August 3, 2008

Glynn Cardy

Pentecost 12     Genesis 32:21-31

The Christian God has many faces, and one is struggle. When we struggle with disappointment, fear, guilt, loathing, and regret we struggle not just with ourselves or those close to us but also with God. God is not divorced from our pain but is in the midst of it. Usually God is a friend helping our healing. But sometimes God can also be our adversary, wounding us.

This was the experience of Jacob. By the ford of Jabbok he met with God, who was in the form of a wrestler. They struggled all night. At dawn God wounded Jacob. The text alerts us that the “face” of God and the “faces” of Jacob and his estranged twin Esau are all one and the same. By facing his brother Jacob would confront the “face” of his God. But he would also confront himself. Only when he confronted those aspects of his own personality that filled him with fear and disgust could he heal the conflict in his soul.

As I drive around Auckland I see these church noticeboards telling me there must be more to life. God is often marketed as ‘more’ and ‘better’ and ‘fulfilling’. To follow God, so they say, is to find abundant life. I suppose a sign that says “Wanna be wounded?” doesn’t quite cut it. In the drive to make God everybody’s best friend, coach, and mentor I think we’ve lost the sense that following God can be absolutely terrifying.

Another way to think about ‘wounding’ is that when we have to make hard decisions, and though our eventual choice might be the right one, there is a cost. Win-win encounters sound nice in theory but they come at a price. Sometimes that cost is a dent in the ‘we-can-do-anything’ myth. Sometimes that cost is knowing that we have caused others pain. Sometimes that cost is knowing the loss of innocence and that we can never walk the same route again. Usually we come away from these soul-struggles hobbling. It is not easy to face God.

Joan Chittister in her book Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope uses the Jacob story as a paradigm for a “spirituality of struggle.” In the Jacob saga she identifies eight elements of our human struggle – change, isolation, darkness, fear, powerlessness, vulnerability, exhaustion, and scarring. “Jacob does what all of us must do,” writes Joan, “if, in the end, we too are to become true. He confronts in himself the things that are wounding him, admits his limitations, accepts his situation, rejoins the world, and moves on.”

Jacob’s story really begins with a robbery. Jacob stole, through trickery, the irrecoverable patriarchal blessing from Esau. Jacob was now to be the child of the Promise, the chosen one. Esau, in his pain and anguish, wanted to kill Jacob, and Jacob fled.

As the boys had grown up their different personalities had emerged. They were polar opposites. Esau was the hunter, sensual, living for the moment. Jacob was passive, quiet, and a schemer.

Twins in various cultures have been a symbol of the divided self. Jacob had fought Esau in the womb. Esau was his alter ego, the shadow self, that Jacob carried within him and with whom he would have to come to terms if he was to live a fruitful life.

This was the primary soul-struggle Jacob would have to contend with – not so much reconciliation with Esau but with his own self. The ‘faces’ of Esau, God, and Jacob would blur.

Throughout his life Jacob was unable to live comfortably either with or without his brother. He had disguised himself as Esau to fool his father into giving him the blessing. It is an odd image. Jacob was trying to be both brothers at once. In psychological terms, it is almost as though he was trying to heal the conflict in his personality that would so often impede him in later life.

Jacob through deception stole from his brother and caused him enormous grief. Jacob, far from prospering through this theft, then led a blighted existence. Jacob could not forget the wrong he had done his brother. He had no peace. His life became a struggle.

Jacob fled to Mesopotamia, the opposite direction from the Promised Land, and remained there for the next twenty years. He lived in the household of his wily uncle Laban who tricked the cheater into marrying his eldest daughter, Leah. Then seven years later Jacob married the favoured and younger sister, Rachel.

One of the questions the text raises for us is how come this receiver of the patriarchal blessing, this inheritor of the promise, this one blessed by the God of struggle, lived such a terrible life? Was he blessed or was he really cursed? Or is the whole saga an attempt by Jacob’s descendants to come to terms with his legacy of both family dysfunction and engagement with God?

The conflict within Jacob’s soul soiled any harmonious family life. Jacob was born into a family system where there were favoured and unfavoured children. Unless confronted such systems reproduce in each generation.

Jacob set up winners and losers. This was his understanding of how life operated. He favoured Rachel, the younger sister, and despised Leah. Leah and Rachel, not surprisingly, got into a competition of trying to win Jacob’s favour, and passed that destructive competitiveness on to their children.

Finally after twenty years in Mesopotamia, with two wives and additional maids to bear his children, Jacob decides to begin the journey home, and into his past. He was the first of the patriarchs of Israel to make a return journey. Henceforth the whole notion of return would become an important symbol of integration and reconciliation in the faith of Israel.

It was a journey both to find peace with his brother and within himself. He was now a rich man – with large flocks, slaves, etc. – and at the same time impoverished in his family relations and in his own soul. Interestingly as he neared his homeland Jacob began to experience God again. [1] Already Jacob had sensed that in addressing his brother, his shadow self, he was in some mysterious sense addressing God.

Jacob then hears that Esau is heading his way at the head of four hundred fighting men! Gulp!! Jacob assumes the worst. In fear and distress Jacob divides his followers into two camps in the hope that some might escape the bloodshed to come. He then runs to God.

Jacob is no longer confident in his own cleverness. He feels unworthy and small. Yet he does not flee. He realises that he must go forward to confront the past. Next Jacob dispatches a huge gift of livestock to Esau. His envoys were to say these are from “your servant Jacob”. Then he sends his wives, their maids, and his eleven children ahead of him. He has divested himself of all his outward status and power.

And that night Jacob meets wrestles with God by the ford of Jabbok. He is tenacious – and we get that lovely line of God saying ‘Let go of me!’ He wrestles with himself, Esau, and divinity. He wins and he loses. He is healed and he is wounded.

The next day he meets Esau. It is wonderful day – hugs and tears all round. Esau too must have done some processing of his past and learnt to live with his limitations. It’s important to note however that although there is reconciliation for the brothers neither lives happily ever after. And neither do their descendants. From Esau came the nation of Edom [nowadays the Dead Sea area and southern Jordan] who had many wars with Israel.

Struggle defined Jacob’s life. Outwardly he was rich in possessions and children. He was the child of promise. He was seen as blessed. Inwardly however his life was a struggle. He didn’t know how to create or facilitate relationships of mutuality. He didn’t know that power and even love can be destructive without mutuality. He didn’t know that God would fight him and wound him.

[1] Life started to assume a “double” aspect; each apparently mundane event would also have a divine dimension. For example God sent messengers to Jacob, and he responded by dispatching messengers to his brother Esau.