Treasure in clay jars

On a shelf in an ordinary house in the ancient world sits a plain clay pot, the cheapest thing in the room. No glaze, no ornament, the kind of vessel a potter turned out by the dozen and no one thought twice about. It is exactly the sort of jar a family would choose to hide what they treasured, a few coins, a deed, something precious, precisely because no thief breaking in at night would ever bother to lift a common pot off a shelf. The plainness is the disguise; the cheapness is the safety. And there is something else about a jar like this. Fire it, knock it, let the years chip and crack it, and if there is a lamp burning inside, the cracks do not ruin it. They become the places the light gets out, thin bright lines escaping a vessel that a flawless pot would have kept sealed in the dark. Paul looks at the believers in Corinth, battered and unimpressive and pressed on every side, and tells them what they are: clay jars carrying a treasure, ordinary vessels holding an extraordinary light.

You may catch your reflection after the upheaval and see only a cracked pot, chipped, visibly worse for wear, and conclude that whatever holiness you might once have carried has leaked out through the damage. Paul says you have it exactly backward. The treasure was always meant for clay jars, plain and breakable, and there is a reason: so the surpassing power would obviously be God's and not yours. A flawless vessel takes the credit; a common one points past itself. And the cracks the upheaval left in you are not the failure of the jar, they are where the light gets out. A sealed, perfect pot keeps its lamp hidden; a cracked one shines in thin bright lines no whole vessel could. So you do not have to be unbroken to carry the treasure. You are pressed, Paul admits, on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair. You carry the light precisely as you are, chips and cracks and all, and the glory leaks out through the very places you broke.