The Potter’s Responsive Touch

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him [Jeremiah 18:1-4, from this Sunday’s Old Testament reading, the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year C].

While on my recent pilgrimage to Turkey, in the ancient region of Cappadocia, my fellow sojourners and I encountered a potter’s workshop that seemed to exist outside of time. The craftsman—perhaps in his late forties—sat at his wheel with the patience of one who had spent decades learning to work with clay rather than against it. His hands moved with a certainty born of countless hours spent understanding how earth and water respond to pressure, to gentleness, to the turning of the wheel.

I was surprised by the amount of water he used. His hands remained constantly wet, and he kept a bowl within easy reach, dipping into it again and again as he worked. Utilizing some hidden gear mechanism, just a few pushes of his foot set the large wheel spinning with surprising speed. The clay responded to the gentlest pressure of his fingers.

“Same clay, different vessel,” he demonstrated, showing how the identical lump could become a bowl with wide, shallow movements or a pitcher with his thumbs drawing the walls upward. When the clay began to resist or the walls grew uneven, he didn’t force the issue. Instead, he added water and used gentle pressure to guide it back to workable condition.

“Clay must stay soft,” he explained in his practiced English. “Too dry, it breaks. Too wet, it falls. Always water, always watching.”

Now, as I recall that Cappadocian workshop, with its array of beautiful, different vessels, I can begin to understand why God sent Jeremiah to observe a potter at work rather than sending him to the temple library or to the royal court. There are things one can learn only by watching an artisan respond to the resistance and possibilities of raw material, only by witnessing how skilled hands adapt their technique to achieve his purpose without breaking what he’s trying to shape.

The potter’s constant attention to moisture, his willingness to start over when the clay wouldn’t hold its form, his patient adaptation to what the material could and couldn’t bear—it whispers a level of patience that I had not earlier grasped, a level that I do not possess. The master craftsman works with the clay’s properties rather than against them; he achieves his purposes through responsive collaboration rather than overwhelming force.

Since our pilgrimage, my mind keeps returning to that workshop. The image of those wet, gentle hands that could reshape without destroying offers me a vision of just how God’s power operates within our lives—and why that power’s action is actually quite unsettling.

The Ancient Workshop and Its Theological Implications

When YHWH commands Jeremiah to “go down to the potter’s house,” the prophet must leave his familiar spaces—the scriptures and sanctuaries—to learn about divine ways by watching an artisan at work.

The workshop Jeremiah visited would have operated much like the one we encountered in Cappadocia. The same need for constant moisture, the same patient responsiveness to what the clay could bear. But Jeremiah witnesses insight that illuminates the entire biblical understanding of human creation and divine purpose.

Duke Divinity OT professor, Dr. Anathea Portier-Young, pondering this Jeremiah passage, offers an important distinction: clay that has been fired becomes rigid, specialized, brittle—useful for its designated purpose but no longer moldable. Clay that remains unfired stays responsive, capable of being shaped and reshaped infinitely.

Portier-Young’s theological point challenges our comfortable assumptions about spiritual maturity. Though YHWH shaped humankind in Genesis and breathed life into our nostrils, He chose not to fire the clay from which we were made. The same Hebrew verb yatsar that describes the potter’s work appears in both Genesis 2:7 and throughout Jeremiah 18. We remain, in a fundamental sense, unfired—still capable of transformation, still responsive to the divine touch.

Such an understanding echoes through Jewish liturgy, particularly in the Yom Kippur service where Jeremiah’s words “like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand” become a prayer of repentance. The Day of Atonement framework suggests that what keeps us spiritually malleable—prevents us from hardening into irreversible patterns—is the ongoing possibility of teshuvah, of turning back toward our intended purpose.

The Cappadocia potter’s constant attention to moisture begins to take on deeper meaning. What serves as spiritual water in our lives? What keeps us supple enough for divine reshaping rather than brittle enough to shatter under pressure?

