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First
Reading
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Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
| Genesis 32:22–31
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Psalm 121 |
Timothy 3:14–4:5
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Luke 18:1–8
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The story of Jacob and his late night struggle at the ford was likely handed down for generations, around the embers of a campfire and told with the same dread and suspense as we might tell our children a story of a mysterious and powerful occurrence. Fords and bridges across rivers have always been considered places of danger, where demons may lie waiting and safe and easy crossings never taken for granted.
Make no question about it. The old Jacob was a cheat. He had cheated his older brother twice, and finally had fled in fear of Esau’s anger. Jacob lived the next twenty years in a world of deception and shady deals. But now he had no other place to go. He had decided to return home and face the consequences. He split his family into separate groups to protect them and sent ahead flocks as a peace offering to his brother. Little did Jacob realize that his brother Esau had changed. Even less did Jacob know that by morning, he himself would be changed, too.
With whom did Jacob struggle? The text is purposely ambiguous. It was certainly much more than an ordinary river demon or troll. Was it Jacob’s guilty conscience, a ghost of his past coming to haunt him? Was it a confrontation with a messenger of God over what Jacob the cheat was and what Jacob, the parent of a great nation, would be called to be? The Bible is purposely ambiguous, just calling it a creature, but afterwards, Jacob senses the presence of God.
Jacob had originally stolen his brother’s birthright by lying and refusing to disclose to his dying father his real name. But here by the ford his defenses are stripped, Jacob can no longer deceive. He acknowledges who he really is, Jacob the old cheat. It is only after he fesses up to who he is, that he receives a blessing, and discovers he is no longer just the old Jacob, but now with a blessing he is given the new name of Israel. However, for the rest of his life, whenever he tried to run, a sharp pain in his thigh would remind him of this strange transfiguration.
At daybreak, Jacob safely crosses the river, no longer afraid to meet his brother. Esau comes with arms outstretched, and hugs Jacob. Then, an overwhelmed Jacob says to Esau, “For truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God, with such favor you have received me.” In his anxiety and struggle at the ford in the dark, Jacob never saw with whom he was struggling nor did his adversary ever reveal his name. Yet the following morning, Jacob becomes reconciled with his brother, his exile is ended, and in the eyes of his brother’s welcome, he sees the face of God.
The individual people in the Bible are rarely mere individuals. They are also symbols for entire nations and communities. Jacob is that community of faith who, like us, often has a history of questionable virtue and with lamentable limitations, but is continually called by God to be something else, something much more. As a result of staying, facing his past, and wrestling over his life at the ford of Jabbok, Jacob changed from a cheat into an instrument of blessing.
Today this passage from Genesis confirms that God is often found in the process of the struggle as we go forward, a struggle which often happens in ambiguous circumstances when we are groping for clarity and the answers are not all readily available. Yet in staying with the struggle, people of faith find their anxiety of the future neutralized, just as the anxiety of Jacob over meeting his brother was transformed into reconciliation, a new name, and a new legacy. Like Jacob, we don’t immediately see God directly in the struggle nor do we ever command God’s will. The struggle may be scary and may keep an uncomfortable hold of us until we fess up whom we really are. It may teach us that so much of the control over our lives that we so desperately try to protect, is an illusion. However, wrestling with God has the potential to alter us in amazing ways and open to us a new future. Perhaps after the struggle, like Jacob, we will discover that something in the faces of our brothers and sisters is like seeing the face of God.
Of course, our stories will never be exactly like Jacob’s, but most of us, as we grow into adulthood, have faced forces beyond our power and comprehension, and we have survived and become the better for it. We know we have been changed and received a lasting blessing because of them. Perhaps some quiet night if we reflect about it, we, like Jacob’s progeny, will be able to pass on a marvelous and mysterious story of grace.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
