The Magnificent Defeat

That same night Jacob got up, took his two wives, his two concubines, and his eleven children, and crossed the River Jabbok. After he had sent them across, he also sent across all that he owned, but he stayed behind, alone.


That last phrase hangs in the air, and it’s meant to, I think.

I imagine Jacob standing still for a long time, watching as the caravans of his people and his animals trudged off into a future he couldn’t control; the usual hubbub of noise strangely subdued as evening took a firm hold of the sky and wrung the last vestiges of colour out of it. He watched them go, alone.

Alone but for the babbling waters of the river, the wind in the rushes, and the calling of the night birds.

And there must have come a moment when he turned away from where they were bound and turned back to the business for which he had remained behind.

And what that business was, the writer gives us no clue. But there’s little doubt that taking stock and remembering how he had got to this point in his life were part of what he had stayed for.

I imagine him perched on a large boulder overlooking the river as the sun sets. And though I know it’s anachronistic, I picture him drawing deep on a cigarette and cupping its glow in his hands as he slowly sighs the smoke out into the night air. He’s a man with a lot to reflect on.

For a man whose name - or new name, Israel – has entered into the pantheon of history Jacob was pretty far from the paragon of virtue we expect our spiritual heroes to be.

He was said to have emerged from the womb grabbing his older twin brother by the heel – that’s the literal meaning of the name Jacob – and a good part of his life, up to this point, has been spent in grasping, scheming and fighting.

Jacob was his mothers’ favourite, but he was always second to his brother Esau in his father’s eyes. Esau was the alpha male – the hunter and provider, and being the elder son, the birthright and his father’s blessing would be coming to him.

But Esau was also a fool. He came in famished from the field one day and sold his birthright to Jacob with a binding oath for the sake of a plate of stew. He forfeited the extra money and status that were due him as the elder son for the instant hit of a full belly. Not one of his best decisions.

But Jacob, in this incident, which hardly covers him with glory, learns an important lesson. What he can’t have by right, he can gain for himself through cunning. And a trajectory for his life was set.

Many years later, Jacob’s father Isaac was old and blind and on the verge of death and the time had come to pass on his blessing to Esau. And the cultural significance of that could easily pass us by.

In the world of their day, a blessing was much more than a vague expression of good will towards someone, like wishing them well.

A Father’s blessing was seen as passing on something of the very essence of his soul to the one he blessed; and this final blessing to a firstborn son was the most powerful of all – so much so that once it had been given it could never be taken back.

And though that idea might seem strange to us, we know enough to realise that words spoken in deep love or deep anger set things in motion within the human heart that can never be reversed.

And chances are you know the story of what happened next– Isaac sends Esau out hunting so he can prepare him one last tasty meal cooked with fresh game, and while he’s away Jacob and his mother hatch a plan. She covers Jacob’s arms in goatskin to make him hairy like his brother, she puts Esau’s robe on him, cooks the kind of tasty food Isaac wanted, and sends Jacob in to steal his brothers blessing.

And poor Isaac is taken in. He gives his blessing to Jacob and Esau is left empty handed. And the empty hands soon curl into fists and Jacob has to run for his life, heading far north to stay with his uncle Laban. And it was on that journey that he had his first encounter with God in a dream at Bethel, where he saw a ladder spanning earth and heaven and angels ascending and descending on it. Jacob’s ladder, we call it.

Once he arrives with Laban, he falls in love with his cousin Rachel and Laban says that Jacob can marry her in return for seven years work on the farm. But Laban was no slouch in the art of deception himself and managed to switch his slightly less desirable daughter Leah for Rachel at the last moment. I’m guessing that veils or copious amounts of wine must have been involved somewhere! So for once the deceiver was deceived. And he had to work another seven years to get the woman he really wanted.

Needless to say, his relationship with his Father-in-law wasn’t exactly cordial after that and things only got worse when thanks to some creative animal husbandry, Jacob managed to get his flocks to thrive at the expense of Laban’s.

Eventually things got so bad between them that Jacob decided to do a runner and head back home, knowing full well that at some point he would have to face the wrath of his brother.

And that’s where we find him in today’s reading: right on the cusp of that encounter he’s been dreading for years. Esau is coming out to meet him and he has 400 men with him.

And Jacob sits alone, on a rock by the river Jabbok. Fearing the worst; fearing for his life, and the lives of his household, who at that very moment could well be being slaughtered.

Jacob, the arch-manipulator, the cunning strategist has come to the end of his own considerable resources. And he sits there as helpless in the face of what’s about to happen as any man could possibly be.

