Treasure in a Clay Jar
"But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed."
— 2 Corinthians 4:7-9
Fired clay was the cheapest material in a first century household. Local potters turned these pots out by the hundred, and a cracked one went on the rubbish heap. Even then the pieces kept working: people wrote receipts, tax notes and short letters on them, because broken pottery was free and writing material was not. Israel's law had a case where a pot used for boiling a sin offering was smashed, while a bronze one in the same case was scoured, rinsed and kept. Metal was worth saving, baked earth was not. That is the container Paul picks for himself, and just before these lines he says what fills it: God's glory, seen in the face of Christ. He quotes a complaint made against him, that his letters were weighty and forceful while the man himself made no impression and his speaking amounted to nothing. He grants elsewhere that he was never trained to speak. Earlier in this letter he says the trouble that met him in Asia was past what he could carry, and elsewhere he lists five floggings, three beatings with rods, three shipwrecks. The word rendered "crushed" is built on the term for narrow: squeezed into a space with no room to move. The next pair runs one verb twice, the second time with a prefix that pushes it to the limit: at a loss, but never at the end of the road. None of that is a claim to be tough. God trusts his treasure to people who break easily, so the strength on show is plainly his.