08/02/2018: Jars of Clay

The Bible cannot get enough of comparing people to clay jars. The psalmist writes, “I have been forgotten like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel”, and Isaiah says that sinners “will break in pieces like pottery, shattered so mercilessly that among its pieces not a fragment will be found for taking coals from a hearth or scooping water out of a cistern”. In this passage, Paul writes of the gospel as a ‘treasure’, stowed in such a jar in much the same way as the Dead Sea Scrolls were. Greco-Roman archaeologists are forever digging up jars of coins from the first century, buried deep within the ground in times of war and hardship to stow away their precious cargo in hope of imminently better days. Samuel Pepys buried a chest of fancy cheeses during the Great Fire of London for a similar reason.

But, once again, the jars in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians are human. “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”  This is a remarkable commentary on the simultaneous fragility and resilience of the human condition, to live post-Christ is, for Paul, to not only be saved but—sometimes against all the odds—to survive. According to Paul, we really are sacred vessels because, as he writes “we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” To have a body is sacred because, as much as Christ was the incarnation of God, we are all in turn incarnations of his salvation. Every movement, gesture, touch, embrace is divine; no wonder humans fall in love with one another.

Once you embrace the idea that Christ’s salvation has rendered human flesh sacred, there are broadly two ways of responding to this newly sanctified body. You can treat it as an untouchable: preach celibacy, sobriety, abstinence, austerity; keep it clean and on a shelf, never, so to speak, get it out of its box. Avoid sins of the flesh by avoiding the fact that you have flesh whatsoever. Or, you can celebrate the body, by living through it in the knowledge that you share it with Christ. Feel its pleasures in communion with your fellow humans in a dynamic existence of love, and a living communion—after all, God made man in his image. We may be “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed”, but that is because we are the harbingers of multitudes. Or, in the words of Walt Whitman: “I celebrate myself and sing myself. And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”.