You’ve probably carried a grocery bag with a small tear in the bottom. Somewhere between the car and the kitchen, a thin trail of rice follows you across the driveway, and you feel nothing. You find out when you set the bag on the counter and it slumps over, half as full as when you left the store.
Jesus tells almost exactly that story in the Gospel of Thomas, and it appears in none of the four gospels in the Bible. Right after it comes a second parable missing from the canon, about a man who practices a murder before he commits it. Sayings 97 and 98 make a strange pair. Read together, they describe two ways a spiritual life can go, and they’re worth a slow look.
Two Parables Nobody Else Kept
Thomas contains plenty of familiar material. Saying 96, just before our pair, is the woman who hides a little yeast in dough and ends up with large loaves, a parable Matthew and Luke both tell.
Sayings 97 and 98 have no such company. Marvin Meyer’s notes to his translation say each is “known only here in early Christian literature.” For the jar, he mentions a somewhat similar story in a text attributed to Macarius of Syria, and that’s all. If your picture of Jesus comes from the canonical gospels, these are two stories about the kingdom you have never been told.
The Woman With the Empty Jar
Meyer’s translation of saying 97 begins like this:
“The [Father’s] kingdom is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road.”
The square brackets mark gaps in the papyrus that the editors have filled in. “She did not know it,” the saying goes on, and then the ending. “When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.”
For a kingdom parable, this one runs backward. The mustard seed grows into a tree, and the yeast raises the whole batch of dough. Here the kingdom story is about something shrinking to nothing, with no crash and no pain along the way, only a broken handle and a long road.
What the Woman Didn’t Have
The line about her not noticing is one of the rough spots in the manuscript, and the translators disagree about it. Meyer adds that “she had not noticed a problem.” Bentley Layton, working from the same Coptic, has her say something harsher: “she had not understood how to toil.” Meyer’s notes mention editors who emend the text so that she noticed nothing while she labored along.
Layton’s footnote on the first clause is the part I keep coming back to. Where he prints “She was not aware,” the literal Coptic, he says, is “She did not have acquaintance of.” Throughout his book, acquaintance is the English word he uses for gnosis.
So on the most literal reading, the woman lacks gnosis. She had the jar and she had the meal, but she didn’t have knowledge of her own situation. In a gospel that opens by promising that whoever finds the meaning of its sayings “will not taste death,” that is a pointed thing to say about someone carrying the kingdom.
Slow Loss Is the Usual Kind
Most people who lose their inner life lose it the way the woman lost her meal, a little at a time. Morning prayer slips from daily to most days. The hour of quiet becomes twenty minutes, and then it becomes the time you spend reading headlines in bed. No single morning feels like a failure.
Handles break, and the parable never scolds her for that. What undoes her is the distance. It was a “distant road,” and she walked all of it without looking down. An attention economy built to keep you moving is very good at making the road feel short.
This is different from the dry stretches every seeker goes through, the ones this site has written about as seasons of the soul. In a dry season you know you’re thirsty. The woman with the jar felt fine the whole way home.
The Man Who Tested His Hand
Saying 98 follows immediately, and it is jarring in a different way. In Meyer’s translation:
“The Father’s kingdom is like a person who wanted to put someone powerful to death. While at home he drew his sword and thrust it into the wall to find out whether his hand would go in. Then he killed the powerful one.”
Layton heads it “A parable of an assassination.” In his version the target is “a member of court,” the weapon is a dagger, and the man stabs the wall “in order to know whether his hand would be firm.”
Jesus comparing the kingdom to a killer sounds shocking until you remember how often his parables use unlikely heroes. In Luke, a master praises a dishonest manager for his shrewdness. What the assassin models is his preparation. Before he goes anywhere near the palace, he goes home, alone, and tests himself against a wall, and only when he knows what his hand can do does he move.
Luke has cousins of this idea, the builder who sits down to estimate the cost of a tower and the king who counts his soldiers before marching out against a larger army. Thomas makes it more physical. Instead of doing arithmetic, the man is finding out what his own body will do when the moment comes.
Who Is the Powerful One?
The saying never says. Meyer’s notes point back to saying 35: “You cannot enter the house of the strong and take it by force without tying the person’s hands.” In both sayings a strong figure stands between you and what you’re after, and you have to be ready before you face it.
In a gospel so focused on self-knowledge, I read the powerful one as something inside. It might be a compulsion or an old fear, or just the part of you that currently runs your days without asking. The ancient teachers had a name for that last one, and this site has written about the counterfeit spirit before. That reading is mine, though. The saying leaves the target unnamed, which may be the point.
A Pair on Purpose
Whoever arranged Thomas put these two parables side by side, and they work as mirror images. The woman is out on the road the entire time and never checks. The man stays home and checks everything before he goes out.
She lost what she had without knowing it. He got what he wanted because he knew. Both parables turn on the same thing, knowledge of your own condition, and they show you what happens with and without it.
Checking the Jar
A few ways to take these parables into an ordinary week.
Look inside at a set time. Pick one evening a week and ask what you actually practiced compared with a month ago. Write the answer down. Slow loss only shows up against a record, since memory will always tell you the jar feels about the same.
Find the broken handle. When you do notice a leak, look for the small mechanical cause. Often it’s something like the phone moving to the nightstand or a new commute eating that half hour. Fix the handle before you try to refill the jar.
Test your hand at home. Before a hard conversation, say the words out loud in the car first. Before you announce you’re quitting something, go one day without it and see how your hand holds.
Name your powerful one. Write down the single habit or fear that shapes more of your days than you’d like. The man in the parable knew exactly who he was going after. Vague enemies are hard to prepare for.
Most of us are both characters in the same month, careful about one thing and leaking on another. If you set your own jar down tonight and looked inside, what would you find there? And what, if anything, are you rehearsing for at home?
The Gospel of Thomas is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), including his notes on sayings 97 and 98, and from Bentley Layton’s translation in The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, with David Brakke (Yale University Press, 2021), including his footnote on saying 97.
