Trinity 18 2022
Genesis 32.22-31, Luke 18.1-8
One of my favourite sculptures is a representation of the Old Testament story we heard today, the story of Jacob and the Angel, which can usually be seen in the Tate Britain in London. It’s sculpted from a gigantic block of alabaster, and it was made by Jacob Epstein in the 1930’s. Epstein has caught the moment when Jacob realises he can’t win this wrestling match. It’s a very ambiguous image. Is Jacob being crushed by the angel, or upheld and embraced? Epstein probably meant us to be unsure, just as the Biblical storyteller does.
To understand the story, and this moment of ambiguity, we need a bit of background. Jacob is one of a pair of twins, who have been at loggerheads since before they were born, wrestling in their mother’s womb. Esau is born first, but only just. Jacob is holding onto his heel. Jacob’s name, means “the supplanter”, because that’s what he spends most of his life trying to do – supplant Esau, take his place as the first-born. In his culture the first-born son got everything. He became leader of the family, the head of the clan. He controlled all the property, and he got the blessing of his father. Jacob thought that role should have been his, that he would do it far better than Esau, and he may have been right. Esau comes across in the stories as more brawn than brain, a good hunter, but none too bright. So, in a series of events too long to explain here, Jacob tricks both Esau and his father, Isaac, and at the crucial moment, Isaac gives the blessing of the first-born to Jacob instead of his brother.
He seems to have won, but his trickery does him no good. Esau is furious, and Jacob has to run for his life, back to his mother’s family home hundreds of miles away in on the border of what is now Southern Turkey. There he makes a new life for himself, with his mother’s brother, Laban. Decades pass, but in the end, the pull of home is too great, especially as Laban turns out to be just as manipulative as Jacob. So Jacob decides to go back, and face the music with Esau. .
The story we heard takes place on the night before Jacob crosses the boundary into Esau’s territory. The Bible is deliberately vague at first about who the mysterious figure he encounters is, but you don’t have to be a psychological genius to see this wrestling match as a reflection of the struggle that’s going on inside Jacob, torn between the desire to go home and the fear of how Esau might react. He is still hoping there might be a way to manipulate and manoeuvre himself out of trouble.
The stalemate in the wrestling match is, perhaps, the moment when he realises that there is no magic solution to his dilemma, no way forward without pain and cost to him, not least the pain of admitting that he wronged his brother. But he seems also to recognise that it is in the struggle and the pain that he will find the peace he longs for, that there are some things you can’t trick your way around. “I will not let you go, unless you bless me”, he says to his opponent. Epstein’s sculpture captures that moment of relief for Jacob in this, as the wrestling becomes an embrace. Here is someone, finally, who pushes back as hard as he does, who won’t let him go, who holds him accountable. Jacob realises that this figure represents the God who loves him even when he loses.
Jacob is blessed not despite his struggles, but because of them. He’s given a new name – Israel – which means “one who struggles with God”. It’s a very significant name. Earlier in his life, when Jacob had run away from Esau and from home, he thought he was running away from God too. On his journey he found himself in the desert, with nowhere to sleep but the hard ground. But as he slept, he had a dream of a ladder set up between earth and heaven, with angels going up and down on it. “Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it” he said, in wonder. He thought he had left God far behind, but he discovered that God was still with him, as much at home in the desert as anywhere else. This wrestling match at the ford of the Jabbok tells him that again, as he is confronted with the reality he has tried to walk away from, and the God whose challenge and whose call he has tried to ignore.
People often apologise to me if they feel they are wrestling with faith, questioning or doubting or feeling angry with God. When we are going through tough times we often try to put on our best face, to say all the right things. But this story tells us that God would rather we wrestled with him and shouted at him than pretend that everything is fine, treating him with distant politeness, or ignoring him completely. The Bible is full of people having a go at God, demanding to know “how long, O Lord!”. Even Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, tells his Father that he really doesn’t want to do what he's called to, and in today’s Gospel reading he tells us that it’s ok to feel we are being like that desperate widow, stroppy, mouthy, so long as we keep showing up. God isn’t an unjust judge. He doesn’t need to be battered into submission, but it’s important for us to feel we can be honest with him and tell it like it is. If we argue with people, it is, at least, a sign that they matter to us, that we care about what they think, even if we disagree with them. And where there is an argument, there can be a reconciliation. It’s when we ignore people, avoid them or treat them as irrelevant that there is nowhere to go, nothing that can be done to change the situation.
In modern jargon people call it “ghosting” when a friend abruptly stops replying to texts, emails, phone calls, blocks you on social media, vanishes from your life. Often I find that people try to “ghost” God. They stop praying, stop coming to church, avoid the people and places that remind them of him, or they just hide behind pious platitudes.
The message of these stories we have heard today, though, is that not only does God want us to be honest with him, he also wants us to know that it’s safe for us to do so, and that this is the gateway to the blessing we long for, because we can then discover that we are loved indestructibly, whatever we have done, and whatever life has done to us. Jacob’s story starts with him longing for the blessing of his earthly father, which he can only get by cheating, but it ends when he discovers the blessing of his heavenly father, which nothing can take away from him.
We don’t have to be polished, polite or dignified. We don’t have to pretend. We just have to show up as we are. God does not bless us despite our struggles. He wants us instead to find the blessing that’s within them, to let our prayers change us, bit by bit, into people who know that however far we run, God runs with us. Amen
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