THE POTTER’S FIELD

Some days, I look around me at my friends and family, and others I come into contact with, and I see what looks like broken pieces scattering the ground. So much pain. Broken hearts. And then I remember the Potter’s Field. We learned about that twenty years ago at YWAM.

Outside Jerusalem, there was a field of broken pots. Potters would dig up clay from the ground there, and used pottery was discarded, left lying in a broken mess across the ground.

There are a some interesting things about that field. One of them is that, after Judas betrayed Jesus for his thirty pieces of silver, he felt guilty and returned the money. The religious guys didn’t feel right about putting the “blood money” back into the treasury, so they used it to buy the Potter’s Field. Jesus’ blood money was used to buy a field of broken pots.

There are a lot of references to pottery in the history of believers. A couple that come to mind are: The Creator is referred to as the Potter, moulding and shaping us into the image that He saw from the beginning, in a lump of clay. The second is that the apostle Paul talks about this great treasure contained in earthen vessels (us), so that we would know this glory comes from God and not from ourselves.

So today, when I look at my own heart and at the pain that sometimes seems to be overtaking so many around me, I think of the Potter’s Field. I think about how Jesus’ blood paid for us. And I think about that glory residing inside of us, pulsing, threatening to consume the darkness with incomprehensible light.