Hilton Head Island, SC – January 5, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 32:3-12; 22-32
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of day. – Genesis 32:24 (RSV)
According to biblical tradition, the three great patriarchs of ancient Israel were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Abraham was the father of Ishmael, who, the tradition declares, became the progenitor of the Arabs. Abraham also was the father of Isaac, who became the progenitor of the Hebrews, or Israelites, or Jews.
Of the three, however, the book of Genesis gives far more space in its narrative to Jacob, if only because Jacob had twelve sons, whereas Abraham had only two and Isaac only two. (Whoever wrote the Bible’s first book doesn’t even bother to tell us if there were any daughters.) From the twelve sons came the twelve tribes of Israel. Furthermore, we are told twice as much about Jacob as Abraham and Isaac combined.
There is no one in holy writ who was a slipperier character than Jacob. In lots of ways, he is the least likeable and perhaps the least noble person in the whole Bible. He is Bernie Madoff, Al Capone, Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping all rolled into one.
But, as Fred Buechner wrote in his delightful little book Peculiar Treasures, a bit of which is quoted on today’s bulletin cover, God didn’t need a perfect specimen to accomplish His purposes by means of Jacob. The soiled, sordid, sorry Jacob was overcome by grace, God’s grace. However, it took several decades for that to happen. That should encourage all of us, especially those of us who have already been around for several decades.
But Jacob also is an indispensable part of the biblical story. Without him, there would be absolutely nothing after Genesis 24, either in the Old Testament or the New Testament. The crooked, cagey codger was that crucial to the entire plan of God.
I’m not going to recount the earlier escapades of Jacob. You probably remember many of them anyway. And if you don’t, you can read Genesis 25 to 50 to get the entire salacious saga. When we encounter him this morning, it is twenty or thirty years after he has stolen his twin brother Esau’s birthright and blessing. This occurred with the willing assistance of their dear mother Rebekah, no less. Well, dear to Jacob, but probably not so dear to Esau.
Jacob decided to return to the land of Canaan (Palestine) from the land of Haran (southern Turkey or northeastern Syria). Even though his skullduggery with Esau happened decades earlier, Jacob was afraid Esau would want to kill him once he found out his treacherous twin brother was back in the old home stomping grounds. So Jacob sent some henchmen to his brother, obsequiously begging Esau not to harm Jacob. The henchmen came back to Jacob with the terrifying news that Esau was coming after him with four hundred men.
When Jacob heard that, his heart turned to ice. “Holy Methuselah!” he exclaimed, or words to that effect. “Now what am I going to do?” So what did he do? He prayed. Jacob never prayed unless he was in a big jam, and a bigger jam than this there never was. As you heard in the first reading, he reminded God that God had told him to take his two wives and two concubines and his sons and all his flocks and he was to go back to Canaan. If you read the text closely before that, however, God never said any such thing to Jacob. Jacob just assumed that is what God wanted him to do, because that’s what his wives Leah and Rachel told him to do. What this shyster does he shouldn’t do, and what he shouldn’t do is what he does. What can I say?
Here we have a con artist who has run out of victims to con. He tries to buy off Esau by presenting him over three hundred head of livestock of various varieties. At this point, however, we don’t know whether Esau is willing to be bought. It is in that terrifying situation that Jacob faces the greatest crisis of his life.
Jacob sent his family and herds across the ford of the River Jabbok. Now it called the Yarmuk, and it is in the Kingdom of Jordan. Then comes a mysterious and nebulous verse, which is our sermon text: “And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.” Who was this man? Why was he there? And why did he and Jacob wrestle all night long? Further, how could they wrestle all night?
Now for a parenthetical note. My wife Lois, the sports junkie, is a wrestling fan --- not of professional wrestling, which is not a sport, and instead is carefully orchestrated entertainment. Loie’s father was a school wrestling coach, and she loves high school and college wrestling. Every month, when Amateur Wrestling News comes, she reads it from cover to cover. As I have said many times to many people, she knows more about wrestling than 99.99% of all the males in this country, and probably more than 90% of everyone who ever wrestled.
Amateur wrestling is a very serious and difficult athletic pursuit. I never attended a wrestling match in my life until we were married twenty-two years ago. Since then, we have attended many matches in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and here in the Lowcountry. I probably now know more about the sport than 98% of Americans --- which isn’t saying much, because hardly anyone knows anything about amateur wrestling.
The rules of wrestling are very technical and complicated, and the sport is physically exhausting at a surprisingly speedy rate. There is one three-minute period and two two-minute periods with a minute of rest in between. But by the end of that time, both participants are powerfully pooped, I can assure you.
And now for another parenthetical note. In classical Greece, men wrestled naked. Presumably that is the mental image whoever wrote this part of Genesis had as he was recording the story. That being the case, you can easily guess there was one particular wrestling hold that was forbidden under all circumstances, and you don’t need me to tell you explicitly what it was. Nevertheless, the narrative says, the one who wrestled with Jacob couldn’t defeat him, so it says he “touched the hollow of his thigh, and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint.” Easy to picture what that really means, if it means what the biblical commentators hint that it means. Is Genesis a wild and racy book, or what?
