OK, so here's the deal: our hero Jacob –
or is it anti-hero Jacob? – has arrived in Haran, after fleeing his
father's place in South Palestine.
You'll remember why he had to leave: his brother Esau was plotting his
death in a murderous rage. Why? Because Jacob had tricked his blind, mentally
infirm father Isaac into giving him his blessing, when it by rights
belonged to Esau. So, you might ask,
what's the big deal? Why doesn't Isaac
just give his blessing to Esau as well?
I mean, we give our blessing every time somebody sneezes, for
goodness sake . . . Aaa- choo! someone goes, and we say "bless
you." And who can forget all the
"God bless the U.S.A." slogans that appeared on cars and country
music lyric sheets, asking – rather selfishly, don't you think? – for God to
bless ourselves, to give a great big old theological "bless
you" to ourselves,. as if we – who've corralled a twenty-five percent
of the earth's wealth for our measly four-point-three percent of the
world's population – as if we really need any more of God's blessing . . . A
friend of mine has a bumper sticker that I think says it all . . . God bless
the whole world, no exceptions . . .
But I digress. The point is, we see blessing these days
as something pretty trivial . . . we see it as just words, as just a
slogan or something polite to say after somebody sneezes. But that's not the way the Old Testament sees
it . . . there, it's a deadly serious proposition. In the Old Testament, words of blessing were
not empty . . . they had potency in and of themselves. Just the saying of them imparted
energy and power . . . when God blessed Isaac, he became a wealthy man . . .
and that blessing was irreversibly transferred to Jacob when – disguised as
Esau – he served up some game that Rebekah had cooked. And as soon as Isaac figured out who he'd really
blessed, he knew what he'd done . . . Esau cried out "Have you not
reserved a blessing for me?" And
Isaac just said "Your brother came deceitfully, and he has taken away your
blessing. I have blessed him, and blessed he shall be."
And now, Jacob the blessed one—blessed in
spite of being a cheat and a liar, blessed in spite of what he's done,
the same Jacob to whom God has just
passed the promise saying "in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed"—that Jacob has just
gotten to his uncle Laban's place in Haran, and he's greeted him as a kinsman,
and then worked a month for him – apparently without any problems – and now,
here, all of a sudden Laban brings up the question of wages . . . he
says "Just because you're my kinsman, should you serve me for
nothing?" And on the surface it
looks like he's being kind here, being generous, but do we detect
an undercurrent of deceit already?
"Tell me," Laban says "what shall your wages
be?" Now, Jacob's already met the
beautiful Rachel watering her father's sheep at the well, and we all know that
things . . . happen at biblical wells, and so he may have fallen in love
with her right there, love at first sight, like in a Harlequin Romance – and so
when Laban asks what his wages shall be, he asks for her: "I will serve
you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel." Of course, he knows about the older
daughter Leah, whose eyes were lovely, according to our translation, or weak,
as the New International Version has it, and who else in
Jacob's life had weak eyes?
So Jacob serves Laban for seven years but
they seem but a few days because of the love he has for Rachel – the orchestra
swells romantically, heavy on the strings, love is indeed a many splendored
thing – and he says to Laban "Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for
my time is completed," the romantic old devil, and so Laban orders up a
wedding feast, and they feast all day – feast, feast, feast – and Hebrew
weddings being what they are, drink all day – drink, drink, drink – and in the
evening, when I personally am surprised that Jacob could even stand up –
Laban brings his daughter into the tent.
And when the morning comes, Behold! it's Leah! and can you imagine the chagrin, and maybe
even the embarrassment . . . Jacob's slept all night with the wrong woman . . .
talk about weak eyes! Hilarity ensues!
Now obviously, this is meant to be funny .
. . and it is, in a bawdy way . . . and I want you to notice the earthiness of
the scene, the physicality of it . . . the ancient Hebrews were
down-to-earth people, and if you think about it, it makes sense . . .
sheep-and-cattle herders tend to be matter-of-fact about . . . biological
functions, shall we say . . . and here the humor revolves around Jacob being so
drunk or stupid or something that he sleeps with the wrong woman or, as
the scripture itself puts it bluntly, he goes into the wrong daughter. But of course there's something else at work
here, isn't there? The trickster Jacob,
who is so good – and so not-repentant – at deceiving others, is himself
tricked, bunko-ed, taken advantage of. He's
met his match in Laban,
And oh how sweet the irony: he beds the
woman whose ambiguous eyes – depending on the translation, they are weak or
lovely – recall Jacob's poor old blind father, and the way Jacob is tricked is
that he's made blind – again like
Isaac – by the dark and the drink . . . and perhaps his love. And the sense of what goes around comes
around is made all the more acute by the delicious ironies at work here. And the folks who listen to this story told
and retold around the campfire, and those who later hear it proclaimed from the
scroll in the temple, nod their heads in satisfaction, because what goes around
does come around, and Jacob is only getting what he deserves.
And so folks who were scandalized when
Jacob the deceiver got the goods in spite of his deceit get a measure of
gratification in this story, and that's why these stories can't be isolated
from one another, they are all of one piece in the end . . . the story of
Jacob's conflict with his brother and father is incomplete without this
tale of his comeuppance.
