Shaped by Testing
Scriptures: Jeremiah 18:1-6, Matthew 4:1-11
We watched a few minutes of my Dad working at the wheel during the children’s time. It’s a hobby he became interested in many years ago, at first taking lessons and practicing on a wheel at a local community centre. Eventually he got his own wheel and set up a little pottery workshop in his basement. It’s been an important creative outlet for him, and continues to be now in his retirement. And he makes some beautiful pieces. We have a small but growing collection of pottery dishware that Dad has made for us. A set of serving bowls, a teapot, a couple of mugs with a creamer and sugar bowl. We love them.
But let me tell you – getting finished products out of that guy is not easy! Since it’s not a livelihood for him, production really isn’t his top concern. Dad can spend hours working and re-working a particular piece – making small adjustments, correcting tiny faults, and often – like he did on the video, just breaking something down and starting again. It takes a lot before he’s ready to send a piece off to be fired. And most of the time, getting to that stage isn’t really the point. As I watch him do this, it seems more about the joy of forming and reforming. Getting lost in the creative process, giving himself over to a craft that demands the whole of his creativity and attention.
I’m wired a little differently, I think. A little more oriented to productivity and having something to show for the work. And my small efforts at making or building stuff show it – I’m more ready to say “good enough” and calling it done, even if later I’ll wish that I spent more time getting it just right.
But as Jeremiah’s visit to the potter’s house makes clear, God doesn’t seem so concerned about displaying a final and unchangeable finished product either. In fact, the whole point of the encounter in Jeremiah 18 is to remind Jeremiah – and so God’s people – that God’s work in their lives is ongoing. In this case, it’s a warning to repent and turn from evil. If we read ahead a little further into the chapter, God says – look at how the potter can take a project, break it down, and start shaping it again. I may have planned to build you up and make you prosper in the form you are now, but if you do wrong and stop listening to my voice I can still change course and start over with you again. And in the same way, in my mercy I can tend and nurture and re-work for good any that turn back to me.
If God is a potter, it doesn’t seem like the kiln gets used all that often. Once you fire a piece, there’s no going back. It is what it is, both its beauty and its flaws. But this potter works and re-works. Carefully shaping and tending, drawing those walls up higher and thinner, adding contour and detail. Calling the beauty out of the rough clay, the human miracle from the dust of the earth. And this work continues. God’s creations don’t sit on the shelf for display. They are constantly growing into themselves as the master’s hand touches the material of our lives.
This image of the potter, and of being shaped and called like clay, is so appropriate to the season of Lent that we’ve begun. This season of approach and preparation for the cross of Christ and the celebration of Easter. It’s a reminder that we are indeed made from the earth, and from the earth we will return. We live mortal lives as created beings. We live and we will die. Our times come and go. And we find the truest expression of our humanity in one who embraced this mortality and offered himself even to the point of death.
But the clay is also an image of possibility and renewal as we let go of the tight hold we keep on ourselves. The potter remains at work, shaping and forming again and again. Calling us towards beauty and healing and life – even when we have been smashed or crushed or punctured or broken. Revealing miracles of resurrection that we could not have anticipated from our places of devastation. These weeks of Lent are about the craft of our souls. Turning our attention away from what we produce to who we become. Away from what’s put on the shelf to what’s being shaped inside.
The image of the potter and the clay will stay with us through these weeks of Lenten journey with Jesus to the cross. But today we begin with Jesus at an earlier point in the gospel story. Out in the wilderness, in a desert of hunger and loneliness and doubt. And with the question of what it might mean to be shaped by testing.
The story of Jesus’ temptations in the desert is so closely tied to his experience of baptism in the Jordan, which comes immediately before. He has this beautiful moment of affirmation in the water, with the sky opening and the Spirit descending on him like a dove, and the voice from heaven: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3:17).
And then the very next words: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” (Mt 4:1). Whatever it might mean to be the beloved son of God, it apparently doesn’t include a guarantee of comfort and ease. In fact, it seems to begin with this experience of deprivation and self-examination. Not to mention a few hard conversations with an adversary willing to play on all of Jesus’ vulnerabilities.
Notice how the tempter frames the first two tests: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread…” (4:3). And “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down…” (4:6). Isn’t that interesting. The tempter starts from the very place of affirmation that Jesus just received in the river. And suddenly those beautiful words from heaven begin to twist and contort. The affirmation becomes a defence. The gift of blessing becomes an entitlement.
I’m going to guess that this actually happens to us a fair amount. Something that’s good and true and life-giving gets a little twist and suddenly we’re being tugged in a different direction. And when it starts with something true, it’s hard to catch the ugly turn. There was a Catholic scholar and priest named Ivan Illych who spent much of his life ministering in settings of urban poverty. And he liked to say that “the corruption of the best is the worst.” The most dangerous temptations are those that take God’s good gifts and spin them in destructive directions.
