History is Clay
Photo by John. M.Elijah on Unsplash
In his winsome, page-turning memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (2022), Bono traces his life story and the way he grew in prominence, effectiveness, and influence. There is nothing of self-serving or boastfulness in his tale, only an account of the ways in which he came to have impactful contact with many of the most powerful world leaders. In his interaction with Mikhail Gorbachev, Bono writes this important eye-catching verdict on the impact of Gorbachev and others like him:
So this had been a moment when Mikhail Gorbachev changed his own history and ours. We discover history doesn’t have to shape us. The world is more malleable than we imagine, and things do not have to be the way they are. History is clay and can be pummeled or punched, corralled or even caressed, into a whole new shape (253).
Mikhail Gorbachev did indeed change the world, surely in ways he had not fully anticipated. The world is indeed malleable, given leadership that is grounded, bold, and caring. Beyond that truism to be derived from the world of Gorbachev, I am especially drawn to Bono’s image of “history is clay,” an appeal to a most important biblical metaphor.
In spite of our sense of fate or our fear of and resistance to change, the world can indeed be changed. In largest sweep the biblical promise is that God is preoccupied with making a new world—a new creation. The most radical promise in the Old Testament is this in Isaiah:
For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—
and their descendants as well.
Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord (Isaiah 65:17-25).
This promise is matched in the New Testament with the final anticipation of the Book of Revelation:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying,
See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away (Revelation 21:1-4).
The newness is the work of the creator God. The old world with its failure can and will be terminated. In the book of Isaiah, the world to end is the one governed by Babylon; in the Book of Revelation it is a world dominated by Rome, a stand-in for ancient Babylon (see Revelation 18). No explanation is given, as we are invited into a world of poetic imagination. Any explanation that could be offered could not be contained in our explanatory categories.
The biblical anticipation, this large portrayal of God’s radical newness, is in fact accomplished through human effort in small gestures, acts, and decisions. In Christian parlance, it is the one-at-a-time work of Jesus to embody that alternative kingdom, so that Jesus deals one-at-a-time with persons in need seemingly beyond rehabilitation. It is his remarkable power to make new that is the amazing plot of much of the gospel narrative. Each of his transformative acts of healing, feeding, teaching, and casting out demons is a generative act in and through which the new world—the new kingdom—emerges. Beyond his own work, moreover, he commanded his followers to do the same work:
Cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” (Luke 10:9)
In the subsequent text of Matthew 25 we get a full index of the work that initiates a new world:
Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me (Matthew 25:34-36).
Jesus and then his followers are at the work of performing, in great specificity, the general vision of the poetic promise of Isaiah and Revelation. The wonder of such specificity, moreover, is that it continues and does not grow old. It does not grow old because the old world of fear, greed, and violence continues its destructive force and must be countered—as Jesus countered—for the sake of restoration, rehabilitation, and beginning again.
The specific imagery of Bono, “history is clay,” is much used in the Bible that speaks of change for the sake of newness. We can cite three uses of the imagery in the pre-exilic prophets. In Isaiah 29:16 the prophet uses the image to identify the sin of Israel in seeking to perform its own plan in the dark, a plan that violates the will of the creator:
You turn things upside down!
Shall the potter be regarded as the clay?
Shall the thing made say of its maker, “He did not make me”;
or the thing formed say of the one who formed it,
“He has no understanding”? (Isaiah 29:16)
Israel, the clay, in defiance challenges the potter (God) by demeaning God and imagining autonomy. The imagery is further employed in two uses of Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 19:1-2, 10 the prophet likens God to a potter and Israel to the clay:
Thus says the Lord of hosts: so will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, so that it can never be mended (Jeremiah 19:10).
Israel has acted in gross disobedience, and God the creator will respond with destructiveness. For all of Israel’s imagined autonomy, the potter God will have the last say, and the last say is one of extreme and wholesale destruction.
In Jeremiah 18 the same imagery exhibits God-potter exercising control over clay-Israel. It can go either way with the potter, as the potter has complete freedom (vv. 7-10). But the verdict of Jeremiah concerns a potter who has lost patience and will “shape evil” and “devise a plan” which in context is defined by Babylon:
Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you, from your evil ways, and amend your ways and your doings (Jeremiah 18:11).
In the exilic and post-exilic texts, the imagery is inverted and made positive. In Lamentations 4:2, the “worth” of Israel is assessed. It is affirmed that in truth Israel is “worth its weight in gold.” In the happenstance of history, however, Israel’s true worth is not recognized as it is treated as nearly worthless, like a clay pot that is readily discarded. Thus the lament opines that Israel’s true worth goes unrecognized in the world of the great powers, perhaps like Latvia or Estonia, too readily disregarded and discounted by the major powers.
The imagery recurs in three texts in later Isaiah. The usage in Isaiah 41:25 contemplates the rise of Persian power that will “trample” Babylon like a potter treads clay. Thus mighty Babylon is made vulnerable to the assault of Persia. The image in 45:9 echoes Isaiah 29:16 as the way in which the pot questions the potter:
Woe to you who strive with your Maker,
earthen vessels with the potter!
