The life of Jacob was — from the very beginning – marked with struggle, with challenge, and often with profound moral ambiguity. Born to Isaac and Rebekah, the second-born of a set of twin boys, the first thing that we learn about him was that he was already contending with his brother Esau while the twins were still in Rebekah’s womb. Even at the moment when they were being born, Jacob was grabbing at his older brother’s ankle (even then, trying to get ahead of his brother, wrestling to try to supplant his older brother’s rightful place).
As they grew, Jacob continued to find it difficult to accept his place in the family hierarchy, so he had tricked both his older brother Esau, and his father Isaac, into giving him the birthright that rightfully belonged to his brother. Having acted in such an unscrupulous manner, Jacob was forced to flee lest he incur the wrath of his older brother. He found himself in a distant land, both protected by, and employed by his relative Laban.
But even there, things had not gone smoothly for Jacob. Although he had fallen in love with Laban’s younger daughter Rachel, and had worked for seven years in order to marry her, Laban tricked Jacob into marrying his older daughter, Leah, first, thus leaving Jacob to have to work another seven years before he could marry the woman that he actually loved.
Even after the fourteen years of work for the two women, tensions grew between Jacob and Laban. Laban once again tried to trick Jacob, and Jacob was finally directed to take what was his and make the journey back to the land of his ancestors. Of course, that journey, as well, was rather dangerous, in light of the fact that there was no way to know if Esau was still angry about the ways that Jacob had tricked him so many years before.
It is quite a series of stories.
And quite a cast of characters. Complex, duplicitous, self-serving, deceptive, sometimes dishonest, manipulative.
And those are the heroes of the faith.
The name Jacob was reflective of the narrative of his life, as the name meant “supplanter, or follower, or the heel” because of the way that Jacob had come into the word, following Esau, grasping at his heel, constantly trying to supplant him. Jacob’s had been a constant struggle to find his place in the world, mostly through rather unfortunate means.
But today’s reading leads us to one of the most intriguing and transforming of all of the stories of Jacob – and a story in which all of us are invited to find a degree of profound, and perhaps complicated, inspiration. It is a story set in a transitional, and perhaps even frightening time in Jacob’s life; he had left Laban and was about to encounter Esau, and he found himself in the middle of a dark night, wrestling with a mysterious figure on the banks of the River Jabbok.
The two men wrestled through the night. Neither seemed able to best the other, and the identity of the mysterious figure remained elusive. Jacob would not let the man go, even though Jacob’s opponent – for reasons that remain unexplained in the text – wanted Jacob to let him go before the sun rose.
“Let me go because the dawn is breaking,” states the mysterious character. For that unnamed man, the place of encounter, the place of wrestling, was in the dark night, not in the light of day.
“I will not let you go, unless you bless me,” replied Jacob.
And then, a most unusual interaction takes place. The man asks for Jacob’s name. When Jacob speaks his name, however, the man renames him. “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.”
No longer are you Jacob, the supplanter, the follower, the heel; constantly trying to grasp and reach for what is not rightfully yours. From now on, you will be known as Israel, the one who wrestled, the one who struggled with the divine and the human and prevailed.
Jacob then asks for the man’s name, for his identity, for some glimpse of who he had been wrestling with through that dark night.
But the man’s name is not given. Instead, Jacob is blessed – but is also permanently injured from his encounter.
And Jacob, now Israel, renamed the place where the wrestling had taken place. Peniel. “For I have seen God face-to-face, and yet my life is preserved.”
His life had been preserved. But never would his life, or his identity, be the same. He would go from that place, as Israel, the blessed ancestor of God’s chosen people, whose identity and character had been forged in the middle of a dark night of wrestling, clinging to God in the darkness until a blessing had been given.
This is a formative and foundational story of the type of faith that was meant to shape and form God’s people in this world. That is, this essential encounter that formed the basis for Israel’s understanding of faith and of Israel’s relationship with God, was not rooted in an experience of comfort, and prosperity, and ease, and success, and spiritual ecstacy and visionary enlightenment.
Which might seem odd, at first. That is, so often, we assume that true faith is born out of far more enlightening experiences — when suddenly, the light goes on, the answers become clear, the path of our lives becomes obvious and our relationships become smooth, all of our problems fall away, and we run towards the God who has been so beautifully and wonderfully revealed to us.
