Genesis 32:24-30
Jacob wrestles with
God
"Jacob was left alone;
and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. (25) When the man saw that he
did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and
Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. (26) Then he
said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not
let you go, unless you bless me." (27) So he said to him, "What is your
name?" And he said, "Jacob." (28) Then the man said, "You shall no longer
be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with
humans, and have prevailed." (29) Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me
your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he
blessed him. (30) So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have
seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.""
Real growth experiences
always involve struggle and pain.
That's as true for the
butterfly that has to fight its way painfully out of it cocoon before it
can use its wings as it is for the human being who has to fight her way
out of a suicidal depression before she can form meaningful relationships.
Real growth experiences always involve struggle and pain.
This is true to our
experience, and so it should not be surprising to find that when societies
have ritualised growth stages in life, the rituals always involve
pain.
Robert Bly, in his book
'Iron John', tells of an aboriginal tribe that used to take all the boys,
when they reached a certain age, to a special place where they would tell
them the ancient stories of their forefathers and where they would point
to a distant tree where their great forefather (an Adamic figure) used to
sit and where he lost a tooth in a fight with some demonic creature. And
while they strain to look at the tree, the adult males come by and knock
out one tooth from each of the boys. And then the boys return home as
men.
In our white Australian
culture of course we have no 'coming of age' ritual for boys or girls,
though, as some of you know, I'm doing my best to establish one (for boys
at least). I do everything I can to encourage young boys, as they reach
the ages of 16 and 17 to start training for a fight. Some say "but what
if I get hurt?" I say, "If you don't get hurt, you didn't
fight."
Why am I so keen for these
guys to fight? Because I know how much my first fight did for me.
There's nothing quite like
it - climbing into that square ring, where all the normal rules of
society, that aim to restrain us from violent involvement with each other,
are (virtually) ignored. The women folk and children are pushed back at a
distance. You stand in the middle of the ring, under the spotlights, in
your underwear. You stare across that short and painful space at your
equally ill-clad opponent, knowing that you have only your arms and your
legs to defend yourself with. And the bell rings and your heart pounds and
fist hits face and everything becomes a blur. But when the final bell
goes, and you make your final walk back to your corner, to be greeted by
the embrace of your brethren who are waiting to receive you, you know that
you're a man.
Real growth experiences
always involve struggle and pain. And so Jacob, at the turning point of
his life, wrestles all night with a dark and shadowy figure by the river
Jabbok. He struggles. He fights. He is wounded. He is blessed. In the
morning he limps away from this violent spiritual encounter as a new man
with a new name, saying, "I have encountered God face to face, and have
survived."
The great Rabbi Maimonides
saw the whole episode as so impossible that he said it had to be a dream.
Or if not a dream then perhaps Jacob wrestled with his brother Esau, or if
not Esau could it perhaps have been that Jacob wrestled with himself? For
how can a human wrestle with God?
The one thing that seems
clear to me from the story is that, as far as Jacob was concerned, it had
to be God that he was wrestling with. For it is this wrestle that makes
sense of Jacob's whole life.
Do you remember the story of
Jacob's life up to this point?
During Rebekah's pregnancy
with Jacob and his twin brother Esau - apparently it was so painful and
problematic that she thought she was going to die. The children, we were
told 'were wrestling within her'.
When Jacob is born he comes
out second, grasping his brother's heel, and so they call him 'Jacob'
meaning 'grabber', and as he grew up he made it his habit to go on
grabbing everything he could for himself, especially those things that
belonged to his brother Esau.
Jacob, as I read him, was a
nasty child and he became a rather nasty man. Yet he was also the 'child
of the promise' through whom God had promised he would make a great
nation. Jacob knew that, and it would appear that his wheeling and dealing
was his attempt to achieve for himself that destiny that he had already
been promised by God. But he had to do it his own way.
Jacob struggled with Esau
and stole his birthright. He struggled with his father and fooled him into
giving him Esau's inheritance. Then he left town because Esau wanted to
kill him, and he went and struggled with his uncle Laban in a far away
land, who turned out to be a bigger grabber than he was. In the end Jacob
wrestles from Laban most of his wealth too, and Laban joins the growing
list of persons who would like to see Jacob dead.
So Jacob heads back home
with all the wealth and his women and his children and the servants that
he has managed to acquire through the grabbing and grasping and wrestling
techniques that he had perfected over many years. As he nears his
homeland, with Laban behind him, he hears that his brother is coming out
to meet him with an army of four hundred men - a force that is clearly
greater than anything Jacob has with him. And so Jacob realises that all
his grabbing and grasping and cheating and wrestling is all about to come
an end.
So Jacob sends on ahead of
himself gift and offerings aimed at appeasing his brother. He divides up
his entourage into two groups, so that one might hopefully escape while
the other is destroyed. Finally he sends all the women and children across
the river in front of him, in the hope that, presumably, even if they
don't sway Esau's sympathy, at least Esau's arrows might hit them
first. And he spends the night alone on the other side of the river -
alone perhaps for the first time in many years. Alone with time to think,
to plan, to pray perhaps. But God jumps him!
It seems clear to me that in
all Jacob's wrestling and grasping, his issue had always really been with
God. He knew he was the 'child of the promise'. His mother had been
telling him this since he was a tiny tot, so he figured that it was his
destiny to be a millionaire by the age of 30. And so if he wasn't raking
in the millions from the word go, it must be somebody else's fault.
It was his dumb brother
Esau's fault, or it was his dotty old dad Isaac's fault, or it was his
conniving uncle Laban's fault. Because he had a right to his millions, and
he had a right to all the women he wanted, and he had a right to good
health, to good relationships and to constant happiness, and if he didn't
have all these things then it had to be someone else's fault.