For Jesus, the temptation is to take that affirmation of identity as the beloved son of God, and leverage it for his own ends. Nourishment, protection, power. It’s the temptation to move in the opposite direction of the hymn that Paul quotes in Philippians 2 when he says: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.” Not even for understandable reasons. Not even if you figure the world would be better off with the son of God as its benevolent dictator. The mind that was in Christ Jesus recognizes that this kind of grasping is not what it means to be a child of God.
We’re calling today’s theme “Shaped by Testing,” and I want to consider that way of describing this story for a moment. We often talk about the temptations of Jesus in the desert – I’ve been using that language already. Matthew describes how Jesus was sent into the desert to be tempted. And he even names the devil as the Tempter. We could also talk about Jesus’ trials, perhaps. But our title has to do with testing. What opens up when we think of Jesus’ experience as a test?
The first context that probably comes to mind for most of us is school. A test is an assessment tool. It’s a way for teachers to figure out what has actually been learned. And for most students, tests become a pretty important incentive for actually doing the learning. So we often think of tests in terms of passing or failing. In terms of judgment, perhaps. You have been tested and found wanting.
Interestingly, many educational settings are moving away from testing as a primary assessment tool. We know that tests don’t always demonstrate the learning that has happened. Sometimes all they show is which students are good at writing tests. There’s a movement in education towards project-based assessment. Forget about the test with its time-pressures and high-stress environment. Better to let students demonstrate what they’ve learned in a broader way through an integrative learning opportunity.
But in any case, the school setting is not the only place where we use the language of testing. And here I have to give credit to Cynthia, who reminded me of this as we were planning for this service. We also talk about tests as experiments. I’m going to test a hypothesis here. Or we have a health issue and our doctor orders some tests to figure out what’s going on. We sometimes test an idea or a plan with other people. Test the waters, as it were, to see how a new direction might land. Or we might be careful to test our footing to make sure we don’t slip on a patch of ice. When we talk about testing in these ways it’s more about exploration. Trying something out. Investigating options as we hopefully come closer to a decision or to the truth of the matter.
This kind of testing is not so much about passing or failing. It’s more about shaping direction. And it can change and develop over time. It’s more like way a potter works at the wheel. Ok, let’s see what happens if we pull the base out a bit here. A little more, a little more, uh oh – that’s getting to be too much. Let’s try narrowing the neck a bit – does that get us to the shape we want? What about a little ornament on this side – a stripe around the middle.
I can imagine Jesus’ experience in the desert in this kind of way too. What does it mean to be the beloved son of God? How do I live with this calling and identity? With the gifts and the possibilities I have been given? In the tests that Jesus is presented with, he does a bit of experimenting. Tests his footing on one kind of ground and then another. Ok, what if I were to turn these stones to bread? What if I did call on a company of angels? What if I were a king like other kings, only the greatest of them all? But Jesus recognized that none of those terrains would bear the truth of his calling. He recognized that equality with God is not something to be exploited. And he chose instead the path of human likeness – humbling himself to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Sometimes our testing of direction lets us make a small adjustment and keep going with the project. Other times we realize that we’re on the wrong track altogether, and we need to start over. Sometimes the vessel breaks or collapses or thins out so much we can’t go on the way that we were.
I don’t know about you, but I kind of felt my stomach hit the floor when Dad’s tool slipped and the vase he was making got ruined. It’s hard to watch something get damaged like that. Something that has been fashioned with such patience and care. Part of this story of testing is acknowledging that we’ll get hit hard sometimes. In some cases because of mistakes we’ve made or failures we can point to. And in others by circumstances beyond our control. We will be wounded, cracked, crushed. By loss, by grief, by pain. We will feel like disfigured vessels, a shadow of our former selves, unable to imagine a way back. These are real experiences of testing, and we will all have them. Like Jesus, we will ask ourselves: what does it mean that I am a beloved child of God? Do I still have a future? Can I still trust in the hands of the potter?
Because the truth is that the beautiful affirmation offered to Jesus in the Jordan is extended to each one of us, too. You are a beloved child of God. With you, I am well pleased. And the shaping and testing of that identity is the work of our whole lives. What does it mean to be formed in the image of God? To be shaped by God’s patient work in and on us? To humble ourselves as clay in the hands of the potter?
What it meant for Jesus was a road that led to the cross, to the offering of his life in love for the world. But even here in the desert, at the beginning of this road, we also see what comes next. The vessel cut and broken, collapsed and lifeless, returned as dust to the earth – is raised again to a shape of wonder and delight. The walls of the vase rising from the lifeless ball of clay, growing and spreading outwards in marvelous renewal, in unaccountable beauty. Opening to heaven yet grounded in earth. “Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done” (Jer. 18:6)? Resurrection! A future even through our wounds, our holes, our mistakes, our failures, our crushing defeats. Skilled and patient hands that shape us again in old and new ways, stirring that divine image in us that has never gone out.
Shaped by testing as we discover what it means to be called beloved children of God. Shaped by testing as we try our footing in the footsteps of Jesus on his journey to the cross. Shaped by testing as clay is formed in the hands of the master. “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words” (Jer. 18:2).
Amen.