The Jar of Clay

May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Despite having lived a comparatively colourful life, Until a few months ago, I had never seen a dead body. 

This was not, I hasten to reassure you, the culmination of a longed for ambition - A desperate wish, listed somewhere between ‘scale Machu Picchu’ and ‘swim with Dolphins.’ 

No, this body belonged to someone I had known and loved. An Irish friend - who - in the tradition of that rather wise and humane culture - had been laid out, on the evening before her funeral,  in a ritual called ‘the repose.’ 

The repose means - instead of being spirited away, as it so often is in England - the body is presented, before burial, for anyone who wishes to see it.  And many do. Some, make the pilgrimage in their best clothes, and with a formal manner, some drop by with their shopping on the way home. They stand around the deceased, and are able to touch her, weep over her. Bid her farewell. 

Encountering the dead can be something of a shock. But, more than anything else, it’s a shock of recognition. Here is the familiar face, the shape, the clothes - all the elements that made up that vibrant, creative person - all perfectly identifiable. But something is missing. 

‘Well, obviously’ you might reply. ‘The life is missing. What did you expect?’

But ‘what did you expect’ is a useful question. What we expect, is that when we look into a human face - even one rendered unconscious - we will detect, however faintly, an essence of the vivid. The quick. It’s a signal so subtle that Tintoretto, say - or Rembrandt - could render it with just a flick of white paint  into the dead black of a human eye. 

It occurs to me that W.H Auden may have had today’s reading somewhere in his mind when he wrote, in the poem,  ‘In Memory of W.B Yeats.’ 

‘Let the Irish vessel lie, emptied of its poetry.’

For the time that our bodies ‘contain’ - for want of a better word - our lives, our spirits - then the body and the self seem utterly indivisible. Only when the body is emptied of that spirit - only when the treasure is removed, do we see what has been there all along. The jar of clay.’ 

Paul’s metaphor is characteristically blunt and compelling. 

He is conscripting all of his considerable gifts as a writer, to upbraid the people of Corinth, after, what he considers, a slip in the league tables of the early Christian church.  

In fact, these letters to the Corinthians share a similar tone with the furious notes pinned backstage by a theatre director - who has left the play in splendid shape - only to return a few weeks later to find the playing baggy and self-indulgent, and an extra six minutes added to the running time. 

‘Corinth, I expected better of you.’ 

But Paul is showing us, as he so often does, his human side. Frustration, irritation, grandstanding… All the mortal weaknesses, employed in the service of that one divine and eternal strength - The spirit - The treasure, which he urges us to attribute - ‘so that the light of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.’

While I was writing this sermon, I was aware of a small clay pot that sits on my desk. It doesn’t contain treasure - in fact, the last time I looked, it contained blu-tack and some stamps - but it’s a beautiful, crude, hand wrought object - in fact, you can see the marks of the thumb that pulled it into shape - and looking at it helped me appreciate the vessel Paul chose to make his point - a wineskin, or a wooden barrel doesn’t carry anything like the same fragility or earthiness. 

But there are questions too. If you have treasure to impart - and particularly the treasure of the spirit - the ‘light shining out of darkness’ - why place it in something so humble and obtuse in the first place? 

Paul’s answer is that the body provides a kind of opposite to the spirit. It serves to remind us that we are mortal, earthbound - ‘always being given up to death’ 
A fact, the Corinthians had obviously forgotten - ‘proclaiming themselves,’ as he accuses them, rather than Christ - who - and this is the centre of Paul’s point - was the one who gave them the power to proclaim in the first place.  

But take away the element of reproval, and something more tender could be revealed. 

Is it possible that we were made like this - tethered to the ground by flesh and blood, and subject to injury, and damage, and ultimately destruction - for a very important reason? 

We’re told that we were created in God’s own image - but couldn’t he have chosen any form? 

We might have been blithe spirits like Ariel, or Unicorns, or clouds of incense. Far better at exalting Him than these aching, creaking vessels - slaves to their selfish appetites and driving needs? 

The parts of the Gospel which have always moved me the most, are those in which Our Lord fully experiences the all too human limits of his earthly body. 

He weeps when he learns of the death of his friend. Just as I wept over mine in Ireland. Even though he knows that, through the miracle of faith, he will raise him from the dead - he weeps. 

He prays - just as I do - that something terrible might pass from him. That just this once, he might be spared the suffering. 

Could it be that our finite, fragile, imperfect selves are beloved of God, precisely because they are imperfect and fragile? That our limitations, our ordinariness - our humanity - is, in fact, the very point of us? 

How then, are we supposed to appreciate the treasure we’ve been invested with? How can something so earthbound contemplate the infinite and the divine? Does the pot understand the jam? Does the glass comprehend the Champagne? 

Perhaps the answer to that lies in the one part of the treasure that we seem to be able to control. The imagination.   

We - the earthbound, common-or-garden clay jars - can also sing, and compose. We can write, and paint, and read, and dream. 

In spite of being the prisoner of our allotted years, in spite of being subject to the laws of atrophy and decay - we possess an element which exists outside of time, and which can travel in infinite directions. 

I wince with my body when I consider the lashes, the thorns, the weight of the cross. But it is my imagination which greets the risen Christ at the opening of the tomb. 

It may be a cognitive dissonance to accept that we are part earth, part air, part mortal, part immortal - but I fear it’s the only way we can even begin to understand the completeness of God. 

And yes, I know that’s an impossible task. I don’t expect anyone in this room to be surprised when I remind you that to be a Christian is to be comfortable - at the very least - with the concept of failure. 

When I saw my friend’s body laid out in Dublin, I gave way to despair. I felt desolate.

I told her son - whose suffering I was desperate to mitigate, somehow - that, for what it’s worth, I believe that the spirit lives somehow - that it cannot be extinguished. 

‘I hope that’s true’ he said. 

Sometimes hope is all we have. But hope is a part of the imagination - the light shining out of darkness. It’s a miracle that we can imagine several outcomes and invest in one above all others. That we carry death in the body - but also life. 

We are clay jars. That is true. But we contain treasure. That is also true. 

Life and death. Suffering and transformation. Earth and spirit. We have an example in all of this - a shining light who was also man - and in the fullness of His life - made manifest the extraordinary nature of God. 

If only we - earthbound, though we are - can summon the faith, the courage, and the imagination - to put our trust in Him.