Jacob Wrestles with God

Genesis 32:22–31

Jacob Wrestles with God

The Rev. Roger S. Marxsen    

Christ Church, Macon, Georgia   

August 15, 19701 10th Sunday after Trinity

Jacob Wrestles at Jabbok Genesis 32:22–31

I have just read a story whose origins are ancient and shadowy. If you have no poetry in your soul – if you are a literalist about ultimate things, a sodden interpreter of your inner life and indeed no mystery to yourself, I suppose this story will seem simply preposterous and it will leave you cold. The Bible speaks to people who are aware of multiple realities requiring multiple languages to describe them. A story like this is one such language, describing in picture-talk that unnamed adversary we discover within ourselves in whose grip we struggle for victory or blessing. The story, like most good stories, has a fantastic quality, as though it had been composed in a dream. But it is a dream about real things – bringing realities, in fact, so universal that the man of imagination, centuries removed from Jacob, knows himself to be Jacob's kin, his spiritual descendent. He nurses the same kind of spiritual bruises as Jacob and limps away from similar battles.

Thanks to modern scholarship, we now have many Bibles instead of one. As a result of techniques of scriptural detective work too complicated to review in a sermon, we know that many of these ancient stories changed over the years. They changed in the telling and in the writing, as experience brought to light new points in the stories and underscored previously only dimly perceived aspects of our relationship to God. We can sympathize with the process. A man who set out to write his autobiography every five years would not simply add chapters to those already written. He would doubtless do the whole thing over each time, for every advance in age would conceivably bring with it new self-understanding. It is recorded that every time Tolstoy received galley proofs of his novels, he would proceed to rewrite the book in the margin, until finally an exasperated publisher would call a halt to it.

Madame Tolstoy recopied War and Peace seven times in longhand, as Natasha and André and the rest metamorphosed under the novelist's increasingly penetrating gaze. So too the Bible, which is the work of an ancient people, is a many-layered text whose stories have been shaped and reshaped by the ever-changing religious consciousness. In the beginning, for example, this story of Jacob's wrestling with God has Jacob emerging as the victor. It is God who at daybreak limps away. Is that story any less true than this present one? I think not. For it tells us of the playfulness of God who has created his creature only a little lower than the angels and is so fond of him that in a fair contest (i.e., God limiting himself in the very act of creation) a human victory is possible. We are only just now - thousands of years later, beginning to recover some appreciation of God's playfulness, and our own, and to see it as a neglected aspect of the very nature of life. Perhaps it is in our play rather than in our work that we are most God-like. For a long time, we have preferred to think otherwise, probably because, as this later Jacob story indicates, we are neither humble enough nor innocent enough to be permitted to play with God on equal terms. Those whom God would play with - (and certainly that is what heaven is all about-) He first must bring to their knees.

Jacob did not come to his knees easily. Jacob is the grandson of Abraham, the patriarch of a race - which learned from his example that their destiny is a destiny of risks undertaken in faith. Abraham is the man who is willing to break with the securities and serenities of his childhood (home and kin) and in his maturity embrace a life of pilgrimage and adventure.

He lives not by certainties but by faith - faith in the promise of the future. For Abraham, as for the rest of us, that future is undefined as to either privileges or exemptions. Abraham does not know the shape of tomorrow. He simply faces out towards it in the expectation of abundance. He and his descendants will flourish. That is the single promise spoken from the heart of Creation. Abraham responds in faith and commits his life to the God who blesses with promise! Isaac is the child of promise, the child who in his own person, against all reasonable expectation, symbolizes the faithfulness of God. But by the time Isaac's son Jacob is born, the circumstances, if not the conditions, have changed. Pioneering adventure has given way to the challenges and temptations of a more settled existence. The sons of the pioneers must learn to live with one another; They must learn cooperation and the art of sharing. The virtues of the wandering pilgrim must be supplemented by the virtues of residency. Property now competes with kinship as the cohesive force in community. The first half of the story of Jacob is a story of how Jacob deals with these novel challenges and temptations. He has learned that a cooperative situation can also be a competitive situation in which craft and wiliness can be profitable. One can share with one's brother but one can also, as in the case of Esau, trick him out of his due. One can marry into one's neighbor's family and thereby enlarge one's own community of kinfolk, but one can also beat one's neighbors at their own unscrupulous game, and, as in the case of Laban and his two daughters, Rachel and Leah, get away with not only the daughters but with the best of the old man's flocks as well. Jacob is the folk-hero who outsmarts everybody including his brother and his father-in-law. Life is a game of wits - a contest - a wrestling match, if you will, in which an occasional breech of the Marquis of Queensbury Rules will make you the champ. The earlier biblical tradition apparently celebrated these somewhat twisted virtues as evidence of man's superiority and nobility, much in the same way we are inclined to celebrate the morally dubious shrewdness of a tremendously successful businessman or politician. Such practical wisdom sets men apart from other creatures after all and is therefore easily mistaken for reflections of a God-like image within. That's why in the earliest version of this story, in a contest with Jacob, even God withdraws limping. God has created a match for himself in shrewdness.

But experience was to teach the Israelites a less obvious truth. If Jacob is clever, it is not entirely a good-natured cleverness. It is a cleverness which sets him at odds. It inevitably introduces an overweening self-regard into the human picture. Men who begin by being playfully competitive too often end in dead earnest. Instead of life being an adventure in faith, they begin to see possibilities of their controlling their destiny by the application of a more intense shrewdness. Instead of believing that abundance is a promise from God, they gradually succumb to the temptation of providing for themselves. Unbelief, pride and inordinate desire are the result, and what are these but the marks of a man estranged from the life of faith and hence alienated from God.

On one dark night of the soul, there came a reckoning for Jacob. It was the night of his humiliation - the night he received a permanent reminder that whatever gifts we have received from God, as Saint Paul says, we have received in finite earthen vessels. This vessel, so fragile, vulnerable to a thousand afflictions, which breaks down, grows old and unsightly after so brief a span, is contrary to every reasonable explanation, a proper mansion for the Spirit of God who is the Lord and Giver of life. How easily tempted we are to reject life on those terms and compensate out of fear of being cheated by panting after dust. The temptation is perennial. The chance for security in a multitude of other guises, the attractive prospect of a world beaten at its own game, become the epiphanies of idols who are the smiling pretenders of the Lord and Giver of life. And it is these idols to whom we turn in unconscious apostasy. But we are wrong, and it is a fatal error. The transcendent power belongs to God alone and to no idol of our own. Let us remember, says Paul, that while it is the nature of life for us to be afflicted, we are not crushed; we are perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed; in fact, we carry death about with us at all times and in all places. But it is the death of Jesus; which means that we also carry about with us at all times and in all places the resurrection power of Jesus. He proved once and for all that His is Spirit which is Lord - His the Spirit which gives life!

God lames us often, but He does not depart without a blessing. Jacob limped the rest of his days to the grave, but every halting step was a reminder of the One from whom blessings flow. Again, the words of Paul: though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day! It is a hard saying for one undergoing the dark night of the soul, wrestling with we know not whom, afflicted, as it were, by one who will not give His name. Yet there is a dawn of light approaching wherein every man will know, like Jacob, that he has been blessed! Thanks be to God.