Yes, there's something very
contemporary about the character of Jacob, and we know full well what he'd
be doing if he were growing up today in this society. He'd be suing
everybody - divorcing his parents, taking out AVO's against the rest of
his family, entering into pre-nuptial agreements with his women, and tying
up all his assets in trust funds.
Jacob spent most of his life
grasping for the destiny that God had promised to provide for him anyway.
OK, maybe God's vision for Jacob was a little different from Jacob's
vision, but the bottom line is that God had always intended to give him
the good stuff without him having to go around grabbing it from everybody
else. So when God finally gets Jacob alone, He jumps him. And God doesn't
just sit Jacob down and talk to him about it. God belts him.
This is one story where a
good knowledge of traditional wrestling does help quite a bit in your
understanding of the story.
When Jacob and God wrestle,
they're not competing according to modern Olympic rules - looking for a
shoulder pin and a count of three. They're wrestling in the traditional
style - an all in brawl that usually ends either in a submission or in
death.
I suspect I know more than
most people here about the history of wrestling. Let me tell you that most
countries and cultures have their own traditional wrestling styles - from
Silat in Indonesia to Jiujitsu in Japan to Sambo in Russia to the
Pankration of the early Greeks. Each style has its own look and feel, but
one thing they have in common is that they were all traditionally quite
brutal.
I know one man who spent his
teenage years wrestling his way through the sandpits of India, where every
village has a slightly different style of wrestling from its neighbour. He
told me how he stayed with a family of wrestlers in one town, where their
style involved wrestling with a great metal spike attached to one arm.
Apparently you were allowed one good shot with the spike when you got the
other guy on the ground. Almost every member of the family was carrying
some horrific wound - a missing eye or a great hold in the face etc. This
is traditional wrestling.
When I was in Greece I saw a
statue of Hercules and Atlas wrestling in a way that reflects the way the
ancient Greeks used to wrestle. Hercules has Atlas above his head and is
about to drive Atlas' head into the ground. Atlas has hold of Hercules'
genitals and it ready to tear them off! This is the way the Greeks used to
wrestle at the original Olympics! It was said of Ulysses that when he
returned from Troy after twenty years of battle his own mother couldn't
recognise him, but when the winner of the Olympic wrestling returned home
after the Olympics, even his own dog couldn't recognise him! It was a
rough sport.
Now this is obviously not
far from the sort of wrestling on view in Genesis 32, because in that
fight God only gains the advantage when He wounds Jacob with a shot to
the inside thigh. Many scholars think though this may be a
euphemism suggesting that he was wounded in the genitals - God applying a
wrestling technique colloquially known as 'the squirrel'. We don't
know for sure, but we do know that Jacob limps for the rest of his
life.
This is not a comfortable
image of God - the one who fights with his chosen people and both blesses
them and wounds them with shots below the belt!
And this is where the rubber
hits the road in this story, isn't it? This image of the God who brawls
with his chosen ones and wrestles them into submission is a long way from
the gentle Jesus meek and mild that we might be more familiar and
more comfortable with!
We live in an age where
popular religion is about getting in touch with your spiritual side and it
tends to be sugar and spice and all things nice, but with the Biblical God
there is also a lot of blood and pain and struggle.
"It is a fearful thing to
fall into the hands of the living God", says the writer of the letter
to the Hebrews, and if you're going to deal with this God you are going to
have to deal with God on God's terms.
Have you wrestled yet with
this God? Have you gone beyond thinking about Him to actually come to
grips with Him. Have you ever prayed as Jesus did, with the sweat coming
down like drops of blood? Have you ever screamed at Him, unable to break
his suffocating grip? Have you ever really thrashed it out with God and
reached that point where you can limp away saying with Jacob "I have
seen the face of God and have survived."
Real growth experiences
always involve struggle and pain.
I've wrestled with God on at
least two significant points in my life. The first led to my conversion,
but it cost me. I lost most of my friends through my conversion including
my girl friend. I had to abandon my hopes for a quiet career as a barber
in a seaside town!
I wrestled again with God
after my first marriage broke down. Again I lost friends and family, and I
had to come to terms with the loss of what I thought was the plan God had
for my life. I was supposed to be a missionary in Thailand by this stage.
I was sure that had been where God was leading me. I had been sure of so
many things. I wrestled.
John Calvin, in his
commentary on Genesis (published in 1554) makes the bold claim that
"all the servants of God in this world are wrestlers".
For "the Lord exercises
us with various kinds of conflicts. Moreover, it is not said that Satan,
or any mortal man, wrestled with Jacob, but God himself: to teach us that
our faith is tried by him; and whenever we are tempted, our business is
truly with him, not only because we fight under his auspices, but because
he, as an antagonist, descends into the arena to try our strength. This,
though at first sight it seems absurd, experience and reason teaches us to
be true. For as all prosperity flows from his goodness, so adversity is
either the rod with which he corrects our sins, or the test of our faith
and patience. And since there is no kind of temptation by which God does
not try his faithful people the similitude is very suitable, which
represents him as coming, hand to hand, to combat with them. Therefore,
what was once exhibited under a visible form to our father Jacob, is daily
fulfilled in the individual members of the Church; namely, that, in their
temptations, it is necessary for them to wrestle with God."
Do we dare to wrestle with
God? For Jacob it was the turning point, not simply to becoming a
man, but to becoming a man of faith. Do we dare to make that
transition ourselves by confronting God in our humanity? Will we dare to
have it said of ourselves that 'we wrestled with God and with men and
have survived'?
Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, August 4th,
2002
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