Beyond ColorblindSýnishorn

The Cracks Are Not the Final Say

Pottery is an ancient and highly respected practice in Japan, and each vessel is made with great care and thought about the piece’s balance, shape, and feel. With Kintsukuroi, the Japanese practice in ceramic art meaning “golden repair,” broken pottery is repaired by setting it back together with an intentionally brilliant golden or silver lacquer. This method highlights each piece’s unique history by emphasizing the fractures instead of hiding them. Often, the final work is even more beautiful than when the piece first came into being.

When Jesus shapes our ethnic identities, He is like the gold seam in Kintsukuroi. He demonstrates how each of us in our ethnic backgrounds and identities were made for good in the image of God, like beautiful pieces of pottery. 

But sin—in the form of cultural idolatries, ethnic division, and racism—causes damage, brokenness, and painful cracks in the story of our ethnic identities. When unattended, many of those cracks deepen into bitterness, prejudice, revenge, racism, hatred of others, self-hatred, depression, suicide, numbness, despair, and idolatry that we pass on to our children. 

God is not content to leave us to our brokenness, and he sends Jesus to redeem us in all of who we are. As children of God, we die with Him in his crucifixion and rise with Him in his resurrection.

Jesus’ resurrection did not get rid of His scars. His scars remind us of the broken story of humanity and the powerful, costly love that came to save and mend us. As in Kintsukuroi, when Jesus enters our stories, the healing, redemption, and reconciliation He brings is the undeniably striking golden seam. 

Before his conversion, Paul (born Saul) was dedicated to preserving his culture and attacking and killing anyone that he saw as a threat to that way of life. One would not think someone with such a broken past would be used to reach the nations he once despised. But Jesus used Paul’s learning, his background, his Jewish heritage, and his Roman citizenship for his kingdom purposes.

Kintsukuroi doesn’t deny the brokenness of the pottery—it uses it to tell a new story. Likewise, our scars become transformed by Jesus’ scars. And it is the beauty of that story that allows us to share the gospel with those around us. We are most fully able to share the gospel when we can share about its impact on all of who we are. And when those diverse pieces come together as one body and share the myriad of stories of healing, reconciliation, and sacrificing for the other, we are a visibly powerful vessel of kingdom witness.

Jesus, there is no scar, no enmity, no sin in our ethnicity so deep that you cannot bring healing. Help me see where the cracks are in my ethnic story. Bring about your healing in me so that I can help others experience the same. Help me to love the other.