My present experience in Malawi has encouraged me to ponder Paul’s life as one sent into the Gentile world. Perhaps from a Graeco-Roman worldview – a view molded by efficiency and power, accustomed to eloquent orations, and tantalized by precise, philosophical nuances – Paul might have appeared and sounded as one who crawled out from a desert catacomb: short in stature; quick, daring eyes; a scraggly beard; his voice: high- pitched and lulling; and his hands: those of a craftsman. Of course this is a caricature, but I frame him in this manner, because Paul willingly crossed from one cultural setting to another, conscious that he was strange and foreign – for he had grown up Hebrew in a very Hellenized city: Tarsus.
At one moment in his Gentile sojourn, Paul described himself in this manner: “But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed”.[1] Perhaps these general allusions he later specified as: [On] frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.”[2]
Because of my experience yesterday, Paul’s “clay jar” image (ostraca: ὀστράκινος) has captured me, for I have felt very much like a clay pot, albeit one that’s cracked. Paul didn’t describe himself as “cracked,” and certainly few and only tenuous parallels exist between his experience and mine, but yesterday as I stood among hundreds of mourners, at the culmination of a 3hour, open-air funeral service; feeling as though I had made a cultural faux pas, I nonetheless followed willy-nilly behind a white Toyota pickup, its cargo a white coffin. Having preached at a 7am worship service (by 8:20, when I stood to preach, approximately 700 had gathered), by 5pm, still enduring jet fatigue, my left kidney periodically emitting discomfort, the funeral procession hymning all about, in my weariness, I wondered: “Stan, where are you? Just what are you doing?” I felt like a clay pot cracking -- even so, those about me honored me with their smiles and nods of respect.
Still more later,
Stan
[1] 2Corinthians 4:7-8.
[2] 2Corinthians 11:26-27.