Wrestling with God
[A reading of Genesis 32:22–31]
Here we have the story of Jacob wrestling with God. Let’s start with what is happening. Immediately before the start of this passage, Jacob was preparing to meet with his brother Esau. This is important to the setup of this story. See, Jacob and Esau have not had the best of relations. They fought each other in the womb. They were twins. Esau was born first and Jacob was holding Esau’s heel as he was being born. It was prophesied that both of these men would grow into great nations and that contrary to custom, the older, Easy, would serve the younger, Jacob.
When they were younger, Esau was hungry, Jacob offered him food, only if he sold his birthright to him. Later on, when their father Isaac was sick, Jacob and his mother colluded to fool Isaac into giving Jacob the blessing that was due to Esau. To put it mildly, this family had issues. So at the onset of this story, Jacob is preparing to meet up with Esau for the first time since the blessing shenanigans. He was likely afraid that Esau would seek revenge. He sent servants before him with gifts, then sent his family.
Now Jacob was alone. Here it said that he wrestled with an unidentified man all night. Who was this man? When Jacob asked him his name, he did not oblige, but he did say that Jacob “wrestled with God and with man” and won. What does this mean? Was this man actually a manifestation of God? Was he an angel? Did this actually happen or did this happen in Jacob's dream? We do not know. What we do know, is that to the ancient Jewish people reading this would not have been as concerned about the semantics listed above. The text is a living word as we practiced and discussed last week. They would be, and thus, we should be more inclined to look to what can be learned from this.
In some way, Jacob wrestled with God. As I wrestled with God in graduate school, unhappy with my career choice in higher education, and found myself face-to-face with a tornado on a spring night in south GA. It resulted in me knowing there was purpose in my life.
I wrestled with God after being pushed out of my job at the University of Texas, after moving halfway across the country. It resulted in my call to ministry.
I wrestled with God upon breaking up with my fiancé, and shortly after losing my job and church. It resulted into getting accepted into 3 high calliber universities, Duke, Wake Forest, and Vanderbilt with significant scholarship money.
I wrestled with God after losing the funding for my church plant after moving across the country, leaving family, friends, and life behind. It resulted in this placement right here.
A family friend, who I will call Martha, although that is not her real name, has a story about wrestling with God. One of her daughters has down syndrome. That is tough enough to deal with as it is, knowing that extra care will be needed and health complications will likely follow throughout her life. Then her son gets a rare disease that caused him to collapse one day in school. It turned out to be this disease that grows tumors on his spinal cord. It has nearly killed him on more than one occasion. He has been paralyzed ever since. Around when this was reaching its peak, her husband lost his job, and due to a hurricane, the power went out, ruining the expensive medicine her son needed that required refrigeration.
She lost it. She broke things, screamed at God, screamed obscenities. You could say, she was wrestling with God that night. While I cannot say what specific life-changing results came from this, what I can say, is she received a response. The next morning, the priest from her former church in Virginia called her out of the blue and said “I had a feeling you need to talk.”
I believe the author of this story in Genesis knows that we need to wrestle with God, like Jacob. It’s an invitation. Not an invitation to be cocky, but rather the opposite, to be humble. It feels like a form of worship because it is brutal honesty before God. We can hide behind flowery words and thoughts, but God knows our hearts, and sometimes, we need to wrestle. Jacob was wrestling to be blessed. He said he would not let up until he was blessed! That’s not the type of prayer we learn about growing up in Sunday school.
Another important thing to note here, Jacob and Esau were two individuals, brothers, but they were also nations. Jacob was now called Israel. Throughout the scripture, Israel, the nation, is referred to as Jacob. Esau became known as the nation of Edom. Jacob wrestling with God represents God’s people as a whole, wrestling with God. Israel wants to be blessed by God before confronting Edom, and it was not confronting Edom for a fight, but for forgiveness. While the man Esau eventually forgives his brother, the nation of Edom does not forgive the nation of Israel for what happened between the brothers. Throughout scripture there are conflicts between the two. In the books of the prophets, God rebukes Edom for not forgiving.
It’s really important that when we see ourselves in a Jewish story that we see that story with Jewish eyes. In part, that means that we don’t get too caught up in the individual lens, but the collective lens. Perhaps right now the whole world right now is wrestling with God, seeking a blessing regarding the pandemic. Unfortunately, there are some foolish pastors out there that worship their constitutional rights more than the God that cares about the well-being of their congregants.
Perhaps right now, the black community is wrestling God, seeking the blessing of not being killed in the streets in violence.
Perhaps the Native communities are wrestling with God right now, seeking a blessing as they have been living under our occupation on their ancestral lands.
Seeing this in a collective lense does not mean that we cannot see it in the individual lens too, though. So, who do we individually need to wrestle with God, but more importantly, how do we as a people, as Christ-followers need to wrestle with God? How do we need to seek a righteous blessing, the kind of blessing that is not for our own comfort and benefit, but to do the right thing?
