NOTES for Jer 19:1-15

The potter's clay vessel is shattered irreversibly, just as God's judgment is irreversible. In a certain sense, every human fall and every failure on the path of love and faithfulness is incurable: it produces inevitable consequences, evil gives birth to evil, and so on... But there is a way out of this natural circle of mutual responsibility—a supernatural and miraculous way, when God overcomes human sin and limitation and pours joy upon a person instead of despair. This is what happened on the night of the Resurrection, when Jesus' disciples saw their hopes shattered as irreversibly as a clay pot. Those hopes never came back—not in their former shape. Instead of the destroyed hopes and ideas about God and His Kingdom, the world was given a new hope and a new faith that can no longer be shattered.