But . . . what about the women? What about what Rachel and Leah wanted in all
of this? What about their
preferences here, don't they matter? In
a word, no. Lamentably, in those days,
women were possessions of the men . . . daughters of their fathers, wives of
their husbands . . . they had little formal rights in and of themselves . . .
that's not to say, of course, that they didn't have any power . . . see the
machinations of Sarah and Rebekah if you think that they didn't . . . but they
didn't have any rights, and men could – and frequently did – do with them
whatever they want.
To illustrate this, look at the language
used here . . . we're told that in the evening, Laban took his daughter
and brought her to Jacob and he went into
her . . . and this language of taking and bringing and going
into the woman is common . . . the woman is passive in this thing, all the
verbs – taking and bringing and going-into – belong to the males. And the verb "take" is a
commonly-used word for "marriage" as in "he took her as his
wife." Men were the takers and
women were the . . . tak-ees.
And of course this hierarchical,
male-centric notion of human relations in scripture has been used to solidify
male strangle-holds on power in many places – not least of all the church – for
centuries. And our passage takes it all
as a matter of course . . . Leah has no say in what has happened, any more than
does Rachel . . . and when Jacob complains about being tricked out of his one,
true love, Laban shrugs it off – we don't give the youngest before the
firstborn in this country – and the final ironic nail in Jacob's coffin
becomes apparent. Here he is, running
away after successfully subverting primogeniture, after successfully
overturning the ancient rule that the first-born gets the lion's share, and now
he's hoisted by that same petard. His
idyllic dream of life with the ravishing Rachel is dashed by Laban who says
oops, I forgot to tell you . . . our laws say that the first-born comes . . .
first.
Well.
That crafty old Laban manages to bind Jacob to him for another seven
years – fourteen in all – in order to get both his daughters married off, and
Jacob promises to work another seven years, and he takes Rachel and goes into
her, and our passage ends on an ominous note . . . Jacob loved Rachel more than
Leah, and it's eerily reminiscent of his own parents' dysfunctional marriage –
Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob most of
all. What goes around does indeed come
around.
And we might well expect trouble to come
out of it, and that's just what happens . . . Rachel is barren but Leah is
incredibly fertile, and she gives Jacob four sons, one right after another –
Reuben and Levi and Simeon and Judah – and she thought surely Jacob would love
her after that . . . but Rachel gives him her maid to bear children in
her stead, and she does – Dan and Naphtali . . . but then Leah gives Jacob her
maid and she bears him Gad and Asher . . . and then she herself bears two more
sons, Issacher and Zebulun . . . and conflict between the sisters, rivalry for
Jacob's love – certainly of dubious worth – becomes a way of life for Jacob's
family there in Haran . . . and in fact, conflict has surrounded Jacob all
his life . . . with his brother, beginning in the womb, for Abraham's sake, and
with his father Isaac and father-in-law Laban, and now conflict he
cannot control swirls around him once again . . .
And some of you out there might be wanting
to ask a simple question: where is God in all of this? Where is the God we know – the God of Abraham
and Moses, of Jeremiah and Jesus – where is God in this story of a
dysfunctional and deeply conflicted family?
Well, I'm glad you asked . . . I have to say that . . . God is right
there, in the struggle . . . because out of that conflict comes a
people, the people of Israel . . . the sons born to Jacob through Leah and the
maids are the patriarchs of the Hebrew nation, the heads of the first ten of
the twelve tribes . . . and finally, Rachel conceives and bears a son –
Joseph – and Joseph would eventually save them all . . .
God is in the conflict, right square in
the middle of it . . . and out of that struggle, out of that crucible of fire
and brimstone, God forms a people. God
uses this tremendously dysfunctional family, with its huge, gaping flaws, who
fight like cats and dogs, and takes them and somehow her will is worked. Out of all the conflict and pain comes . . .
life, comes the Israelite people, comes hope. And as a Christian people, we too were forged
in conflict, we too were forged in pain, we too were forged in the
struggle between one man and the powers that be, the powers that rule the
earth, as personified by the Roman empire and their religious-authority toadies
. . . and we confess that God – in the person of Jesus Christ – was quite
literally right there in the middle of that conflict, and in fact suffered its
ultimate expression on the cross.
And
I don't know about you, but I’m comforted by the thought of God right there
beside us in the struggle, right there with us . . . because it seems like
– sometimes at least – that our own lives, no less than Jacob's, are all
about conflict. . . families that are less than . . . loving, people that seem
bent on our destruction, who seem to be out to get us, all the time . . . when
the conflict over survival, the fight just to make it with our health
and sanity and life threatens to overwhelm us and just sink us like an
overloaded ferry, God is there with us and is working God’s mysterious
ways. And just like with Jacob’s unruly
life and times, just like in its ups and downs and ins and outs and skittering
sideways moves, God will triumph in the end, life will emerge, and God’s
blessings will be showered on us all . . . no exceptions. Amen.
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