the Word of the Lord. In the second, the Word of the Lord hears the sounds of a market and sees to it that the voiceless are given room to pray.
We are too familiar with these stories, too comfortable in their presence. They are meant, as all the Scriptures are, to uproot and overturn us, to flip the tables of our presumptions and tightly-held convictions, driving out what conventional wisdom tells us must be true about right and wrong, righteousness and sin, faith and the sovereignty of God. They are meant to drive or draw us toward repent, turning us toward Christ, turning us into Christ. So come, Holy Spirit, make us new!
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We understand nothing of Jeremiah's book if we forget its opening line: “The words of Jeremiah… to whom the Word of the Lord came” (Jer. 1.1-2). What the book gives us are the words stirred up in the prophet by the Word who is the form and content, figure and ground, source, guide, and goal of prophecy. Reading this story, we are witnessing the after-shocks, the trace effects of the impact Jesus, the Word, has had on Jeremiah's consciousness.
“Come, go down to the potter’s house..." Jeremiah obeys, putting his body where it has to be for his heart to see and hear the Lord. He sees the potter "working at his wheel." He sees a vessel "marred" in the potter's hand. He sees it "reworked into another vessel." He sees that the potter is pleased with the outcome of his work. Then, only then, he hears the Word of the Lord: "Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”
The same, of course, is true of us. True as it may be that God is omnipresent, and that any place might be a gate of heaven, we must become present to such a place to know it and to know the truth and goodness the Lord wants to give us then and there. We must bring our bodies to the place where the Lord can be heard and seen, where his goodness can be tasted.
"Religion is spirituality with rigor," Nick Cave says. And we need that rigor, because without it our soul atrophies and we lose heart. So: keep coming to church, pray the offices, fast, give alms to the poor, seek spiritual direction, build an altar in your home, make pilgrimage—do whatever you have to do in order to keep the eyes of your heart open to and set upon God, the All-in-All, altogether lovely. The Father is ever and always speaking, ever and always sharing the same Word. But we are not always listening. And the heart cannot hear what the body does not allow it to heart.
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“Come, let us make plots against Jeremiah..." Jeremiah learns—and so teaches us—that obedience does not always lead to success and hearing the Lord does not always mean we will be heard or seen rightly by others. The people rebel, at least their leaders do, and seek to shut Jeremiah up and down. They bring charges against him, convinced they have no need of his voice. It’s not as if there aren't other prophets, other priests, other elders, they say.
In distress, Jeremiah falls to prayer:
Give heed to me, O Lord, and listen to what my adversaries say! Is evil a recompense for good? Yet they have dug a pit for my life. Remember how I stood before you to speak good for them, to turn away your wrath from them.
The lectionary reading ends right there, with what seems to be a promise of intercession. But the prayer itself continues and becomes something terrible:
Therefore give their children over to famine; hurl them out to the power of the sword; let their wives become childless and widowed. May their men meet death by pestilence, their youths be slain by the sword in battle. May a cry be heard from their houses when you bring the marauder suddenly upon them! For they have dug a pit to catch me and laid snares for my feet. Yet you, O Lord, know all their plotting to kill me. Do not forgive their iniquity; do not blot out their sin from your sight. Let them be tripped up before you; deal with them while you are angry.
It's not wrong for Jeremiah to voice this prayer, of course. Terrible as they are, these desires need to be brought to speech—precisely in order to be healed. Through the words of this prayer, the Spirit is drawing out the poison, washing out the wound, so that the prophet can be healed.
Truth be told, these are not truly desires anyway. They are the infections and bruisings of desire. The pain of Jeremiah’s sorrows has made his heart sick. so his cries to God cannot help but be swollen, oozing, foul, inflamed, his words pitching and scattering like livestock and moneychangers in the temple courts.
He is not calculating revenge, coldly seeking retribution. He is crying out in a fiery anguish, desperate to be seen, to be heard. He says he wants God to be angry, but what he really wants is for God to be angry for him, to be moved by what he's being made to suffer, to care that he is in trouble even if he cannot or will not deliver him from it.
The fevered honesty of that prayer delivers Jeremiah to the truth. He had gone down to the potter's house thinking himself a watcher, an observer, no more than a witness to the shaping of Israel's fate on the wheel of the Lord's designs. But now he finds he is himself the vessel marred in the potter's hands. Suddenly, he knows he is the one on the wheel, under the Lord's hand, misshaped by his pain, his fear of death, his unreadiness for mercy. With the words of his own prayer still ringing in his ears, he remembers the first words the Lord had spoken to him so long ago: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you... [and] I have put my words in your mouth..." (Jer. 1.5,10).
Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet, the prophet of lost causes. His pain is deep and storied. Not only did he meet throughout his life with rejection on every hand, he was born into trouble, one of a long line of marginalized and exiled priests in Anathoth. Even his call was at times a burden, a misery for him. Now, all of that pain bursts through him into prayer. What he feels as anger is in fact a longing, the need to be whole, to be at peace, and to be loved forcing itself into full consciousness through his cries.
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The potter that Jeremiah saw reworked his ruined pot into another vessel. Origen sees in these words the promise of resurrection: though we fall through our own stubbornness and fear from the potter's hand and are undone, broken on the ground, dust returning to dust, the Lord always takes us up again and makes us right again.
This, then, is the Word of the Lord for us. Our pain, our fear of death, our unreadiness for mercy misshapes us, mars our image. Yet Jesus keeps us on the wheel, saturating us with the clean water of the Spirit. We can trust him. We can trust ourselves to him. His mercy is inexhaustible. His creativity is endless. His delight in us never-ending. We are not the potter, no more than we are detached observers of the potter's craft. We are the clay, the earthen vessels of his making. He has formed us so that he can fill us with himself, so that his life in us can be poured out for the life of the world.
Remember this this Lent: Repentance, healing, and what the prayerbook calls amendment of life are necessary because we are not yet what we long to be, not yet what others need us to be. And repentance, healing, and amendment of life are possible because the Lord never turns in disgust from us, never gives up on our remaking, never throws us away. Always, always, always—no matter what, no matter what—the potter takes us up again and makes us new and better than new. In his house, there are no broken vessels.
Thank you for these words. So often pain is disguised as anger but it can be a cry to be heard and loved. Thank you for revealing the hope in this passage.
This is so well said and so healing and freeing for a person who might need to pour out their rage. When asked what my favorite book was in a creative writing class I said Jeremiah. What a great story of a man’s interactions with God. Thank you for your wise words.