Wrestling with God
Genesis 32.22-31, Sunday 17th October 2022
8am and 5.45pm Eucharist
At the heart of our faith as Christians is encounter. Encounter with God, encounter with Christ, encounter with one another. Today we witness one of the strangest and most fascinating encounters with God in the whole Bible: Jacob spending a night wrestling a man who turned out to be God and ending up with both a blessing and a disability. It seems that faith, along with wrestling, is a contact sport.
Some passages of the Bible seem to sum up the whole gospel in a few short sentences. And this seems to be is one of them. Here we have Jacob, a slippery character at best encountering the living God in an intimate way and being forever changed by it. Here is someone who has lied and cheated his way through much of his life. As a young boy he persuaded his brother Esau to hand over his birth right and later cheated his father Isaac into believing that he was Esau, thus receiving his father’s blessing in Esau’s place. Then having run for his life, he ends up colluding with his wife Rachel in stealing the wealth of his father-in-law, Laban. All in all, not the most upright of people. And we catch up with him 20 years after he left home, about to meet his brother Esau again and clearly nervous at the prospect. He’s divided his household party into two groups in order to protect himself and sent them on ahead of him. Now we hear he is alone in the night. And the text tells us ‘a man wrestled with him until daybreak’. A man wrestled with him. It seems that at the time he did not know it was God. Only much later does he say ‘I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved’.
This mysterious encounter is exactly that: mysterious. When I Googled the sort of moves wrestling entails, it brought up the following terms: clinch fighting, throws, takedowns, joint locks, pins and grappling holds. Pretty violent. Whatever moves were involved, this was a very physical encounter. It was long, it was intimate and neither side wanted to give in.
This story conjures up an image of a God who is willing to appear hostile. He is not only the god of love we are more familiar with, but one who wrestles with us. When we think about it, we see this way back in the story of the garden of Eden when God drives Adam and Eve out of the garden and places an angel with a flaming sword to guard against their way back to the tree of life. There ends up being a whole new journey of discovery for God’s people to find the tree of life again. The symbolism of this story seems to suggest that if we are serious about our relationship with God then he will engage with us and we will not be allowed to stay as we are.
Jacob was prepared to stay with the challenges of the wrestling match until he got a blessing, and God was prepared to do everything it took to remain in relationship with him. Even if it meant putting Jacob’s hip socket out of joint in the process. Jacob walked away limping, in a different place with God, changed and with a new name – Israel - meaning ‘the one who strives with God’. The most important thing was to stay engaged with God until he received a blessing. He went off to meet Esau changed, and discovered a brother who ran to meet him, weeping with joy at being reunited.
That is all very well, but what does this story have to say to us today?
I would like to suggest two things:
First, no matter what our life history, God desires to be with us. Jacob seems to be not so much a saint but an anti-hero. Regardless of our past behaviour, God longs to be with us, to engage with us in ways that sometimes seem unusual. God’s modus operandi in the world is partnership, longing for genuine collaboration and contact, not standing aloof.
Second, struggle is part of faith. Sometimes nothing seems to make sense in our lives and we wonder what on earth God is up to. We might have endured a great loss, hardship, or illness and wonder where God is in it all. We are keen to make sense of things and to find neat, tidy answers, to satisfy our minds. And yet, when these neat answers don’t come, we don’t let go, even if at times we lose heart. We continue to cry out to God asking for understanding and insight. We wrestle with God in our own way. Not giving up, but keeping on keeping on. And sometimes it is only very much later we realise that God was there all along and we might have seen God face to face.
Or God seems to put a finger on a particular area of our life that needs to change, taking hold of us and confronting us in the darkness of our own dishonesties and things we would rather not admit to. God gets into something of an armlock with us and won’t let go until it is finished, and we are left changed, perhaps aching a bit and sore initially, but transformed, blessed, more aware of God’s love for us and of our desire to follow him. This type of struggle always brings greater life and freedom.
We only have to look ahead to the pain of Jesus as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane for God to take away the suffering he was about to endure, to know once again that the life of faith involves struggle. And to know that God is present in those struggles. That painful struggle that led to the cross ultimately ended in rising to new life.
So uncomfortable as it might be, let us feel the hard work of struggle, let us embrace the experience, trusting that God is present with us, will not let us go and longs to bless us.
Amen.