But then, in the last verse of the chapter, it says this: “Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh, because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh on the sinew of the hip.” Such a string of tortured euphemisms. What this is really saying is that the laws of kosher forbid eating that particular part of a bull or ram which no one would ever be eager to eat anyway. So who needs a religious prohibition against doing what no sensible person would do in the first place?
Having dispensed with some of the bizarre background of this passage, let us now come back to the two wrestlers beside the river. After Jacob’s hip is thrown out of joint, the unknown and unidentified wrestler asks Jacob’s name. When Jacob tells him, the stranger says, “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” The footnote tells us that the proper noun Israel means either He Who Strives With God or maybe God Strives. Thus was Jacob’s name changed, and thus did the Hebrews become the Israelites, since Jacob, now Israel, via his twelve sons, is their genetic originator.
But who is this mysterious stranger? The text says he was merely “a man.” The prophet Hosea said he was an angel. As for Jacob, he concludes his foe is none other than God Himself. Therefore Jacob calls the place Peniel. The footnote says that means The Face of God. Jacob exclaims in astonishment, “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved!”
Have you ever felt confronted by God because of things you never should have done? Or have you felt the piercing sting of His anger or disappointment or sorrow because of things you didn’t do, and should have? Sins of commission or omission are often equally onerous, and we, as well as Jacob, are guilty of them on far too frequent a basis. Almost everything we have learned about Jacob prior to this incident consists of a string of duplicities and connivings and shenanigans. Jacob was the first major practitioner of Really Dirty Tricks. Compared to him, Tricky Dick Nixon or Tricky Bill Barr look like Calvin Coolidge or Jimmy Carter.
Everything in Jacob’s seedy life has been building up to this contest with the God of Israel. Either he shall worm his way out of his responsibilities to God and everyone else once again, or God shall confront him in such a way that he can no longer try to do the slick and sleazy and easy thing. He has always managed to avoid God’s stringent demands before; might he pull it off yet another time?
Curiously, in the story it is not God who refuses to release His grip on Jacob; rather it is Jacob who refuses to release his grip on God. “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” That’s what Jacob needs; that’s what he desperately needs: the blessing of God! He has spent his entire existence running away from God and His commandments, and he has used cunning and deceit to get everything he has. Now Jacob knows that the jig is up. He can’t keep going on like this. “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”
Listen carefully, would-be Christians: God doesn’t need to wrestle us, but sometimes we need to wrestle God. Until we truly come to grips with Him and His power, we may try to avoid both Him and His power through our many and assorted conscious or subconscious subterfuges. It seems so much easier and more pleasant to avert the claim of God on our lives than to respond to His constant beckoning, and submit to Him. Therefore we dance around Him, engaging in false starts and feints. Finally He stands before us, blocking our way toward more of the same lethal behavior, deliberately hindering us at the ford of the River Jabbok, giving us no opportunity once again to squirm out. Now we must confront Him, face to face.
The jig is up. The match is over. We emerge victorious in our defeat. He whom we meet face to face, He who bests us in the contest of wits and wills, gives us a whole new beginning to a whole new life. To win against God is to lose; to lose against God is to win.
We cannot go forward without pain. We cannot get back into the Promised Land without meeting God on the other side of river. The way from here to there requires preparation and exertion, but ultimately and most of all, it requires submission. We can’t get a new start, a new hope, a new name, unless we are willing to grapple with the One who will not let us go.
Even when we know all that, however, we may still be frightened to face the consequences of our fugitive behavior. What if, instead of reviving and restoring us, God might leave us dangling, or worse, annihilate us in an outburst of divine wrath?
He is a grinning, jaunty patrician. On a cold March day in 1933, he leans on a podium on the west side of the United States Capitol Building. The worst financial collapse ever to have seized the nation or the world has manifested itself everywhere. No one is to know that this fragile colossus cannot stand by himself, let alone walk. But in his inaugural address he says, in his curiously Harvardian New York accent, in words that shall echo forever through the unfolding centuries, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
No one can know exactly what happened to Jacob on that night almost four thousand years ago at the side of a narrow mountain river running steeply down into the Jordan Valley. Was it as we are told, or was it vastly different, if indeed it happened at all?
I think what we are meant to deduce, however, is this: Jacob had finally used up all his running room, and he had no choice other than to face God head on. In typically Jacobean fashion, he tried to wiggle out, but neither God nor he would release the other. And thus the confrontation that Jacob so feared turned out to be the thing that saved him, forever altering his future. Never again do we read of another dirty trick; not once. His days of attempting to put one over on God and everyone else were finished.
All of us can learn a lesson from that. If for our own spiritual advancement we need to get into a wrestling match with God, we should do it immediately, if not sooner. Don’t put it off. Accept the challenge. Get into the proper crouch, and prepare for battle.
We must not wait. The One who made us stands before us. Defiantly He is blocking our way forward to try our old tricks on Him. But He also is instantly ready to seize us, preventing our going back. He insists on doing battle with all the forces that seek to deter or misdirect us. To know Him is to fear Him, but to fear Him is therefore to love Him.
The mat is down; the whistle is about to blow; the clock is about to begin its relentless ticking. Who shall emerge as victor from this match? And in such an unequal pairing, what might victory actually mean?
A new year has begun. If you have never allowed God to defeat you, allow Him to do it now. The only way to win in life is to lose to God.