Today the symbolic actions of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 18:1‑6) announce the creative intention of God, the divine potter, to collapse the misshapen and useless clay back to its primitive form and start over again in forming the people of Israel, and by extension, forming us. The Gospel today (Matthew 13:47‑53) concludes Matthew’s main section about the reign of God (Chapters 11 to 13). In both readings we find God’s merciful way of starting over again. In the end, Jesus suggests that life is like a storeroom. It is full of new things as well as the old.
Biblical religion is generally marked by a forward vision moving towards a new future. It never consecrates a past golden age but keeps moving towards its Messianic age. Along the way, Israel took monumental leaps, changes that were required by cultural or national crises: the Philistine threat that led to the unification of the people into a one nation; or the one temple system established under David and Solomon. Other changes were needed to renew and purify the people, as Jeremiah suggested under the prophetic symbol of God as a potter molding clay jars: Whenever the vessel that the potter was making turned out badly, he tried again, making of the clay another vessel of whatever sort he pleased.
God is the divine potter who asks, “Can I not do to you as this potter has done?” There is the continuity. The clay is the same and the potter is the same. Yet all transitions are difficult. They can seem as drastic and cruel as the gospel parable of the dragnet that catches both worthwhile fishes and useless ones. In the fierce ordeal, some are hurled into the fiery furnace. Yet, this is not the end of Jesus’ sermon. He adds one final parable, the storeroom from which “the head of the household…can bring forth…both the new and the old.” At all transitional moments in our personal life, or our church, or our national existence, we need to be courageous to suffer through the change, and clear-sighted enough to recognize the will of God. His glorious presence is in the new stage along the way, safeguarding tradition and providing genuine continuity with the past.
The parable of the dragnet cast into the sea suggests that at the end of time there will be a separation of the good from the wicked. However, this is GOD’s work, and it will happen at the end of time. We often make the mistake of thinking that it is OUR work and that it should happen in the course of OUR time. Even now, we can tend to decide who is good and who is bad, here and now, and treating people in the light of that judgement. Yet, when we make such a judgement, we are prone to getting it wrong. We see the good in ourselves more easily than the good in others; and the bad in others more easily than the bad in ourselves. We also fail to appreciate that people can change for the better, like the misshapen pot, with God’s help.
The image of God as the potter in today’s reading suggests that God can take what comes out wrong in our lives and reshape it into something good. We are all a work in progress. God may have begun a good work in us, but God has yet to bring it to completion. Judgement belongs to God at the end of time, and the judging God is also the creator God who is constantly at work to bring good out of evil and new life out of what has come out wrong. As humans, we should be very slow to take on God’s work of separating the good from the evil. As Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, “Do not pronounce judgement before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness.”
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!