The Disturbing Promise – "I Am Shaping Evil"

But then the Jeremiah text’s potter metaphor takes an unexpected turn that challenges our comfortable assumptions about divine benevolence. In verse 11, YHWH declares: “Look, I am shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you.” As pointed out by OT scholar, Robert Alter, the same Hebrew verb yotser that describes the potter’s careful work with clay now describes YHWH’s intentional crafting of harmful circumstances.

The language is jarring to the ear precisely because it uses the potter’s vocabulary. YHWH doesn’t merely allow negative consequences—YHWH doesn’t just step back from protection—the sacred text suggests active divine participation in bringing about what we would experience as opposition to our plans and comfort.

Yet the textual context reveals how prophetic discourse functions. The “shaping evil” comes with an immediate invitation: “Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings” [18:11]. The threatened disaster serves not as inevitable fate but as urgent call to transformation. Prophecy operates as invitation rather than mere prediction.

Consider Jonah and Nineveh. The prophet announced destruction in forty days, but when the city repented, YHWH relented. Jonah’s anger at YHWH’s forgiveness reveals our human tendency to prefer divine predictability over divine responsiveness. We want to know where we stand definitively rather than live within the dynamic relationship that the potter metaphor describes, where our moral choices actively influence how God shapes our circumstances.

The theological tension becomes acutely ironic: if prophecy succeeds in provoking repentance, then the prophecy becomes “false” in the sense that the predicted disaster doesn’t occur. The prophet’s ultimate goal, therefore, is to be wrong about the judgment while being right about the possibility of transformation.

This suggests that God’s “shaping evil” functions like the pressure a potter applies when clay begins to resist. The pressure might feel destructive to the clay, but it serves the larger purpose of creating a vessel that can hold its form. The alternative—allowing the flawed vessel to continue toward the kiln—would result in permanent, irreparable failure.

What hardens us against this kind of responsive shaping? What makes us prefer the illusion of spiritual completion over the ongoing work of transformation? And what might it mean to discover that divine love sometimes expresses itself through resistance to our illusions of control?

Living in Dynamic Relationship

I think that the potter’s workshop uncovers an unsettling truth about divine-human relationship that challenges both our desire for control and our longing for certainty. Unlike a factory assembly line where products are manufactured according to fixed specifications, the potter’s wheel requires constant improvisation. The craftsman’s purpose remains steady—creating a vessel that will serve its intended function—but the specific techniques must adapt to how the clay responds at each moment.

This dynamic quality of divine shaping disrupts comfortable theological categories. We often prefer a God whose decrees are unchangeable because such predictability offers the illusion that we can calculate where we stand. But Jeremiah’s potter metaphor suggests divine constancy lies not in rigid predetermination but in unchanging commitment to our ultimate good, expressed through infinitely flexible responsiveness to our moral choices.

The prophet’s message in verse 11 embodies this tension. The call to “turn from your evil way and amend your ways and your doings” assumes that we retain the plasticity necessary for transformation. We haven’t been fired into permanent spiritual shapes that cannot be altered. The capacity for repentance, for teshuvah, keeps us workable in divine hands even when we’ve begun to collapse under our own contradictions.

But remaining unfired clay also means accepting perpetual vulnerability to reshaping. We cannot graduate to spiritual completion where divine formation is no longer necessary. The moisture that keeps us malleable—whether we call it grace, humility, or ongoing acknowledgment of our need for divine guidance—must be constantly replenished. Without it, we harden into the brittleness that makes us unsuitable for God’s purposes.

Where do we find ourselves resisting the potter’s touch? What circumstances in our lives might represent God’s “shaping evil”—not as vindictive punishment but as the pressure necessary to prevent collapse during the firing process that lies ahead? When did you last experience the discomfort of being reshaped rather than simply affirmed?

The potter we watched in Cappadocia worked without frustration when adjustments were needed. He added water, applied gentle pressure, used his skilled hands to guide the clay back into workable condition. The clay’s resistance hadn’t diminished its value or exhausted the potter’s patience. It had simply revealed that a different touch was needed to achieve the intended purpose.

This is what divine love looks like when it encounters our resistance—not the abandonment of flawed material but the patient willingness to start over, to add whatever moisture is necessary, to work with our limitations while never abandoning the vision of what we might become.