Clay Pots

Copyright © 2005 by Ralph Williams. All rights reserved.

When Mack came into the house, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his change. Quickly, he sorted through the coins and extracted two half dollars and dropped them into a jar by the door. “My wife’s spending money,” he commented. “Been doing it for a while.” Mack’s habit of dropping half dollars into a jar soon added up to quite a stash. Millie wasn’t spending the half dollars, but she enjoyed watching them mount up in the jar. Soon the quart jar was retired in favor of a gallon, and that too filled up. Another was put in its place, and the first was hidden.

Mack and Millie decided it was time to stop when they had 7 jars full of half dollars hidden here and there about the property. They had to keep moving them, and every time they left home, they had to find new hiding places. They were afraid to tell anyone about them, for fear they would all be taken.

They told me this story one time when I stayed the evening in their home. They were laughing at themselves. “What sort of fool would keep several hundred dollars around the house in glass jars?” Mack asked.

Mack came by it honestly. He had been one of that generation of Arkansas farmers who didn’t trust banks. You still hear tales about them. Mack used mules long after everyone else was farming with tractors. Occasionally, he would wander into the tractor dealership, but they had long since given up on persuading him to take out a loan and buy one, like everyone else.

One day, he went into town and stopped by one of the tractor dealerships. He was looking over the largest and most expensive combine on the lot when the salesman noticed him. He started out, then saw it was Mack, waved and went back inside. Mack went over to the other dealer, and bought his biggest and best instead. When they started to fill out the finance papers, he reached into his pocket and pulled out enough cash to pay for it on the spot. He had kept it at home, probably hidden in a jar.

We hear tales about them occasionally. The old lady whose mattress is stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. The fellow who has shoe boxes full of cash buried all over his yard. Crackpots. People begging to be robbed. Backward folk.

Paul uses a similar illustration in his second letter to the Corinthians. Speaking of preaching the gospel, he says, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels....”

Treasure in clay pots...

Just as shoe boxes and glass jars are common items in homes in America today, clay pots were the commonest sort of storage in the ancient world. Look in ancient tombs around the world, and you will find clay pots. From Egypt to Arizona, archeologists can tell you the era the tomb came from and the sort of people who did the burying, by looking at the kind of clay pots they find. In the ancient world they used them for keeping food and drink and seeds and all sorts of other things. But treasure?

Imagine you are a thief in the first century. You gain entrance to the house. How hard will it be to smash clay jars and remove their contents? To turn them upside-down, or to lift the lid and feel down inside them? Pretty easy, right? So who would keep treasure in clay pots?

God would.

God always has.

Not literally. Paul is talking about himself and his fellow evangelists and apostles. Ordinary people with ordinary problems. People who sinned and suffered like everyone else.

Look at the choices Christ made for apostles.

•     A tax collector.

•     A terrorist.

•     Two brothers whose temper was so legendary, he called them the sons of thunder.

•     One disciple betrayed him.

•     Another denied him three times.

Consider the people that God has chosen, throughought history.