Clay in God’s Hands

So let me press on with the subject in front of me — if only I can win for the flesh as much as was granted it by the one who made it. Even then it had something to boast of, since that poor cheap stuff, clay, found its way into the hands of God, whatever those hands were, and was happy enough merely to be touched by them. But why the boasting? Was it that the clay took its shape the instant God touched it, with no further work? Far from it. A great matter was under way, and the creature we are discussing was being shaped out of it. The clay receives honor, then, as often as it feels the hands of God — as often as it is touched by them, and pulled, and drawn out, and molded into shape. Picture God taken up with it and absorbed in it entirely: his hand on it, his eye on it, his labor, his purpose, his wisdom, his foresight, and above all his love, which was dictating the lines of this creature. [a]

For whatever form and expression was then given to the clay, Christ was in his thoughts, who was one day to become man; because the Word too was to be clay and flesh, just as the earth was clay then. This is what the Father had already said to the Son: “Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness.” And God made man — that is, the creature he molded and shaped; after the image of God (in other words, of Christ) he made him. And the Word was God as well, who, standing in the image of God, “did not count it robbery to be equal with God.” So that clay, which was even then putting on the image of Christ, who was to come in the flesh, was not only God’s work but his pledge and his guarantee.

What is the use of throwing the word earth about, as the name of some filthy, grovelling element, in order to tarnish the origin of the flesh? Even if some other material had been available for making man, you would still have to take into account the dignity of the Maker, who by the very choosing of his material judged it worthy, and by his handling of it made it worthy. The hand of Phidias forms the Olympian Jupiter out of ivory; the statue is worshiped, and it is no longer thought of as a god made out of a very stupid animal, but as the supreme Deity of the world — not because of the elephant’s bulk, but because of Phidias’s fame. Could not the living God, then, the true God, scour away by his own working whatever foulness had come to his material, and heal it of every weakness? Or must the thing stand as it is, to show how much more nobly a man can manufacture a god than God can form a man?

Now, offensive as the clay is for its poorness, it is now something else. What I have is flesh, not earth — even though it is said of the flesh, “Earth you are, and to earth you will go back.” Those words mention where it came from; they do not call back what it is. The flesh has been granted the privilege of being nobler than its origin, and of having its happiness enlarged by the change worked in it. Even gold is earth, since it comes from earth; but once it becomes gold it is earth no longer. It is a far different substance, brighter and nobler, though it comes from a source that is dull and obscure by comparison. In the same way it was entirely open to God to clear the gold of our flesh of all the stains you charge it with from its native clay, by purging the original substance of its dross.

But perhaps the dignity of the flesh seems less, because it was not actually worked by the hand of God as the clay was at the beginning. Yet when God handled the clay for the express purpose that flesh should grow out of it afterward, it was for the flesh that he took all that trouble. And I want you to know as well at what point, and in what way, the flesh blossomed out of its clay. It cannot be, as some will have it, that those “coats of skins,” which Adam and Eve put on when they were stripped of paradise, were themselves the actual forming of the flesh out of clay. Long before that, Adam had already recognized the flesh in the woman as an offshoot of his own substance — “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” — and the very taking of the woman out of the man was made good with flesh; whereas it ought, I should think, to have been made good with clay, if Adam were still clay. [d]

So the clay was blotted out and swallowed up into flesh. When did that happen? At the moment when man became a living soul by God’s inbreathing — by a breath able to harden clay into another substance, as into a kind of earthenware, and so now into flesh. In the same way a potter, by adjusting the blast of his fire, can turn his clayey material into a stiffer one, and mold one shape after another finer than the substance he began with, a shape with a kind and a name of its own now. For although Scripture says, “Shall the clay say to the potter?” — that is, shall man argue with God? — and although the apostle speaks of “earthen vessels,” he is speaking of man, who was clay to begin with. And the vessel is the flesh, because the flesh was made out of clay by the breath of God’s blowing; and it was afterward clothed with the “coats of skins,” that is, with the covering of skin laid over it. This is so plainly the case that if you take the skin away you lay the flesh bare. What becomes plunder once it is stripped off was a garment as long as it lay over. That is why the apostle, when he calls circumcision “a stripping off of the flesh,” was saying that the skin is a coat or a tunic.

That being so, you have the clay made glorious by the hand of God, and the flesh made more glorious still by his breathing upon it — by which the flesh not only laid aside its clayey beginnings but put on the ornaments of the soul. Surely you are not more careful than God. You would refuse to set the gems of Scythia and India and the pearls of the Red Sea in lead, or brass, or iron, or even silver, and would mount them in the most precious and most finely worked gold. You would find the most fitting vessels for your best wines and costliest perfumes; you would find, on the same principle, scabbards of matching worth for swords of fine temper. And is God to consign to some meanest sheath the shadow of his own soul, the breath of his own Spirit, the working of his own mouth — and by so shameful a consignment make sure, of course, of its condemnation?

Well then: has he placed the soul in the flesh — or rather set it in and mixed it through? He has; and the union is so intimate that a man may be uncertain whether the flesh carries the soul about or the soul the flesh, whether the flesh attends on the soul as its officer or the soul on the flesh. Still, it is more believable that the soul is the one carried and the one in command, being nearer to God in what it is. And this too adds up to the glory of the flesh, since the flesh both holds a being closest to God’s own and makes itself a partner in that being’s actual rule.

