The Christian Teachers’ Guild Quiet Morning At the Ashram - 19 May 1963

I have taken the Parable of the Potter for meditation this morning. None of the parables of the Old Testament has a more direct and personal appeal to us than this parable of Jeremiah about his visit to the potter’s house. Originally the parable was meant to teach a lesson to the people of Israel, at a certain stage in their history. But it has a message for all at all times. The Old Testament prophets were first of all messengers to their own times, but they also have a message to the people of every age. We may look upon this parable as a lens through which God is to be seen. He is the unchanging God of persons as well as of people in whose hands are all our ways, and with whom we all have to do.

Let us look at the parable now. First, let us try to understand what it is that was occupying the prophet’s mind, when he went to the potter’s house. Jeremiah prophesied during the time of the invasion of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. The people of Israel have turned away from God. They had at one time entered into an agreement with God to obey his laws, and God on his part would guide and protect them. But now they have broken away from God’s laws and have turned defiantly to their own ways. As a result of this God has given them over to their enemies. The King of Babylon has conquered Jerusalem and taken the people as captives. These external and material evils that have come upon them are as nothing in comparison to their spiritual apostasy. They have now become unfit to be the instrument of carrying out God’s purpose towards other nations. Having now started on their life of disobedience to God, they were unable to reverse their direction of life. It looks as if there is no hope for the nation. Jeremiah is disheartened and voiceless. In that situation we can expect only worse things to happen. The nation can have no future except one of successive disasters and ultimate extinction. These were the thoughts that were occupying the prophet’s mind, and he had a gloomy picture of the future of Israel.

But God guided Jeremiah to go down to the potter’s shop and watch the potter at his work. There he saw something that scattered his gloom and restored his confidence. What he saw at the potter’s shop gave him a message for the nation. If only they had paid attention to it the entire course of the people’s history would have changed – and probably the history of the whole world would be different. What did Jeremiah see in the potter’s house? He saw the whirling wheel, and the directing hand, creating in clay the potter’s thoughts. Vessel after vessel was swiftly fashioned and laid aside to be sun baked and then distributed for use. The lifeless object, the clay, seemed to live under the potter’s power, to shape into forms of beauty and usefulness. Jeremiah was fascinated by the objects turned out. As he stood gazing at them there was something that happened which attracted his attention. The potter, while rotating the wheel, suddenly stopped rotating. Why? What has happened? The potter has found in the clay some particles or some bad mixture which he was sure should not be allowed to go into the vessels he was making. So he stops rotating the wheel, crumbles up the vessel, which was in the process of being made, removes the objectionable particles, kneads it into plasticity again, and restarts rotating the wheel. Now that same vessel, which had in it the defective material, has been turned into a beautiful vessel.

This was a parable in deeds not in words, for there was no conversation between the potter and his strange visitor. Jeremiah just stood there and watched and went away. He did not even speak a word to the potter. He did not buy any vessel from him. The operations of the potter had been teaching him profound lessons. In the material handled by the potter, and in the way they were manufactured by him Jeremiah saw a symbolic representation of great and central truths. What were the lessons brought home to him by the things he saw?

1. First of all there is the clay. It is the raw material with which the potter works – the stuff of which each vessel, no matter what its shape may be, is composed. There resides in it the promise of becoming an object of usefulness or of beauty, once it has been subjected to the process of manufacture.

Our lives possess a similar capacity. There are possibilities in us, that admit of being realised. Out of the undeveloped material there can be produced forms and modes of personality of the most diverse kinds. Like clay we yield to treatment. Our natures are plastic. Powers of body and mind and will, abilities of a physical, intellectual and a moral order manifest themselves. Character expresses itself, and more and more tends to stereotype itself on settled lines, and to harden into a permanent shape. Whereas in the early period there was little by which to distinguish one life from another, in the later stages, peculiarities assert themselves, and differences are conspicuous. We display our individuality not only by the features of our face, our height, our speech, our manner of walking, but in a multitude of characteristic ways, definable in some cases, but in others too subtle to be explained in words.

