Episode 4: Isaac's Family - Jacob & Esau
Genesis 25-33 (especially 25, 29, 32, 33)
There are those who are so devoted to something that they seem obsessed, willing to do crazy things, like getting up at 3:15 am every day to pray and sing Psalms for 45 minutes. This is the first of the seven daily prayer times of the monks of the Abbey of Gethesameni where Erin and I spent the week largely in silence and solitude (when we praying with the monks or passing notes at meals). At 3:15 am, while the rest of the world sleeps, the monks file into the unrelentingly well-lit church to chant and pray, and then, in their long, quiet robes, slide out of the church into the cold, pre-dawn, starlit darkness. They’d pause their work and return for one more prayer time and Eucharist before I would be awake, happily joining them for prayers at the much more respectable hour of 7:30 am.
Many of these men have been in this Abbey their whole adult lives, living an exacting rhythm of work and prayer, mostly silent. They came there, and stayed there, seeking to worship God. This is the driving force of their lives, and they’ve given up everything else for this one goal. Last week, fifty or so guests left our own lives and phones behind for five days to sip from their deep well of silence and prayer.
On Friday, I did get out of bed and stumble my way to the way-too-bright church to chant with them at 3:15 am vigil. I made it through 15 minutes of struggling to keep my eyes open and my legs from folding under me. Then I couldn’t take it a second longer and would’ve sold my birthright for a pillow, so I snuck back to my bed for a few more hours of sleep.
Today we meet someone with this kind of singular dedication, someone so important to the scripture story that his life takes up half the book of Genesis. At the beginning of today’s glimpse into his life, he is called Jacob, a name that, depending on how you point your vowels, means “heel,” or “cheater/usurper.” He is the second-born twin, who came into the world literally grasping onto his brother’s foot like he wanted to pull him back inside to be born first. They fought so much in her womb that Rebekah had it out with God, who told her she had two nations wrestling within her and the oldest would serve the youngest, and indeed their descendants would go on to become the Israelites and Edomites.
Jacob was aptly named. Shrewd and clever, he always had an angle, a play. There are those who see life as a constant battle or game to be won, and Jacob was one of them.
Deep inside us all, where the most vulnerable and unprotected part of us lives in profound, wordless silence - in the deep, dark, soundless part of us far beneath the bright and noisy surface, most of us don’t actually trust we are loved. We don’t really believe we belong. We don’t accept that our lives have value. So we try to earn it, maybe by striving to be good or humble, or by disappearing the parts of us we’re ashamed of. Or, we pad our lives with distractions and protections. Or maybe, like Jacob, we scramble and struggle and fight our way through life, believing if we don’t grab our place, it will be lost. We will be lost. Falling back on our original sin, we don’t really trust God to be God, so we take on that job or ourselves.
In the opening retreat talk on Monday, at one point Father Carlos looked at all of us sitting there silently staring back at him and gave us a jolt when he blurted, “What? Is the love of God not enough for you?”
For all Jacob’s insecurity about his own unworthiness, and his restless antagonism with the world, he is lasar-focused on one goal. Like those monks, (who are also riddled with faults and foibles, because every human is), Jacob’s life is set toward one thing: the covenant blessing of God to his grandfather Abraham. While he may not trust his own place within it, he absolutely believes the promise of God. He’s devoted to it, pursuing it so doggedly that he’s willing to lie, cheat and steal for it. He longs for God’s blessing to the point of obsession, to the point of struggling nearly his whole life with other people and with God for something that God had already decided would be his and that God would bring about regardless.
To the more concrete Esau, this blessing is obscure and theoretical. After a long day hunting, food sounds better to him than some far-off blessing, some bigger story he is meant to carry on or future gift he is destined to receive. And Jacob takes advantage of his brother’s weaknesses and tricks him. Like a kid selling the family Nintendo to his little sister, knowing it’s only a matter of time before she’ll forget and it will be his again (Andy), Jacob has a long-term plan. And when the time comes, with the help of his mother, he follows through. The blessing Jacob is after is more important to him than his relationship with his brother, more important to him even than his dying father who bestows it. He believes, at this point, that in order to belong to God, he must violate his belonging to others. Jacob against the world! Jacob in pursuit of God’s blessing “which,” as one scholar puts it, “he can never possess as fully as it possesses him.”
Perhaps the blessing has become an idol, and Jacob has forgotten that it is not something for him to acquire, but for the living God to bestow.
The night before Jacob goes to meet Esau, what we don’t see in today’s telling, is that he sends his family with all his remaining possessions just ahead of him to camp on the other side of a stream and he stays, the text says, “by his lonesome.” A stranger approaches and fights with Jacob, wrestling with him all through the dark night. In the thrashing, chaotic hours of darkness Jacob’s lifelong struggle is given a concrete form and foe. When the opponent sees Jacob will not relent, he strikes him on the hip, wounding him, and still Jacob does not let go.
As dawn begins to break the stranger tells Jacob to release him, and Jacob says, “Not until you bless me!” The figure asks his name, and Jacob answers, a confession of his person, “I am Jacob (the Heel, the Trickster).” The man responds, “You shall no longer be called Jacob but Israel” - which means One who Wrestles with God - “for you have striven with God and humans and have prevailed.” And still, this one refused to answer when Israel asks for a name in return.
At the end of the week at the Abbey, Father Carlos told me, “God doesn’t come to us unmediated. Only through other people can we know God.” Jacob doesn’t know his assailant; in the darkness, locked in battle he cannot see the face. And when it is all over, we’re told, “Jacob called the place Peniel” - which means, ‘face of God’- “saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been spared.’” But though God has engaged him on his terms, he hasn’t really seen God, not yet. But God sees him. Instead of expecting him to be someone he is not, God blesses who he is. Like the parent realizing that when you say to the kids, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” that one beloved child of yours will always, always, pick the hard way, God says, You, my child, shall be called, One Who Wrestles With God.
But also, through blessing, injury, and new identity, God reminds Jacob-now-Israel in no uncertain terms that God cannot be grasped, controlled, or claimed; God does the claiming. Indeed, the unknowable Divine let him live, but now he must face the wrath of his betrayed twin brother who may not.
When the sun rises, Jacob, limping from having tangled with the Almighty, goes forward to confront whatever may await him. But instead of the fate he deserves, he finds forgiveness. In on the open arms and weeping embrace of his brother, God is revealed to him. And Israel, overcome, says to Esau, “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.”
The love of God is enough for all of us, indeed enough for this whole world. If we really, really trusted the love of God, its enoughness would fill us up and spill out of us to everyone around us. It would sweep us back into our belonging to God and each other, wash away all fear and guardedness, coax our tender selves out of our dark hiding, and quench all of our hot striving. But this trust! It’s hard! For most of us, nearly impossible. As impossible, perhaps, as willingly forgiving someone a terrible wrong they’ve done to us. We need God’s help as much with being loved as we do loving. We need God’s Spirit to hover over our dark chaos and breathe into us new life and speak over us with joy, It is good! And some of us will need to wrestle it out.
But God will always work in and through our circumstances and our choices to return us to God and one another, because that is where God determined we all belong. And God will always work God’s purposes for this world in and through broken and imperfect people.
Amen.
LNPC Bible-Read Journey:
Episode 1: Creation & Sin, Adam & Eve
Episode 2: Flood & Promise, Noah (conversation - no sermon)
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