What’s so great?

Lord, you have been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn us back to dust, and say, ‘Turn back, you mortals.’ For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:1-4)

It’s just a broken piece of pottery, but in this season of ashes—and national turmoil—I can’t get it out of my mind.

It lives in a small basket near my desk where I throw my keys. Sometimes I use it for a paperweight. Occasionally, I trace the grooves worked by ancient hands as they fashioned the bowl or jar to which this fragment once belonged.

I don’t know how old it is, certainly hundreds of years, maybe a thousand or more. The hands that made it are dust, so is every civilization that once occupied this hill, Meggido, in northern Israel, where this fragment was one of thousands scattered from archeological digs.

Meggido overlooks a great valley where two ancient trade routes crossed. Armies trod those routes, too, and this ancient hill rose higher and higher as one power after another built on the ruins of those they conquered. The hill stands hundreds of feet higher than the ancient spring that still flows deep beneath it.

Great civilizations claimed this spot for their own at one time or another—Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, to name a few, certainly the Israelites as well. Canaanites made burnt offerings here four and five thousand years ago.

All of them are long gone now, no matter how great, powerful or even insurmountable their military and economic might once appeared.

Today, Meggido is a place where tourists and pilgrims gather among the remnants of digs. They climb dozens of steep steps down to the spring that still flows fresh and clean. Maybe they pocket a pottery fragment as they gaze at the beauty of the Jezreel Valley where ancient armies once clashed.

Memories of Meggido proved inescapable for me, this week, as Christians marked their foreheads with ash and heard sobering words. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.’

There’s no escaping it, not for individuals or civilizations, which is why I picked up my little piece of history in Meggido and keep it near. It puts the lie to every claim of greatness that we, our nation or civilization might make about ourselves.

It calls into question any conception of greatness on which we might spend our lives or our nation’s resources in an effort to claim superiority, as if we could deny what is utterly apparent in the dust of Meggido.

Great nations, powerful leaders, once strode this place. Now, the silent fragments of their existence whisper wisdom, ‘Mortal greatness is an illusion. No matter how pressing or sure it seems, it will fail you.’

And we each are left to wonder, ‘What is truly great; is there anything that lasts, anything to which we might cleave and love and give ourselves to, anything that will hold us when we and all we touched have turned to ash?

Is there?

Yes, says the spring flowing deep beneath Megiddo’s height. There is. Just One. Don't let anyone else fool you.