Readings – Genesis 32: 9 – 30; Mark 7: 1 – 23
It seems that confidence is the theme of our music today; the cheery confidence of the Dyson Magnificat in D, followed by the quietly confident Nunc Dimittis and Just now our anthem, ‘Great is the Lord’, Elgar’s great and very dramatic setting of Psalm 48 – ending again with confidence. As the Psalmist says “For this God is our God for ever and ever, He will be our guide even unto death.” Words which Jacob might have echoed from his experience of God’s blessing on his life. As we meet him this evening he’s a man of substance, with family and great wealth. Although, as he is about to discover getting too close to God has its unnerving side too!
Jacob is also a man on the run. Deep-seated family hostilities have characterized his entire life. Because his parents Isaac and Rebekah played favorites, he and his older twin Esau grew up hating each other. Jacob swindled Esau of his family birthright, which entitled him to a double share of the family inheritance. Later, with his mother Rebekah’s conniving he also swindled the family blessing destined for Esau as the firstborn from his blind and dying father. When Esau threatened to murder him, Jacob fled to his uncle Laban. Laban tricked Jacob into marrying his daughter Leah, eventually allowing him also to marry her sister Rachel, the one who he had wanted to marry in the first place.
Sick of his father-in-law’s manipulation, Jacob fled Laban, only to encounter again his long lost and embittered brother. So, still scheming, and afraid of what Esau might do, Jacob organizes a lavish gift to buy him off and sends the caravan along with his women and children across the river Jabbok. All his life Jacob has been a schemer and a cheat, the ‘Del Boy’ of the Patriarchs, always on the look out for the next deal which will improve his lot. He knows that God is with him, but he’s scared. So in his prayer he reminds God that he has promised to do good to him and multiply his descendants – and he asks for help with the problem of his angry brother Esau. He really needs the ruse of the gifts to work.
And then he finds himself alone. Exhausted and deeply anxious about what will happen, in the desert wilderness, separated from all of his considerable worldly possessions, powerless to control his fate. It’s at this point that he has his encounter with the mysterious stranger.
We’re not told who the stranger is. Is Jacob wrestling with himself – with his own conflicted feelings about his twin brother? With his fear of what might happen? Or is the stranger God, or an angel of God? Certainly it’s a severely testing experience which requires all of Jacob’s resources. And just for once he has to fight with all of his strength rather than scheming his way out of the situation. And he doesn’t come out of it unscathed, he limps for the rest of his life. Afterwards he believes that he has seen the face of God.
We’re not all schemers like Jacob, but we tend to like to be in control. And most of the time we’re pretty successful at it. It’s important, of course to have a certain level of order in our lives. But we so easily assume that we have God under control as well. Listen to this quotation from W H Auden. It’s a kind of humorous caricature of what our prayer can so often be like:
“O God, put away justice and trust for we cannot understand them and do not want them. Eternity would bore us dreadfully. Leave thy heavens and come down to our earth of waterclocks and hedges. Become our Uncle. Look after Baby, help Willy with his homework, introduce Muriel to a handsome naval officer. Be interesting and weak like us, and we will love you as we love ourselves.”1
It’s so easy, much of the time, to make God in our own image
Then there are the times when, like Jacob we have exhausted our own resources. We have planned, we have worked, we have loved – and it seems that everything we have built up is on the verge of collapsing around us. There is no longer anything, humanly speaking, which we can do. So we pray and we wrestle, not knowing quite whether we are fighting ourselves or God. And we do not feel safe at all. And in those moments we know, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).
For Jacob, the wrestling was transformative. It’s not that he became a nicer human being. His reconciliation with Esau which followed soon afterwards is less than straightforward. But because he hung on and struggled and refused to be defeated by the mysterious stranger, God gave him a new name. No longer Jacob, which means ‘heel’ or ‘schemer’ but Israel, which means ‘struggler with God’ or ‘God struggles’. And Israel was from then on the name of God’s people. A people who for centuries afterwards struggled with God and with whom God struggled.
If we are prepared to face God, not with our superficial requests for an easy life but, as Jacob did in extremity, bring to Him all our anger, our wrestling, all that we do not understand, He will surely meet us too. We can be sure too that we will never be the same again. Because God’s loving kindness is greater and deeper than we could ever have imagined “this is our God for ever and ever; He will be our guide even unto death”.
This is the source of true confidence.
Amen
[1]W H Auden, from his Christmas Oratorio For the Time Being quoted in The Healing Word, sermons by Barbara Brown Taylor, p118