In the first reading of this First Sunday of Advent, Isaiah proposes a helpful image to advance the mood of this season:  the story of the potter and the clay. The idea of the story is already in motion in the biblical world long before Isaiah’s prophecy.

The writer of Genesis employs it in the story of Creation, as God molds the first person from the dust of the earth. Jeremiah uses the image effectively many times, presenting vessels in the making and, yes, in the smashing.

Then Job sagely writes, “the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.”

But the most prominent use of this biblical metaphor is that of the clay pot in process, being spun and smoothed and shaped according to the design of the potter.

When a pot goes bad on a particular spin, taking on an undesirable shape, it is the right of the potter to remove the clay from the wheel, reduce it to a uniform mass by crushing, and then begin again to achieve the end for which the clay is originally intended.

The mashing-down process might look and feel like the destruction of the clay, but it is “being cruel to be kind”; or, like a road sign that says, “Temporary inconvenience. Permanent improvement.”

The process of repentance may have the same effect on us.  To change our hearts, our lives, is not easy work; it can even feel like a death.  In fact, to put aside ourselves is a form of dying 

Remember Lazarus . . .  as we stumble out like him at the summons of Jesus from yesterday’s “tomb,” still bound in the funeral shroud of the past. 

Change is neither easy nor elegant, nor dignified.  We may carry gashes to remind us of whom we once were.  Even Jesus came out of his tomb with five visible wounds. 

But remember that the newness, the glory to come, is infinitely greater than the death that precedes it.

We have almost four weeks until Christmas, and five until Epiphany.   Why not use this Advent season as a grateful opportunity to start again, while we wait in joyful hope for the world worth waiting for?

                                                                                                               Prepare the Word & Lloyd Baugh SJ

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