But contrast, for a moment, the differences between our expectation of how faith is supposed to be formed and experienced, and Israel’s experience of how faith was formed.
We tend to think that real faith is born when the light goes on; but Jacob had to wrestle through the darkest part of the night.
We want the answers to become clear; Jacob could not even get a clear answer about his mysterious opponent’s name.
We think that faith will make the path of our lives become obvious and our relationships become smooth, while Jacob was running from a father-in-law who had repeatedly tricked him towards a brother who probably wanted to kill him.
We think that faith means that we will acquire the power and the wisdom to make all of our problems fall away; but Jacob emerged from the night of wrestling without any indication that he had gained any greater insight, whatsoever, about how to deal with the challenges and struggles that confronted him.
And for those who think that faith will give us the inspiration to run towards the God who has been so beautifully and wonderfully revealed to us; well, this story leaves us with the image of a man limping away from his encounter with God, hobbling into the morning light after a night of wrestling with a man whose name he never learned.
And yet.
And yet, something happened to Jacob in that encounter. He might have been confused, exhausted, injured, weary from that night of wrestling – but he also came away from that dark night with reason to believe – reason to believe that his night of wrestling had been with God, one-on-one, face-to-face – and that he had lived.
And the words that he used are significant. “for I have seen God face-to-face, and yet my life is preserved.”
Other translations of this verse render the text, “and my life has been saved” or even “and my soul has been delivered.”
It is interesting to ponder what kind of faith, what kind of spirituality, what kind of relationship with God is formed and commended by a story such as this?
After all, this is not the story of a human being reverently grovelling in some form of humble servitude before some great and powerful deity. Nor is it the story of a person approaching the divine to sit quietly at the master’s feet in order to receive guidance or rules about how to live morally and faithfully and well. Nor is it the story of someone coming to the awareness of God’s presence through some experience of blinding illumination, some transfiguration-like, road to Damascus experience. Nor is it the story of faith being formed in some quiet, peaceful, transcendent, meditative moment of prayerful contemplation.
But nor is it a story of a person who gave up and walked away when the light did not seem to be shining, or when the answers did not seem to be forthcoming, or when the promise of illumination seemed to be all that apparent.
To the contrary, this is the story of a faith, a spirituality, a relationship with God that is born in wrestling in the midst of a dark night, a faith, a spirituality, a relationship that is rooted in the courage to continue to struggle in the middle of the most confusing and unclear moments, a faith, a spirituality, a relationship that is formed by one who had the strength to cling to God even when God’s presence seemed, at best, to be hidden, and at worst, to be altogether absent.
This is the story of a faith, of a spirituality, of a relationship with God that dares to say – in the middle of all of life’s dark nights — the dark nights of doubt, of grief, of despair, of pain, of loss, of uncertainty – I don’t know who you are, but we shall continue to wrestle.
And I am not going to let you go until I wrestle a blessing from you.
You have wrestled with me in this dark night, you have fought with me, you have injured me, and yes, you have never let me go; but now that the dawn is breaking, the sun is rising, we are not done yet.
I am not going to let you go until you bless me.
This is courageous faith — a faith that dares to wrestle with the One who sometimes seems absent and often seems mysterious, but who nonetheless possesses the power to bless us and transform our lives.
And this is the type of faith that formed Israel, and that each one of us is wise to imitate. After all, there was another who had this type of faith, One who had the type of faith that had the honesty to cry out, why have you forsaken me; and the audacity to cry out, into your hands I commend my spirit.
For each and every one of us, the dark nights will come. And when they do, may it be our prayer that we will have the faith of Jacob, who became Israel – the type of faith that carries us through all of the dark nights of our human existence, the type of faith that allows us to hold the gift of life and the experience of death together in such a way that – even in our moments of greatest dread and despair – we wrestle, we struggle, and we cling to the One who is holding onto us.
Because sometimes the greatest blessings come to those who have the strength to wrestle with God in the darkest of nights.
For it is to those who have such faith that the greatest truth is revealed – the truth of the good news of the journey from the darkest nights to the rising of the sun, from suffering to resurrection, from death to eternal life.
Amen.
