One
of the inevitable consequences of the commoditization of Christianity, of the
making it into a salable product—the better to attract members by, my dear—is
that our religion to a certain extent has become whitewashed. A friend of mine—a pastoral therapist—once
told me “let’s face it: the roots of Christianity are murky and bloody. At its heart, it’s a Middle-Eastern mystery
religion, dark and unfathomable.” Ok, he
might not have said unfathomable, but
that’s the general idea, but in fact, it’s a pretty good descriptor. Most biblical stories have depths that we
cannot fathom, that we cannot measure, or understand . . . we treat them,
though, as if they were, as if we
here in the 21st century can understand what a writer from three thousand
years ago means, what he has in mind by what he has written for people in his
own time, people with his own background, who understand the context of what he
was writing. The best we can do, I
think, is to see through a glass darkly, to measure a story’s depth with the
full understanding that the water’s clouded by the silt of many years and many
intervening scribes.
That’s
where the Holy Spirit comes in, the Advocate as Jesus calls it, the Comforter .
. . we pray for the Spirit to come down upon us and create for us a space
within which to interact with these ancient texts, a space where a symbiosis of
our 21st Century sensibilities and those of three-thousand-year-dead
authors can thrive and be fruitful, at least for the space of the fifteen
minutes or so on a Sunday morning sermon.
I
trust that this process has occurred with this morning’s passage, although I
think that in this case, the Holy Spirit has its work cut out for it. This is a particularly enigmatic, especially
mysterious, little tale. It just sort of
happens, out of the blue, as Jacob is returning to his home after years away
from his family, having fled the wrath of his brother Esau after having stolen
his birthright. Jacob, it seems, wasn’t
one of the nicest guys, especially in
his earlier life; he’s been compared to the “trickster” figure of Native
American lore, the entity who, while not really evil, creates mischief and,
sometimes, heartache for those who cross its path.
So
he’d taken off after conning his brother out of his birthright, after Esau
threatened to kill him, and he ended up with his Uncle Laban, who turned out to
be more than his match, swindling him out of seven years labor for a wife he
didn’t even want. But all the work
seemed to make Jacob a better person, or maybe it was the humiliation of it
all, and when he starts back toward his family in Palestine, he is a changed
man. And as he nears the River Jordan,
he becomes more and more nervous about what Esau might do to him, and he sends
some servants ahead of him to meet with his brother to test the waters, so to
speak, and they come back saying Esau’s on his way with 400 men, which was a
sizable bunch in those days, and Jacob becomes, as they say, sore afraid.
So
he divides his retinue into two parts, all the goats and sheep and cattle and family
members, separated to ensure that if Esau comes upon them bent on destruction,
at least half of them would survive. And
as an extra added precaution, he sends some gifts to bribe his brother, or to
put a more positive spin on it, to show his contrition, that he’s seriously
sorry for what he’s done.
But,
trickster that he is, he can’t just
send the gifts outright—he has to complicate matters, he has to hedge his bets
and draw out the gift-giving, perhaps to make it seem like the presents are more
than they really are. He lines all his
livestock up in their individual droves, and sends them out, drove by drove,
well separated, and instructs the drovers to tell Esau that the livestock “belong
to your servant Jacob; they are a present sent to my lord Esau; and moreover he
is behind us.” Then he goes to bed.
But some time in the dark
belly of the night, when even the night-birds are silent, and the stars sleep
veiled in their velvet drapery, something moves Jacob to wakefulness, perhaps
some whisper of the divine, or maybe just an undigested bit of mutton, and he
moves his family across the River Jabbok, his two wives Leah and Rachel, his
children and his servants, but stays himself on the near side. And with a breathtaking, matter-of-fact simplicity,
the narrator tells us “Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until
daybreak.” We get no play-by-play
broadcaster, describing each move and hold, no color announcer comparing the
action on Jabbok’s bank to when he
wrestled as a sophomore at Samaritan State University, just a simple, stark
announcement: a man wrestled with him until daybreak.
Today we would analyze it to
death, likely. Thinking of the
psychological implications, maybe, how the man in the dark represents Jacob’s
dark side, his repressed nature hidden from the world, who comes out only in his
dreams and nightmares. Or maybe we would
dismiss it whole-hog as a dark fairy tale, a deus-ex-machina meant to punctuate
and explain the sudden shift from Jacob the runner, Jacob the trickster, to
Israel, patriarch of a nation.
But our narrator does none of
those things, he—the writer was almost certainly male—announces the fact and leaves
it to our imaginations to fill in the details.
Where did the man come from? He
doesn’t tell us. Could they see one
another as they fought? He doesn’t
say. Were they exhausted in the morning
light? We haven’t a clue. We’re only told that a man wrestles with
Jacob, and really, that’s enough. The
stark fact of the wrestling is what counts here. He sends his family off across the Jabbok,
and a man wrestles with him. And we’re
never told who the man is, though by the end of the story we, like Jacob
himself, have a good idea. And when the
man sees that he can’t beat Jacob, he whacks him on the hip socket and puts it
out of joint. And though it’s been a
long time since I managed my Junior-high-school wrestling team—I was not an
athletic child—I’m pretty sure that hip-whacking is not a legal move in
wrestling, and so the inescapable conclusion is that the man Jacob was grubbing
around with in the Middle-Eastern sand cheated.
