August 3, 2014, Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 32:22 – 31
Jacob comes to Jabbok with all he has. He knows he’ll meet the brother he cheated out of inheritance. He sends everyone and everything across the river. Everything that might prove to Esau and himself that he is powerful, and God is with him. Jacob stays on the far side and waits.
He has to prepare to meet his true self, the identity he fled. He has to go home to claim the blessing he stole. (There’s no question in Genesis that the stolen blessing belongs to him.)
What does Jacob wait for? Some scholars see in this story an ancient belief in river demons. Maybe Jacob believes he will be stronger tomorrow if he fights tonight. He wants to feel sure he can take whatever Esau may rightly throw at him when they meet.
A man appears in Jacob’s lonely camp and they wrestle through the night. The man has power to prevail, but Jacob doesn’t submit. The man has power to wound Jacob, and marks him forever.
The stranger wants to leave. Jacob won’t let him go. He wants a blessing. The man asks Jacob’s name, then changes it to a name that is a blessing greater than Jacob dared asked for.
Why not ask for even more? “Tell me your name.” To know the name of a spirit or a god is to control it. To speak the name of Israel’s God is to demand a revelation. Jacob doesn’t get everything he wants, but he gets his blessing.
Behind the beauty of this story is a thief, cheat and liar who gets what he wants. Genesis makes a hero out of Jacob, a seriously flawed hero, but a hero nonetheless. The promise to Abraham must go on toward fulfillment. It doesn’t seem to matter how or by whom it’s carried forward.
For now, Jacob is humbled. He’s left with a mark. He limps on, toward his fateful meeting with Esau.
Jacob knows he has met God and survived an encounter that would have consumed a lesser man than he thinks he is.
We’d like to move on from this episode and find proof of Jacob’s transformation, especially in his family life. In our August readings from Genesis, and the stories among them that the lectionary skips, we’ll see how the sins of the father really are passed on to the children, and to their children.
We’ll also see how God is faithful to unfaithful people. God keeps on chasing sinners, catching and wrestling them down until they’re still and God can bless them. God stopped Abram in his tracks as he went about his prosperous life, turned him around, and promised him a whole new world. Jacob, now called Israel, goes on to found a nation. God makes sure it happens, whatever Israel and his sons may do. Every time there’s a sharp pain in his hip, does Israel feel God’s hand upon him?
Spend the night with Jacob on the far shore. Be the church, with all we’ve depended on now out of reach. The security, the numbers, the dollars, the privileged place in society are gone. The future looms, largely unknown, across the divide.
Tonight we wrestle. We contend with our fears, our regrets, our grief. We’re torn between the false comforts of nostalgia and magical strategies that falsely promise a future we can shape and manage for ourselves.
Are we really wrestling with God? God isn’t waiting for us, on the other side. Waiting for us to figure out how to move forward. God is here, in our night, waiting to bless us. We can only cross over humbled, even wounded.
Stories of encounter with God are about God, after all. Not about the people who meet God.
