Genesis 32:22-31 • Psalm 121 • 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 • Luke 18:1-8
The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. 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. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." 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." 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. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.
Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"
I don’t remember when it happened, but several months ago, a member of our church was talking with me about a previous time when as a young adult he had given up on church. The way he talked about it, it was as if he had given up on God, too. God was nowhere to be found, and why did it make sense to go through the motions at church when the people there were just as messed up as anyone else? But through this faith community, he discovered that God had never been distant… Even though this person had not been completely faithful, God’s faithfulness had never waned one bit. And as he talked, he clearly saw his faith not as an aspect of his life that required his performance or observance, but something that guided and worked through his imperfections. His life now gives witness to God’s faith in him, despite his struggles, rather than his struggles giving witness his own or to the church’s weakness.
Jacob was anything from perfect, for sure! Maybe God chose his family as one of the founding families of Israel so God could show just how much redemption God could bring to us! As someone whose very name means “trickster”, “over-reacher”, “supplanter”, Jacob’s life showed little regard for the sacred responsibility of being a descendant of God’s chosen family of Abraham. From the very time he came out of his womb, he was grabbing at his twin brother’s heel trying to come out of the womb first. As a young man he stole his brother’s right to their father’s blessing—a tremendously sacred honor only given to a firstborn son. He stole it by coming to his blind, aging dad, pretending to be his older brother Esau. And that’s just the beginning…but we get the picture about Jacob.
By the time we reach him in today’s lesson in Genesis, he is trying to secure his own blessing for himself again. Now he’s trying to do things in order to appease God, to keep God away from meddling in his own affairs—to secure his own blessing so he doesn’t need God anymore. So when he finds out his brother Esau is coming to him, his brother who he has stolen so much from, his brother who would be rightly furious with him, Jacob sends him a hoard of gifts: “two hundred female goats, twenty male goats, two hundred ewes, twenty rams, thirty camels and their colts, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys.” (Gen. 32:14-16) Do you catch just how much work he’s doing to try and make up for his mistakes? Everyone else goes ahead of him to meet Esau, but Jacob spends the night alone, and that’s where we pick up the story with today’s lesson.
And that’s also where God picks up Jacob, and wrestles with him. We don’t necessarily find out that it’s God until later, when Jacob names the place where they wrestle “Peniel”, meaning the “face of God”. But throughout that night, as he knows that his furious brother awaits him, as he waits in the darkness, as alone as he has ever felt in his life—even with all the children and livestock and land he’s accumulated for himself since he left his brother—God finds him to struggle with him. For all Jacob did and had done, God was supposed to have left him alone. But God likes to work through the misfits, mustard seeds and the masqueraders, does God not? God likes to show up at the least expected of times to reveal to us that God’s been more faithful than we had ever thought, does God not? God likes to pick us up and literally shake us sometimes to wake us up to how our lives have been missing the mark, to how God redeems us, does God not?
Now this night of Jacob and God wrestling is but a small, brief literal moment depicting the metaphorical wrestling that God has been doing on Jacob not just over one night, but throughout Jacob’s life. God has been wrestling with Jacob just as much and even more so than Jacob has been struggling to distance himself from God. The God of Jacob is a God of struggle. Anyone who has been the parent of a child whose behavior they have struggled with can say an “Amen” to God’s frustration with Jacob! The God of Jacob has not created the world and let it run its course without bothering to intervene. The God of Jacob was not changeless and absent, or a God who does not grieve Jacob’s deceptive life, or who just waited with crossed arms for him to shape up. God struggled, God agonized, God wrestled with how to intervene in Jacob’s life. God felt Jacob’s fear that night, as he dreaded seeing his estranged brother again. And so God wrestles with him—literally has an all night World Wrestling Federation “Smackdown”, struggling to help Jacob see himself for who he is, struggling with all the forces of pride and greed and self-deceit at work in him. The God who struggles with Jacob, and who struggles with us, wrestles into us God’s forgiveness and spirit of reconciliation. As much as we may struggle with God, God struggles even more with Jacob and with us…in order to reveal the face of God’s mercy…in order to reveal God’s persistent justice, which we see in today’s Gospel lesson…in order to reveal a God who does not give up on us, no matter what.
At the end of his night of struggling, Jacob gets a new name, Israel, which means both “God struggles” and “the one who struggles with God.” A fitting name following the kind of night that God and Jacob have had. Jacob walks away with a limp because of a wounded hip, a reminder of his life’s frailty. But he also receives a blessing that he had not conned, or purchased, or fanagled, but this blessing was given to him by God. And after that kind of night, what would happen in Jacob’s encounter with Esau? Tears. Honest confession. Reconciliation. Hugs. Reuniting. Jacob discovers in the face of Esau the reconciliation that he had found in his divine wrestling partner…he’s so moved by the sight of his brother that he tells him, “for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God since you have received me with such favor.” (33:10) Jacob met that same face in the face that dared to struggle with him, to show him for who he is but to still bless him nonetheless. It’s that same face that we meet in the face of Christ—the Christ whom God dares to send with us to wrestle with our rejecting of him, the Christ who wrestles new life into us by rising from the dead—it’s as if meeting the risen, forgiving Christ becomes real when we see and receive that forgiveness in the face of our fellow sinners and fellow enemies—just as it did for Jacob, who “saw God” in his brother’s face…just as we can see what a forgiving God looks like in each other’s faces.
So, when we talk about the kind of God we believe in to our neighbors, our co-workers, and our family and friends, we do not have to speak of a God who keeps track of our faults, or who is “somewhere out there.” We can speak of a God of who struggles with us, as much as we struggle in our daily lives. We can speak of a God who dares to put up with us! We can speak of a God who dares to forgive us, even though our track record—like Jacob—speaks more often of missing the mark than of making it.
Jacob’s wrestling in the darkness is not altogether unsimilar to the darkness faced by some thirty-three men who finally “saw the light” this week. For people like Mario Sepulveda, even the darkness of a trapped mine could not keep him from giving this testimony upon his being the second Chilean miner rescued this week: “I was with God and I was with the devil; they fought me but God won. God took me by my best hand, the hand of God, and I held on…I never thought for one minute that god wouldn’t get me out of here.” God puts these same words on our lips today, because we have been lifted out of the depths…we can speak such words because God goes to the depths to wrestle with us, to show us God’s own face of forgiveness, a face where God works out God’s blessing of the world through us. Amen.
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