At the beginning of our reading this week, we came to a famous image in the prophet Jeremiah, the potter and his clay, a metaphor for God and His people, Jeremiah 18:1-12. It was an image Isaiah also used and Paul takes it up in Romans 9. The general message is that the potter makes whatever he wills from the clay, and, if he is not pleased with the result, has the liberty to smash it down and start over. For Jeremiah this is a symbol of what God is doing with the people of Israel as the Babylonian captivity is beginning. They are being crushed so that God can reform them into something that pleases Him more.
Theologians drawing on Paul’s use of the potter image have seen it as support for a more Calvinistic doctrine of individual predestination, God choosing to do as He please with each human “vessel,” bringing some to redemption and beauty while condemning others to His wrath and destruction. But it’s a mistake in reading both Jeremiah and Romans to interpret the image in individualist terms. In both cases the biblical writers clearly have in mind a lesson about God’s disposition of a group, of the people of Israel in particular.
Moreover, in the Jeremiah text there is a clear indication that a people, a nation, are not mere clay in the Potter’s hands. Their fate very much depends on what they do. So Jeremiah gives us these words from God, verses 7-10:
“If I announce that a certain nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down, and destroyed, but then that nation renounces its evil ways, I will not destroy it as I had planned. And if I announce that I will plant and build up a certain nation or kingdom, but then that nation turns to evil and refuses to obey me, I will not bless it as I said I would.”
So some arbitrary, predestination of individuals by divine fiat seems far from the minds of these Bible writers as they display the potter’s wheel as a picture of God at work. Yet there is here plenty of warning for nations or spiritual communities in regard to how God deals with those who refuse to heed His commands. That’s in fact how the passage ends, with the people saying, “Don’t waste your breath. We will continue to live as we want to, stubbornly following our own evil desires.”
With a little trepidation, I’m going to hazard the guess that God may be currently doing a little crushing and reshaping of His people in our country. This recent article talks about the decline of Christianity among white Americans. And we have long known the geographical center of the bulk of Christian believers has moved east and into the southern hemisphere. I see the divine hand remolding His church, partly in response to the unfaithfulness, injustice, and complacency of western white Christians.
What’s the good news? Just that God promises grace to those who repent and renounce evil ways. God won’t throw us away, but reshape us into something better than we’ve been. As I’ll also say in the sermon this weekend, Jesus Christ is the way He does that. Jesus crushed for sins, rises again to reform us into the human beings God means us to be.