For what enjoyment of nature is there, what produce of the world, what taste of the elements, that is not handed to the soul by the body? How could it be otherwise? Is it not by the body’s means that the soul is served by the whole apparatus of the senses — sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch? Is it not by the body’s means that the soul gets its sprinkling of divine power, since there is nothing it does not accomplish by speech, even when it only hints at a thing without saying it? And speech comes out of an organ of flesh. The arts come through the flesh. Through the flesh the mind’s pursuits and abilities take effect. All work, all business, all the offices of life are carried out by the flesh — and the living acts of the soul are so utterly the work of the flesh that for the soul to stop doing living acts would be nothing else than cutting itself off from the flesh. The very act of dying, too, is a function of the flesh, exactly as the process of living is.

Now, if all things are subject to the soul by way of the flesh, they are subject to the flesh just as much. Whatever is the means and the agent of your enjoyment must be a partaker and a sharer in that enjoyment as well. So the flesh, which is reckoned the soul’s servant and attendant, turns out to be its companion and fellow heir too. And if this holds in things that last a while, why not in things that last forever?

These are the remarks I wanted to advance in the flesh’s defense, taking the condition of human nature as a whole. Now let us look at what the flesh is to Christians in particular, and see how great a privilege before God has been laid on this poor and worthless stuff. It would be enough to say that no soul can possibly obtain salvation unless it comes to believe while it is still in the flesh — so true is it that the flesh is the hinge on which salvation turns. And since the soul, on being saved, is chosen for the service of God, it is the flesh that actually makes it able to serve. [h]

The flesh is washed, so that the soul may be made clean. The flesh is anointed, so that the soul may be set apart. The flesh is marked with the sign, so that the soul too may be guarded. The flesh is overshadowed by the laying on of hands, so that the soul as well may be lit up by the Spirit. The flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ, so that the soul likewise may be fattened on its God. They cannot be separated in their reward, when they are joined together in the work.

And those sacrifices that God finds acceptable — I mean the soul’s struggles, its fasts and its goings without, and the self-abasements that go along with such duty — it is the flesh that performs them, over and over, at its own particular cost. Virginity, too, and widowhood, and the quiet self-restraint kept in private on the marriage bed, and the knowing of that bed only once — these are fragrant offerings paid to God out of the flesh’s good service.

Come, tell me what you think of the flesh when it has to fight for the name of Christ — dragged out where everyone can see it and set up for the hatred of all; when it wastes away in prison under the cruelest starving of light, banished from the world, in squalor and filth and vile food, with no freedom even in sleep, since it is chained to its own pallet and mangled on its bed of straw; when at last, in front of the public, it is racked by every kind of torture anyone can devise; and when in the end it is spent under its agonies, struggling to pay Christ its last installment by dying for him — on his own cross many a time, not to mention still more savage contrivances of pain. Truly that flesh must be most blessed and most glorious, which can repay so vast a debt to Christ its Lord, and repay it so completely that the only obligation left to it is to stop owing him more by dying — and to be bound all the tighter even then, in gratitude, because it has been set free.

To sum up, then. That very flesh, which the divine Creator formed with his own hands in the image of God; which he brought to life with his own breath, after the likeness of his own living vigor; which he set over all the works of his hand, to live among them and enjoy them and rule them; which he clothed in his own sacred rites and his own instruction; whose purity he loves, whose self-denials he approves, whose sufferings for his sake he counts precious — is that flesh, brought so often close to God, not to rise again? God forbid. God forbid, I say it twice, that he should hand over to everlasting ruin the labor of his own hands, the object of his own thought, the vessel that holds his own breath, the queen of his creation, the heir of his own generosity, the priestess of his religion, the soldier of his testimony, the sister of his Christ! [k]

We know God’s goodness by experience; from his Christ we learn that he is the only God, and the very best. Now, since he requires of us love for our neighbor after love for himself, he will himself do what he has commanded. He will love the flesh, which is his neighbor in so many ways and so very near. He will love it although it is weak, since “his strength is made perfect in weakness”; although it is diseased, since “those who are healthy do not need the doctor, but those who are sick”; although it is not honorable, since “we give more abundant honor to the less honorable parts”; although it is ruined, since he says, “I have come to save what was lost”; although it is sinful, since he says, “I want the sinner’s salvation rather than his death”; although it is condemned, for he says, “I will wound, and I will also heal.”

Why throw at the flesh the very conditions that wait for God, that hope in God, that receive honor from God, that God comes to help? I will go so far as to say this: if such disasters had never befallen the flesh, the generosity, the grace, the mercy — indeed all the kindly power of God — would have stood idle.

You keep hold of the passages of Scripture in which the flesh is run down; take the ones in which it is honored as well. You read whatever text brings it low; turn your eyes to the text that lifts it up. “All flesh is grass.” Well, Isaiah was not content to say only that; he also announced, “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” They take note of God saying in Genesis, “My Spirit shall not remain among these men, because they are flesh” — but he is also heard saying, through Joel, “I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh.” [o]

The apostle, too, ought not to be known by any one statement in which he happens to reproach the flesh. He does say that “in my flesh nothing good lives”; he does state that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God,” because “the flesh craves against the Spirit.” Yet in these and similar things that he says, what is being censured is not the substance of the flesh but its actions. And I shall find occasion further on to remark that no reproach can fairly be thrown at the flesh without falling on the soul as well, since it is the soul that forces the flesh to do its bidding.

Meanwhile let me add that in the same letter Paul “carries the marks of the Lord Jesus on his body”; that he forbids our body to be profaned, since it is “the temple of God”; that he makes our bodies “the parts of Christ”; and that he urges us to lift up and “glorify God in our body.” If, then, the humiliations of the flesh shove its resurrection away, why should its high privileges not rather bring that resurrection about? — since it better suits what God is, to restore to salvation what he rejected for a while, than to hand over to destruction what he once approved.