Or is it? An inescapable conclusion, that is? There were no referees there on Jabbok’s
bank, no three-minute timers, no rules and mats and time clocks. The assumption that the man cheats is a
modern one; the 11th Century BC hearers of the written story, and
those before who heard it around the flickering light of thousands of
campfires, wouldn’t have thought so.
Theirs was a tough life, a hard life, and you used every advantage. The original listeners would quite understand
the apparently underhanded ploy, and perhaps even applaud.
The first clue we’re given as
to the possible identity of Jacob’s assailant—if that is what he is, an
assailant—is when he tells Jacob to let him go, because the day is breaking,
and I’m thinking “What is this
guy? Some dark spirit of the night, some
phantom or wraith, that would fade away like the mist with the rising of the
sun? Or maybe he’s a vampire—I like
vampire movies—that the sun would burn to a crisp were its rays to touch him?” And I’d be scared out of my wits, not to
mention mentally exhausted by that point, but Jacob’s always looking for an
angle, always striving for an advantage, and he tells him no. I will not let you go unless you bless me.
And we would miss a big chunk
of the point if we didn’t notice that this lust for blessing is exactly what
got him in trouble in the first place, exactly what got him banished from his
father’s household in the first place, after he stole Esau’s blessing and had
to go on the lam, and here is the height of Jacob’s striving, the height of his
machinations . . . the riverbank wrestler, who for all Jacob knows is some kind
of dybbuk, some kind of ravenous spirit, wants to be let go—you wouldn’t like him in the morning light!—and he
uses that desire to extract a blessing.
And the man asks his name, and
Jacob gives it, and the man says “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but
Israel, for you have striven with God and humans, and have prevailed.” And
again, we should be thinking back to an earlier time, when the Lord told his
ancestor Abram that his name would be Abraham from now on, but Jacob’s still not satisfied, and he asks the
man’s name, and today we don’t quite get the import of this question, but it’s
yet another attempt of Jacob to get the advantage . . . in the ancient world,
if you knew someone’s name, you had power over them, and here Jacob is, trying
to get a little more juice on the man by the river, though we know by now that
he’s more than just a man, and probably God’s own self, for who else but God
gets to pronounce the names of God’s creatures?
And in return, the man asks an
equally dangerous question: “why is it that you ask my name?” and we know why,
we know that it’s because Jacob is always on the make, always looking for an
advantage, even from God, but in spite of that—or is it because of it?—Jacob
receives his second blessing.
And after he goes on his way
the next day, after he crosses the Jabbok and rejoins his family, and finally
meets up with Esau, his brother runs up to him and embraces—shades of the tale
of the prodigal son!—he runs up to him and embraces, all is forgiven,
apparently, and we have to ask: would it have happened like that if Jacob had not wrestled with God? After all, Esau was heading his way with a
small army, far too big a force just to go and lovingly meet his sibling. Would he have forgiven Jacob if God had not blessed him, if Jacob had not been
somehow . . . changed? The fight on the
Jabbok is a hinge event, a fulcrum around which the narrative turns. Jacob strives with the Lord, he contends with
God, and he comes out the other side blessed.
And I guess if there is a
lesson for us modern Christians, us modern worshippers of the wrestler on the
Jabbok, it is that we are not to be afraid of a little contention, a little
wrestling with our Maker. As I mentioned
right at the beginning, in our quest to make our faith nice, we’ve taken much of the grit from it, much of the meat.
We fall down on our knees in respectful worship, never thinking that
there is value in contending with God, that there is merit in struggling with
our faith.
When I was growing up, we were
taught not to question God, not to question our faith or at least our
denomination’s version of it. We sat in
Sunday School and nodded our heads and learned our lessons like good little
girls and boys, and the result was Christians who are good, but a little on the unimaginative side. Ok, a lot
on the unimaginative side. We knew how
it is, how God meant it to be, and didn’t question. God said it, we believed it, and that settled
it.
Problem is, an unquestioning
faith is a brittle faith, a faith that doesn’t stand up very well to the winds
of change and newly acquired information.
I don’t have any statistics to prove it, but I suspect that if you did a survey of those folks who
have grown disillusioned with the faith come disproportionately from its more
rigid manifestations. There is value in
the striving, in the contention, in the wrestling with God. Our Hebrew ancestors understood that, it’s
shot through the Old Testament, but many of today’s Christians have
unaccountably lost that ability or desire.
That’s why I thank God we
belong to a wrestling denomination, and in particular, a wrestling congregation, that encourages striving with
God, contending for understanding and meaning.
Because even though we may not ever fully get it, until perhaps the last
trump sounds, there is value in the striving, worth in the wrestling, merit in
the questioning of our faith. We are a
wrestling church, a striving congregation, and like Jacob, we will be
blessed. Amen.
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