Does the clay say to the one who fashions it,
“What are you making”?
or “Your work has no handles”? (Isaiah 45:9)
The pot is pictured as asking questions about the work of the potter. It is not the right or the prerogative of the pot to question the potter. Thus Israel questions YHWH’s intent to deliver exiled Israel by the hand of Cyrus the Persian. It is as though Israel is objecting to YHWH’s intent, a completely inappropriate response. It is the proper role of the clay to keep turning on the wheel at the behest of the potter. So it is Israel’s proper business to receive willingly what YHWH decrees. The matter is reinforced in verse 10 wherein the fetus questions the father or mother in a wholly inappropriate way:
Woe to anyone who says to a father, “What are you begetting?”
or to a woman, “With what are you in labor?” (Isaiah 45:10)
In the imagery of both verses 9 and 10 Israel has forgotten that it is subject to the will of the creator God and has no ground from which to raise objection.
Finally, in Isaiah 64:8, the imagery occurs in a lament wherein Israel is helpless and vulnerable, and has no recourse except to rely on the potter God for wellbeing. The lament suggests that the potter God has been “exceedingly angry,” and that Israel is without any hope at all (v. 9). Its only hope is to rely on the potter-God whose construct it is. These several uses altogether attest that the image of potter-pot can serve in a variety of ways to articulate the proper relationship of God and Israel. The insistence in all of these uses is that YHWH holds initiative for the life and history of Israel, and Israel must receive from YHWH the life and history that YHWH intends.
This same imagery has a dramatic usage in the New Testament. In Paul’s tricky, complex argument about the role of Israel in God’s intention for salvation Paul writes about God’s freedom to show compassion (Romans 9:15) to insist that all of human history depends upon God’s mercy (v. 16). God’s free dispatch of Israel and the community of Christ is according to God’s freedom that is beyond human questioning:
But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use? (Romans 9:20-21).
Again the imagery affirms and insists upon God’s authoritative priority to which human creatures must willingly assent. And in God’s freedom much is possible that otherwise could not be. And now Paul utilizes that imagery to assert that the way of God in human history is supple, pliable, and plastic.
We may be left with two important questions. First, who is it that imagines that human history cannot be “pummeled, punched, corralled or caressed into a wholly new shape?” No doubt there are two such populations. On the one hand, those who doubt that history is pliable are those who are left in hopelessness and despair, who do not believe that history can be changed for the better. On the other hand, the same conclusion may be reached by the strongly advantaged who have a great stake in present world arrangements, and readily can see that any change will mean their loss. But the future openness of history does not depend upon either those lost in despair or those lost in advantage. It depends upon those who are willing and able to be pliable clay that will yield to the purposeful will of the creator God. Bono—and Gorbachev—are clearly among those who are both willing recipients and willing agents of the purposeful change intended by the creator.
The second question concerns the agency of change. There are those who abdicate and resign who can say too easily, “God’s got this,” as though God were a completely isolated and lonely agent. And there are those who easily conclude that “God has no hands but our hands,” as though it were all up to us. Biblical faith is of another ilk and rejects both resignation and human autonomy. Such faith has no doubt that God’s large intention—voiced by the poets—does indeed bend history toward justice, mercy, and compassion. But such faith also affirms that human investment in justice, mercy, and compassion is of utmost urgency. Variously in the tradition we may, as with John Calvin, get an accent on divine governance or, as with John Wesley, get an emphasis on human agency. But biblical faith never chooses between the two, and celebrates the prospect that human insistence may be fully in sync with the abiding purposes of God.
Thus we may savor the verdict of Bono, “history is clay,” and see that his statement comes at the end of a long line of witnesses who have run risks so that the old world may finally be the world that God, the creator, intends. Or to put it in the form of a doxology:
The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah,
and he will reign forever and ever (Revelation 11:15).
The apocalyptic vision is grand and sweeping. It depends on the daily work to bring the vision to actuality.
I may conclude with the wisdom of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1967). From a sociological perspective they write:
It should be clear from the foregoing that the statement that man produces himself in no way implies some sort of Promethean vision of the solitary individual. Man’s self-production is always and of necessity, a social enterprise. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations. None of these formations may be understood as products of man’s biological constitution, which, as indicated, provide only the outer limits for human productivity. Just as it is impossible for man to develop as man in isolation, so it is impossible for man in isolation to produce a human environment (51).
Berger and Luckmann write as sociologists so that their horizon is of necessity limited to human community. A different kind of interpreter might also include the agency of God in the community that may produce a livable environment. In order for such a social enterprise to matter decisively, it aims at transformation. And transformation happens as “the individual switches worlds” (156-57). It is the human work of nurture, education, pastoral attentiveness, and liturgy to empower individual persons to “switch worlds.” In the time of Jesus it was a switch from the world of Rome to that of covenant. In our time it is perhaps to “switch worlds” from the governance of Mammon to the rule of God (Matthew 6:24). Mammon is at work daily in world construction. But so also the community of covenantal justice and mercy is at work world-making. We are invited, along with Bono, to sign on with the pummeling, punching, corralling, and caressing work of a new shape for wellbeing. This is the good work the creator intends. This is the good work that Jesus fully embodied.
Before we finish, we may pause to sing:
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me (Glory to God, 288).
Walter Brueggemann
July 15, 2023
