Wrestling with God- Gen 32
We have a fascinating reading from Genesis this morning. The patriarch Jacob is wrestling someone. This is Abraham’s grandson, the son of Isaac. … Before we look at this particular story it is good for us to remind ourselves of Jacob’s story.
Jacob was born as a fraternal twin to his brother Esau. Jacob came out of the womb grabbing the heal of his brother. Being a “heal grabber” seems to have been a Hebrew euphemism for being a cheater, or supplanter. It was like Jacob was grabbing at the place of being firstborn. This foreshadows his life as a trickster.
When Esau comes in from hunting in the field, completely famished and asking for food, Jacob offers to exchange some food for his birthright as firstborn. It’s a foolish thing for Esau to agree to, but it is also a mean thing for Jacob to take advantage of his brother’s desperation.
Later, with the help of his mother, he tricks his father into giving him the blessing reserved for the firstborn son. He did this by dressing up and pretending to be his brother, and tricking his elderly father, who’s vision was failing. When Esau finds out, he goes berserk and wants to kill Jacob. Jacob runs away from home to save his own life from the wrath of his brother.
When he leaves home, along the way he stops to sleep and has a dream about a ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending. In this dream God repeats the blessing that was given to his grandfather Abraham.
“I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you” (28:13-15).
Jacob meets another trickster, Laban. He wants to marry Laban’s younger daughter Rachel, and agrees to work for 7 years in exchange for her hand in marriage. After 7 years of work Laban tricks him into marrying Rachel’s older sister, Leah. … Obviously, Jacob is not impressed. The trickster was now on the other side of the trick. … Frustrated, Jacob agreed to work for 7 more years to marry Rachel, the woman he originally wanted to marry. Eventually he marries both women. But this makes for a strained family life. … Eventually Jacob runs away from Laban to return back home, but he knows that waiting back home is his brother Esau- His twin brother who wants to kill him.
Jacob sends everything and everyone in his growing family across into his homeland, with strategic gifts for his brother Esau. But Jacob stays back before crossing over. This is where Jacob has his wrestling match. It’s fascinating and mysterious. We read that a “man” wrestles with him. But later, the man gives him a new name- Israel- which is interpreted to mean “struggles with God”. He says to him, “you’ve struggled with God and with people and were able”. And Jacob names the place Peni-El, which means “face of God”, and he says, “I’ve seen God face-to-face”. All this seems to point to this wrestling match being about more than Jacob wrestling a mere man. In some way this was a struggle with God.
The two wrestle all through the night, and during the struggle, Jacob’s hip is put out of joint by his opponent, which seems to have given him a life-long injury. As dawn comes, Jacob’s opponent asks to be let go, but Jacob refuses to let go unless the man blesses him. He demands a blessing from this man, who he has been wrestling with all night. This man then blesses him and changes his name to Israel.
Jacob changes while he is away from home. He flees from his brother to save his life. And he encounters God as he leaves. While away he experiences what it is like to be on the other end of someone else’s manipulations. His character seems to had developed by the time he starts his way home.
Many who get serious about their spiritual life can relate to this idea of wrestling with God. Sometimes we talk about Spiritual Warfare. On one level we understand that as battling against evil forces, but it can also be understood as a battle within ourselves. We battle against our disordered desires. Sometimes I really want to keep my sin and I wrestle with God as He tries to take it away from me. We battle to develop a more Christ-like character. Could we also think about the struggle of the spiritual life as a struggle with God?
We have a tendency in our society to paint struggle with one brush. Struggle is bad and it is against evil. … But if you practice martial arts, you will struggle with your fellow students and you can grow very close to people in the midst of that struggle. You can come to know them in ways that are hard to describe. When you practice with your instructor, you can learn a lot. They are struggling with you and that gives you an opportunity to learn, so that when you face a true threat, you are ready. … Maybe we struggle with God like this?
Jesus tells a parable in our gospel reading and the point seems to be about being persistent in prayer. The parable is about a widow that is persistently asking for justice from a judge, who was not a good man. The judge eventually grants the widow justice, but not because that is right, but because she is persistent in asking. He grants her justice to get her off his back. Jesus seems to be saying that if even a corrupt judge is willing to give justice to this persistent widow, then how much more willing is our loving and just God to give justice to his persistent children?
This idea of persistence in prayer can have a bit of an overtone of struggle. Maybe even a struggle with God. There are times in the Bible when we have seen Abraham and Moses struggle with God in prayer and amazingly God seems to change his mind, and that has set theologians minds spinning as they try to understand what it means for God to change plans on the basis of human pleading. Does God only fain the change the plans, and is doing what he was planning all along- maybe it was a test? Or is it a genuine change? … Whatever the ultimate answer is, if it is true that God wants us to be shaped by the conversation, stories, and images that we find in the Bible, then it seems that God wants us to pray like changes will happen as a result of our prayers. And maybe that can be understood as a kind of struggle with God. … Maybe we are struggling with God when we approach God in prayer with deep honesty about our doubts and our fighting to understand why certain things are the way they are. … Maybe we struggle with passages of the Bible, and we meditate on them and struggle with them. And like Jacob we refuse to let go until God blesses us.
In C.S. Lewis’ book “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” there is a brat named Eustace who is magically transported to the land of Narnia. At one point they had landed on an island and, wanting to avoid doing any work, Eustace had wandered off on his own and found a dragon’s treasure hoard. He had put on a golden bracelet and was thinking about how he could get the gold back to England with him when he got tired and laid down for a nap. When he awoke, he realized he had turned into a dragon. At first, he revelled in the idea of being fierce and powerful, but he was soon overwhelmed by sadness that he couldn’t speak, and he was too heavy to travel with the ship. He might be stuck on the island for the rest of his life. Through this experience Eustace experiences the compassion of the others who refuse to leave him, and he also learns to care for them and be helpful to them. He eventually decides to make a self-sacrificial act by leaving the ship to hide on the island, so they can leave the island after they stop looking for him. Eustace has experienced a deep change in his character. He had been a selfish Brat, and now he is capable of self-sacrificial love. This is the moment when he meets Aslan, the Christ figure in the book. Aslan tells him to undress, which Eustace comes to understand means shed his skin, like a snake. Eustace struggles and shed layer after layer, scratching at himself, but the final layers are too hard and Aslan says he must help.
Eustace says, “I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.”
“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. …”
“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there I was as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.”
Like a surgeon’s knife, could it be that our transformation into Christ-likeness requires a certain level of discomfort at certain stages? … Maybe it is very painful at certain moments, but these moments will result in a transformation that we couldn’t have otherwise received. This is a very unpopular teaching right now, but I also feel like there is truth in it. All transformation, all discipline, seems to include a certain kind of pain. We strain learning scales to learn the piano. We strain to memorize vocabulary and grammar to learn another language. Our muscles strain lifting weights as we work to get stronger. These transformations require a certain level of discomfort. Sometimes the blessing comes when we are willing to enter the struggle, and we refuse to give up until we receive God’s blessing. The Blessing of Resurrection comes after answering the call to a cross-shaped life.
AMEN
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