Jacob wrestling with God
Jacob wrestling with the ‘angel’ - Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), from the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris
Wonderings…
I wonder if you've ever prayed for something and gotten what you'd asked for?
I wonder if you've ever prayed for something, and God was silent....
Reflection on these Wonderings + Texts for Year C, Proper 24
Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 121; Luke 18:1-8
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
Something in me rebels against this parable. Because what I hear Jesus saying is that if we keep praying, God will give us what we pray for. If we cry out to God, God will grant justice to us. If we have true faith, God will quickly grant justice to us. And that's not true.
Everyone here has prayers that have gone unanswered.
…that we would get into that school, or get that job; that we would get pregnant this time; that dad would stop drinking and the abuse would stop; that...
And of course if we think about it, we know that other people's prayers went unanswered.
people of African descent prayed for freedom from their enslavement—prayed for justice—and died under the overseer's lash.
Jews and queers and people with disabilities, all packed into cattle cars by the Nazis prayed for survival—for the survival of their loved ones—and were led into the gas chambers
over the last two years, people in Gaza have prayed for ceasefire in the night, only to have their home bombed the next day, and their child crushed under the rubble.
The framing of this parable seems to lay a trap for us. If it's a given that God is good, and loving, and powerful; if it's a given that the world has a basic order, underwritten by the justice of God, but we're not seeing that justice—then maybe it's because we just didn't pray hard enough; we haven't been as tenacious as the widow in Jesus' story; or maybe God has not answered our prayer because we actually don't deserve it, because there's something wrong with us. We’re not one of the “chosen ones.”
I was very close to my grandfather, and he died of congestive heart failure when I was in college. I was there, beside him in the hospital, when he exhaled with a creaky rattle, and there was no inhale after it. And eventually I realized, oh—that was his last breath.
I grew up believing that if you wanted something enough, and you worked hard enough, and you were good enough, then it would happen. So the story that made the most visceral sense to me, as I grieved for my grandfather, was that I had failed him. That I had not loved him enough, or wanted him to live enough, or been good enough for God to grant the deep, unspoken prayer of my heart.
And as I grieved for my grandfather, and gradually let go of that blame, I also lost my confidence in what prayer is, and what prayer might do. And I’ll be honest with you, that question is still not at all settled for me. My own prayer life includes a lot of uncertainty about what I am doing or what I’m supposed to be doing, a lot of asking God to be present in the midst of my wandering and flailing. Trusting that God is.
And in that uncertainty, that flailing, I find a surprising amount of solace in this story of Jacob wrestling by the banks of the Jabbok. I wonder if we could read this story as a scene of prayer.
The story is so mysterious and uncanny, I don’t know how to talk about it without reducing its power, without reducing it to an explanation, or a moral. So rather than going directly at it, let me instead expand the story—tell of what happens before and after. Where this scene of prayer appears, and what difference it makes.
Jacob and his two wives, Leah and Rachel (long story) and all their children: they are on the move, in the midst of a massive life transition. They have taken all their flocks of sheep and goats (which is to say, all their possessions, all their wealth) and left the household of Laban, Leah and Rachel’s father; Jacob has been living there for more than 20 years. They are going to claim some land of their own. But their journey will take them through lands controlled by Jacob’s twin brother Esau.
And there’s bad blood there. Esau is barely the older of the two twin brothers: the story is that Esau was born with Jacob clinging to his heel, coming out of the birth canal essentially saying “oh no you don’t!” As the older brother, the blessing of their father Isaac and the lion’s share of his inheritance should, by custom, go to Esau. But when Isaac is at the end of his life, and the time comes for him to offer his blessing and confer this inheritance, Jacob tricks Esau into trading away his inheritance for “a mess of pottage,” (a bowl of oatmeal). And Jacob tricks his father into offering him the blessing that properly belonged to Esau. Jacob is a trickster. A cheat. One meaning of the name “Jacob” is “supplanter,” “usurper.”
It’s been more than 20 years since the brothers have seen each other, and now they are on a collision course. Jacob has heard that Esau is coming to meet him, and that Esau is bringing 400 men. Just before the passage we hear today, Jacob has divided his family and his flocks into two groups, in the hopes that if Esau slaughters one group out of vengeance, the other might escape. And Jacob has sent both groups on, so that he might be alone.
And we might well imagine that Jacob kneels down that night and prays that God would make a way out of his confrontation with Esau. We might even imagine that Jacob prays that he could go back in time and undo the tricks he played on Esau, undo the cause for Esau’s righteous anger against him.
And does Jacob get what he wants? No he does not.
I want to fast forward for a moment to the next day, after daybreak. After this night of prayer. Jacob changes the plan he has made—and for the first time in his life, he does not try to get around his brother: he moves straight toward him. He sends half his flocks to Esau, as a gift. And he follows behind, to meet his brother in humility and penitence, face to face..
And Esau, seeing his brother Jacob, embraces him. And Esau will not let him go. Their enmity is over, they are reconciled.
So—what happened that night? What did Jacob do, and what got done to him?
We don’t know exactly who or what this being is, that appears to grapple with Jacob until daybreak, and at daybreak to bless Jacob and give him a new name. Tradition tells us that this is an “angel”—a messenger of God, an emanation of God. But scholars understand this story to be quite ancient, harking from a time long before we decided that angels were beautiful and blonde and buff—when divine messengers were more monstrous, more ghostly. The struggle ends because this being must escape before sunrise; which might give us a clue as to the kind of creature this might be.
Realizing that Jacob is tenacious, the divine creature does not yield, but instead strikes Jacob on the hip, putting his hip bone out of joint.
So this emanation of God is not only a frightening presence, it is also a cheat.
Which is to say—In his prayer, Jacob wrestles with himself—with one like himself. And Jacob will not let go until something gives.
If we judge by what Jacob does in the morning, it seems that what gave was something in him. Having seen God face to face, he can now look Esau in the face, and do something that surprises even him: apologize.
Prayer has changed him. Planted a new desire in him. Shown him a way out of the familiar pattern, and allowed him to want a way out of the familiar pattern.
In the story, he is not only given a blessing, but given a new name: Israel. The one who has struggled with God. He has a new identity that is not tied to the brother he supplanted, whose birthright he stole, but is tied to the God who met him in the night and would not let him go. And he has the limp, the scar, to prove it.
How might prayer change us? Show us a trapdoor in our own stuck place? Open a want within us that we could not have imagined wanting? What courage, what peace might we find, having held on until God names us, face to face?
Let’s find out. Let’s practice.
Prayers of the People begin…
