Wrestling With God

This coming Sunday as our journey through Genesis continues, we will get to a really important text in the thirty-second chapter. We know it is important because at daybreak, after all of that wrestling with God through the night, Jacob will have a new name: Israel.

Jacob is on his way home, crossing the ford at the Jabbok River. He’s been away for twenty years. If he left in his late teens or early twenties, then we are probably in the ballpark to assume he is now around forty or so. You might even say this experience at the Jabbok is the ultimate mid-life crisis!  Abraham may be the father of faith, but Jacob becomes Israel. Oh yeah..and after that, he walks with a limp.

Like Jacob/Israel, God's people are called to wrestle with God, to be blessed, and to walk with a limp. That wrestling changes and defines us. 

Recall once more what the narrator has told us about Jacob and the stories his family tells again and again at every family gathering. The second of two twins born to Isaac and Rebecca; “the heel-grabber” they called him, because the midwife said he came right on the heels of his brother, Esau, and it almost seemed like his was trying to hold his brother in the womb and get out first! What happens in the birthing room foreshadows what has since unfolded.

Of course like so many photos taken in the birthing room or in those early years of life such stories take on meaning as life is lived. In other words they get told for a reason. “That kid never seemed to cry,” a mother tells her friend—“she was the best baby.” And that story is told for one of two reasons: either that kid has continued along that path and has always just been easy, or somehow, out of nowhere she is currently out of control and the storyteller is trying to make sense of these changed circumstances. Another parent says, “I knew this wasn’t going to be easy from the moment that boy came home from the hospital and kept us up all night for months on end…”

So Jacob was a heel-grabber, born just a few minutes after his brother and apparently not happy at all about it from day one. In their teens there is that lentil soup story and again it makes it clear that Jacob is ambitious, even if the second-born son. And then the heel-grabber/soup maker all grown up, tricks his father by serving up the stew at the old man’s deathbed with those animal skins taped on his own hands. Last week, though, we got to see that "what goes around comes around" when he wakes up on the morning after his marriage to "Rachel" and discovers it is Leah. Seven more years of work to follow...

So, over the course of twenty years, Jacob has been able to make a new life for himself in the land of his mother’s people. He is now surrounded by two wives and two maids and a bunch of kids. His hard work has paid off and he is financially successful.  Now he is heading home to face not only his own demons, but his family, and particularly his brother, Esau. This experience at the Jabbok takes place on the eve before that reunion.  

Can you imagine two decades passing and brothers who shared the same womb not speaking for that entire length of time? As a pastor I am sad to tell you I can imagine it all too well, because I see it more than I wish to admit, and too often at funerals or weddings. Siblings or parents and their children who have fought over an inheritance (as Jacob and Esau did) or numerous other reasons.  It seems to me that after so much time has passed there is really never any way forward other than for someone to pick up the phone, or start out on a journey as Jacob did. Or to be able to finally utter the two most difficult words in the entire English language: “I’m sorry.” We can spend our whole lives, or decades at least, waiting for someone else to pick up that phone if we aren’t careful.

So as Jacob is heading home, he has a lot on his mind. He is not only coming to grips with his past but facing a very uncertain future. All he knows is that he has to try. He has to try to find his way back home. He has to try to make peace with his brother.

When we see him in this scene from the 32^nd chapter of Genesis he is utterly alone—the wives and kids are all on the other side of the river. On top of that it’s nighttime, the bewitching hour; the time when his internal dragons threaten to undo him. It is there, and then, that he wrestles until daybreak. I wonder if we did have a camera available what kind of photo we would take. Is the "man" he wrestles real or imagined? Is it God, or an angel in disguise, or a man of flesh and blood? Is this an internal or external struggle or some mixture of both?

The text is ambiguous as good stories always are. But one thing is certain: Jacob is left at the end with a limp. And at least in Jacob’s own mind, it was real enough. He feels he has wrestled with God and lived to tell about it. He calls the place, Peniel: for he has seen God face to face and lived to tell about it.

And as already mentioned, he gets a new name: Israel. So if we Christians are part of this story, part of the new Israel that has been grafted in to the old Israel, then this story is important to us. The story seems to be suggesting that the journey of faith is not about moral certitude or dogmatic clarity or blind obedience, but about wrestling. It’s also about that willingness to step forward into the unknown, even if we have to limp toward it. In fact, maybe faith itself is born when we recognize that we can’t go back, and that the only way forward is by grace. I will not let you go unless you bless me...

Next weekend we’ll turn our attention to the sons of Jacob—the original “cheaper by the dozen” gang. Our gaze will turn toward Joseph and his amazing technicolor dreamcoat.

But before we get there, I want to remind you of one of the most beautiful episodes in the Old Testament and perhaps in all of Scripture. It's right up there with that image of the father who runs out to welcome his "prodigal" son home. It comes to us from the 33^rd chapter of Genesis—the very next chapter beyond where today’s reading comes from.  After his divine encounter at the Jabbok River, Jacob continues his journey toward home. And suddenly he looks up and there he sees his brother, Esau, coming toward him, accompanied by four hundred men. And surely Jacob must be thinking, “this is it…my life is over…he has every right to kill me and that is what he is going to do after all these years.”

Only that isn’t what happens. Amazingly, Esau runs out to embrace his brother. He gives Jacob/Israel a big bear hug and kisses him. And these two middle-aged men begin to cry tears of reconciling love. It is an amazing image and it always saddens me a little that the lectionary overlooks it because its omission helps to feed the mistaken biases so many people have about the Old Testament. It’s truly an image of grace and healing no less powerful than the story of the prodigal son. Like that more familiar story it, too, insists that you can go home because the ties that bind family together are far more powerful the divisions and fears that threaten to tear us asunder.

This story brings us near to the end of this generation of the patriarchs. We’ll see Jacob again as an old man who grieves when he is given the news that his favorite son, Joseph, is dead. That of course, will turn out to be a lie. But all of that in due time. By the time we get there the story-line will have shifted toward Joseph - the fourth generation. But we don't speak of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. The Joseph narrative will take us on a new trajectory and into Egypt and into Exodus. So our summer story isn't yet ended. But this is the last we see of Jacob, now known as Israel.

Taken together, if the preacher dares to extend beyond where the lectionary committee has chosen to stop, Genesis 32 and 33 remind us of both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of our faith. We are called into relationship with a God who is not warm and cuddly, but a wrestler who may leave us walking with a limp. Yet that wrestling is in and of itself a blessing. Our encounters with the living God also leave us with a new sense of identity and purpose.

That claim on us leads us toward our true home, and opens us up to the horizontal relationships of life. It calls us into community where we are commanded to love our neighbor., including the family members we have hurt (or who have hurt us) along the way. People who walk with a limp are prepared for embrace and reconciliation, and the tears that healing old wounds can bring. Love of God and love of neighbor—two sides to one coin. And it’s all there in Genesis 32 and 33.