Wrestling with God
Baptism of Rex William Snow Armstrong
“I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Genesis 32.26
I thought I could do no better today than to start with those opening lines of that wonderful Alan Bennett sermon from Beyond the Fringe. It let’s me get the rugby done with and an introduction to Jacob and Esau all in one go. (I’ll try and use his mocking, parsonic voice.)
First verse of the fourteenth chapter of the Second Book of Kings: 'And he said, "But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man."' Perhaps I might say the same thing in a different way by quoting you the words of that grand old English poet, W.E. Henley, who said:
This is a wonderful and mysterious story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel. His name, Jacob, means ‘hold the heel’ and came to mean twister, or cheat. (Although in those name-your-baby books, they generously say it means Conqueror.)When that One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name;
It matters not who won or lost,
But how you played the game.
He followed his twin brother, Esau, out of the womb, grasping his heel, and eventually cheated him out of his birthright as the firstborn.
Jacob’s parents, Isaac and Rebekah, and his grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, represented two generations of dysfunctional family life. Hollyoaks and Eastenders are tame in comparison.
Now 20 years after the grand swindle, Jacob’s returning to face his brother Esau. He’s become very wealthy by more cheating and lying and at the expense of his cheating and lying uncle, Laban.
Life with his two cheating and lying wives is not surprisingly complicated. Rachel stole the household gods when they ran away from uncle Laban’s boys; hid them in the saddle bags of her camel, sat on them and said she couldn’t get up to be searched because it was the wrong time of the month. (Gen 31.33ff.)
But now Jacob is afraid as he hears that his brother Esau is heading towards him with 400 armed men. It’s not looking like a kiss and make up party.
Jacob is a bad man; but strangely devoted to God. So he calls out to God, remembering the vision he had 20 years before at Bethel, when God showed him a glimpse of heaven and promised him the earth:
Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, and the mothers with their children. And thou saidst, I will surely prosper thee, and make thy descendents as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude. (vv 11,12)He waits for an answer to his prayer, for another vision, for a voice from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
And there is nothing.
So he uses his brains, charm and cunning. He sends plenty of bribes on ahead of him, and eventually, the women and children.
Finally he is on his own in the night, by the ford over the river Jabbok. He’s probably contemplating doing a runner at this point, but he knows he’d miss the money, the servants and the women.
And then, there is the Curious Incident of the Man in the Night-Time. It reads as if it’s the most natural thing in the world: “So Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.” (v.25)
They are evenly matched and it’s looking like a draw, when the stranger cheats, and hits him below the belt. (Probably the meaning of this rather strange business about the hip or the thigh.)
Lets now go to the Tate Britain and take up the story. For there is the magnificent alabaster sculpture by Sir Jacob Epstein, Jacob and the Angel, created in the middle of the Second World War.
The two great seven foot, endomorphic, naked men, who look as if they have walked out of a Beryl Cook painting, are in an ambiguous embrace. We can clearly see that the Angel is holding Jacob up, and yet Jacob might suppose that he is clinging to the Angel.
The man wants to be off before the dawn reveals his identity. But Jacob is persistent. Like the woman with the unjust judge in today’s Gospel parable, he will not let God go until he blesses him. For by now he is realising that this wrestling match is the continuation of his apparently unanswered prayer to God.
Jacob is a cheat and a twister and now God has won by fighting foul. He has always wanted to bless Jacob, but Jacob would not let him. He would not become naked and vulnerable. He wanted to stay proud and independent.
The embrace of struggle is the embrace of love. It is a life-changing encounter that leaves Jacob both wounded and blessed.
And to remind him forever after of this, he is given a new name, Israel: Yisra’el, the one who sarahs — the one who strives — with El — with God himself.
Christianity has never been easy-believism. An encounter with the living God, now as then, leaves us both wounded and blessed.
Jesus makes this crystal clear in his teaching. We are to take up our cross and follow him.
For young Rex we hope a long, happy and contented life. But we know that that, however much we try to protect him, there will be the childhood scrapes and bruises.
And as he grows into a man, he will also gather emotional and spiritual bruises, which as he learns to handle them, will add to the richness of his life.
Our ability to grow mature emotionally and spiritually is determined by the degree of woundedness in our lives. And more than that; the degree to which we have processed and wrestled with those wounds.
Here at this Table we come to celebrate the wounds of the one who loves us and who was wounded for us.
I hope you read stories to Rex. And that sometime you might read him Oscar Wilde’s lovely story, The Selfish Giant. The Giant too has been searching for God, and like Jacob asks: ‘Who are you?’
Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?"“I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Genesis 32.26
For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.
"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant; "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him."
"Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love."
"Who art thou?" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."