Like clay we yield to treatment. Our natures are plastic. But to compare the human life of ours to clay is not to state the whole truth about it. For clay is a substance that is passive and inanimate. But God has given us freedom. No doubt the freedom given to men is limited in its range. However it is an important factor in the determination of our behaviour within a certain compass. Secondly, God has given us the power of reasoning – that divine endowment whereby we are able to think and construct a theory of the universe for ourselves and plan what we should do. Then again we are susceptible to emotions and affections. Desires are kindled in us, hopes and fears sway us, our hearts know the pleasures of satisfaction and the pain of disappointment.

Yet while between man and clay there is this great difference, they resemble one another in a certain respect; and it was that resemblance that came home to the prophet’s mind. The point of resemblance is this: Both man and clay are subject alike to effect being produced on them by a cause outside themselves. Both man and clay allow themselves to be moulded. We know this about ourselves. Our lives do not consist of a series of experiences which we determine beforehand. Everything that happens to us is not according to what we had planned and wished for ourselves. Things happen to us bringing unexpected joys or unlooked for sorrows. Events take place in whose initiation and accomplishment we had no part. Perhaps we are apt to forget this fact about the circumstances of our lives. In the lives of all of us events take place quite unexpectedly. When they are ordinary incidents they fail to impress us, but when any great events take place – any event which has serious consequences to us and ours, it transforms our whole outlook. Then we know that God has asserted his power in our lives and we realise that in a true sense we are clay.

The second thing that arrests our attention as we stand beside the prophet, and watch the potter at his work, is his wheel. The clay is set on the wheel and the wheel moves with rapid revolutions. Up from its whirling centre there emerges the vessel growing into definite shape moment by moment. The wheel is an indispensable element in the craft of the potter. Its rotations are necessary to the production of the ware which he aims at manufacturing. The wheel is life itself, the circumstances upon which our characters are fashioned. Circumstances of our lives – the events that happen to us. How often we have complained about the circumstances of our lives, about the things that happen to us. How ruthlessly again and again they seem to deal with us. Yet as the clay remains nothing but shapeless stuff till it is placed upon the wheel, as the wheel with its swift revolutions is essential to the process of making an earthen vessel, so life with its ordeals and losses and perplexing events, is essential to the formation and fashioning of the character of men. We realise how these events are necessary for the development of our character – events which we welcome and those we do not always welcome; events which please us, as well as those which seem to hurt us. But when we have to go through any painful experience we protest against it. We fail to realise the value of such an experience to our lives. God seeks to mould us and shape our lives by the events that happen to us. The wheel is necessary to bring the clay into shape.

There is another object that meets our eyes as we watch with the prophet. The wheel does not move by itself. Its rotations are controlled by the potter. The strain and stress to which the clay is subjected as it swirls round and round , and rises up in the form of a vase or a cup, like a plant growing from its roots, are directed by him. No vessel in that booth made itself or was made by the wheel. One and all took their shape and were moulded after their respective patterns under the skilled and experienced hand of the potter.

The hand of the potter is an emblem of the hand of God. We are apt to think exclusively of the wheel and to ignore the hand. But it is God who affects us with his providence and seeks to mould us for his own purposes. The things that befall us, and from the occurrence of which we shrink, the ordeals to which we are exposed, the disappointments that fill us with sorrow are all ordained by his wisdom and love. And such is His grace that when by our folly or rebelliousness we mar His work He is willing to take us again and refashion us with long suffering and patience.

Shall we not seek to submit ourselves anew to the will of God, and lend ourselves to the discipline and control of Him who delights in mercy? The hand that guides our destiny is no iron hand of relentless force. It is never violent in its smiting as we are sometimes tempted to think. Its actions have been revealed to the eyes of men in the hand of Jesus Christ. It is the hand that took hold of a blind man and led him out to be healed. It is the hand that was stretched out to rescue a sinking disciple. It is the hand that was laid upon little children. It is that hand which gives us the changing experiences of our earthly lot, and which gives and withholds in the case of each of us.

Let us submit ourselves to God’s will afresh. Let us pray that he may take us and mould us as He will that we become vessels meet for his service. The lesson that Jeremiah learnt was that the nation of Israel would be given a second chance. Nations and individuals are given a second chance. Israel was fashioned through war, pestilence, famine and exile. Through the circumstances of our lives He refashions us.