And it’s then that God barrels into him and knocks him flying. And so begins a scrap that makes John Wayne and Victor McLaglen’s fight scene in the Quiet Man seem like a storm in a teacup.

What are we to make of the strange account of what happens next?

Parts of the story seem almost mythic – the business of the assailant having to be gone before daybreak sounds like the old legends of demons or spooks who can’t stand the daylight. What do we make of the killer karate move that dislocates somebody’s hip with one punch? And if Jacob’s attacker were God, why did God find it so hard to overcome him and get away from him? And why does he never actually say that he IS God? Read the text carefully and you'll see that's the case.

This is all very odd.

And I found myself wondering if it’s possible that the attacker was an ordinary man, but Jacob gave this encounter such significance and weight it was as though God himself were wrestling with him?

Indeed, there’s a part of me that wonders if this attacker, hidden in the darkness of night, mightn’t have been Esau himself. He knew Jacob was on his way. He was probably longing for revenge. This feud had always been about the two of them – maybe Esau wanted to settle it one-to-one. Mano-a-mano as they say in the movies?!

Was having Jacob beg for his blessing some kind of compensation for losing his Father’s blessing all those years ago?

Was he keen to get away before dawn because he wanted to get one over on Jacob without being recognised?

And when Jacob said of this event “I saw God face to face” did he mean it literally, or metaphorically? Was that just a poetic way of saying that as he wrestled with his enemy he knew his life was in the balance?

I think it’s fascinating that when the brothers meet in the light of the next day, one of the things Jacob says to Esau is that to see his face is like seeing the face of God. Did Jacob realise in that moment just who he had been wrestling with all night? Did he recognise God at work through the agency of Esau's wrath?

Just a theory. Drop it if you don’t like it.

Here’s something more important to hold onto from our story this morning:

Like Jacob, sitting on a boulder by the river Jabbok, there are times in our lives when we get to the end of ourselves. No matter how resourceful or wise or cunning or able we might be, there come times when we can get no further under our own steam. We are literally at our wits end.

We cannot make that relationship work. We cannot unravel the mess that life has become. We cannot deal with the anger about what happened. We cannot hold things together any longer. We cannot fix the problem and it refuses to go away.

These times come to us all, believer and unbeliever alike.

And in some ways those times are harder for the believer than the unbeliever because we believe in a God who is supposed to be good! So where is he? What kind of a God sits back and lets this kind of thing happen?

We grow angry – and the wrestling begins. Days, weeks, months, maybe years of it. Backwards and forwards. Scrabbling to lay hold of some truth in the darkness; to get a foothold on the scree; to catch a clear glimpse of this God that we are struggling with.

But here’s the thing that God’s people have found throughout the generations and that’s testified to in so many places in the Scriptures, though it’s seen most clearly in today’s story – it’s the wrestling that brings the blessing. That brings us to a deeper understanding of the God we worship.

We don’t have time this morning for me to run through the roll call of the Old and New Testament giants who discovered that truth, but think of how Abraham must have wrestled when God commanded him to sacrifice his son Isaac; how Moses must have wrestled when God told him to go back to Egypt and set the people free; how the Psalmists wrestled with the seeming unfairness of life and the injustices they saw around them; how Jesus wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying it could happen in some other way – any other way.

But they hung on. They refused to let go. And spent and exhausted though they were in the struggle, they found their blessing. God provided a ram for Abraham’s sacrifice and Isaac was spared; Moses found the strength to stand before Pharaoh and deliver the people; the Psalmists found deeper insights into the nature of the God they worshipped; Jesus found peace, and committed his spirit into the hands of the God who can raise the dead.

It’s in the wrestling that we find the blessing.

Perhaps you don’t need to hear that today. You might not be ready for this word. But one day you will be – because there will come a time when you find yourself like Jacob - alone, and at the end of your own resources. It comes to us all.

But maybe that’s where some of you are this morning. Something has happened that’s brought you to the end of yourself and called into question your whole idea of who God is and where life’s going.

I want you to believe me this morning when I tell you that that can be a good place to be. Because in the struggle to understand, to hold on and keep faith, we come to believe in a deeper way and see God with new eyes. The magnificent defeat of our anger, our doubt, or our naivety is a victory, both for God and for us.

But we don’t come through it unscathed. No-one ever does when they tangle with God.

The sun was bleeding over the horizon as Jacob gathered himself, dragged himself to his feet, and set off in pursuit of his family and his brother.

Limping, as from now on he would always limp. But blessed with a new name, and a different identity. Jacob the grasper had become Israel, the one who grapples with God; broken in body, but sounder in soul, and ready to face whatever the future might hold because he had wrestled with the one who holds the future.



(Title, though not sermon, due to Fred Buechner)