Genesis 32:22-31 

Back when I was a student at Deptford High School (a long time ago in a not-so-far away place!) there was a wrestler, one year ahead of me, who became quite a local celebrity.  It was almost the end of his senior year, and he had never lost a High School duel match.  He even had a write up in Sports Illustrated magazine! A wrestling scholarship to Penn State and the Olympics were in his future. 

Now, there happened to be another guy from our rival West Deptford who also had quite an unbeaten streak going – I think his was two years without a loss.  And the speculation in the local paper (The Gloucester County Times) was all about who was the better wrestler. Who would win that match? But, our guy wrestled at 168 and the West Deptford guy weighed in at 178. And even though one of the last meets of the year would pit those two schools together, because of the different weight classes they weren’t going to go head to head.  Or so we thought… 

As the day of the meet approached, word started going around that Jerry (our guy) was going to put his four year unbeaten streak on the line by moving up a weight class in a testosterone laced mano e mano confrontation.  This was High School sports at it’s best! (Now you have to understand that we had precious little to cheer about when it came to sports back then! Things have changed since, but it was slim pickin’s in those days!) 

The night of the meet the gym was packed. And sure enough, the battle of the Titans really was on.  But it turned out that it wasn’t much of a battle. Our guy won by some rule that ends a match when the score becomes too one sided (I’m not sure if they still do that.)  And we had the distinct impression that a pin was purposely being avoided in order to run the score up as high as he did. The only points the other guy scored was for ‘escapes’… and he clearly was being let go. 

We thought it would be quite a match, and although the home rooters enjoyed it, it was really a mismatch. And the ‘underdog’ romped. 

We’ve probably all have been inspired by stories of underdogs rising to the occasion… from David vs. Goliath, to the USA vs. the Soviet Union in Olympic ice hockey, to Kentucky beating LSU last Saturday. (One of the little benefits of being sick last weekend was that I actually got to watch the end of a Saturday afternoon college football game, not something that typically happens for me!)

In the history of sports, however, there has never been such an inexplicable outcome of a contest as the one we read about in Genesis 32! Just a quick recap: Jacob is on the run. After 20 years of being avoided by him, Esau has finally found his brother Jacob and was now on his way to him accompanied by 400 men. 400 Soldiers. Jacob was scared to death – and he had good reason to be! 

You remember the story of how Jacob had stolen by trickery the blessing of his father (Isaac) from Esau, his twin brother.  And as far as Jacob was concerned, it was payback time.  And he was scared. First, he divides all his considerable property into two groups and sends them in separate directions, figuring that Esau would be satisfied with destroying only one of the two.  He sends waves of elaborate gifts ahead to meet the oncoming party to try and pacify them. 

The night before the meeting, Jacob sends his immediate family and all of his personal possessions across the Jabbok River. He then returns, alone, to the desolate camp where he spends a night like no other. 

As I said, there have been mismatches before, but how do you handicap a wrestling match…with God?  To say that this is a mysterious passage is a bit of an understatement. And that is not to doubt it’s authenticity… it’s simply to admit that, we’ll, it’s kind of weird!  Jacob is waiting for the arrival of his brother, knowing the possibility is strong that this could be his last night on earth. And ‘a man’ (which is all the text says in the beginning) shows up in the darkness, and begins wrestling with him. And they wrestle all night long. (That’s kind of weird, it’s ok to point that out!) 

Later in the text, we realize that this man has supernatural powers, and he has the ability to give a blessing; more to the point, Jacob refers to him as “God” (“I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been spared.”) A pretty modest statement from someone who (at least from the wording of our text) could have also added, “And by the way, I wrestled him to a draw!”  But I think that might be missing the point. 

Now we could also point out that Esau was supposed to have been the more rugged one of the twins, and that Jacob must have toughened up quite a bit over the intervening 20 years, but again, I think that misses the point too; because this epic night was obviously highly symbolic. Draw or not, there was a winner. And it wasn’t Jacob. Something was happening this night that was much more significant than a schoolyard type wrestling match. 

This mysterious visitor initiated the contest…and he also ended it when it was time to end. Clearly there was something important about the struggle of that night – let’s name it, this wrestling with God was necessary for Jacob. And at the end Jacob walks – limps – away with a reminder of this night that he would carry to his grave. But he also goes away bearing a new name. 

Knowing how significant names are to Middle Eastern culture, we know (like the name of a book we used to read to our kids) “Something Big Has Happened Here.”  Something big has happened to Jacob. And he will never be the same.  In fact, he’s not even Jacob anymore, is he? He is Israel. 

There was an interesting article in last Tuesday’s Courier Post (Oct. 16^th) about a guy by the name of A. J. Jacobs, an editor at large for “Esquire” magazine, who decided out of his interest in religion in the world, to try for one year living every facet of his life based on a strict (meaning, ‘literal’) interpretation/ application of the Bible. 

It said in the article that he had an advisory board consisting of rabbis, priests, and ministers who lead him to do such things as ‘wearing white’ (“It was like always being dressed for the semifinals at Wimbledon or a P. Diddy party”), wearing a robe and sandals, herding sheep, eating chocolate covered locusts, and snake handing (none of which I can recall being a command in any Bible passage I’ve ever read! So I have some doubts about his ‘advisors’!) 

What really caught my attention, however, was his response to the question of what was his biggest challenge.  He replied, “That’d be no coveting, no lying, no gossiping. They’re little sins, but they’re killers. My year made me realize just how may of these sins I committed every day. And refraining from them for a year was really hard, but completely transforming…”

Interesting! 

What he discovered – also interesting that his name is Jacobs – was similar to what that the characters Jeannie and Brian were being confronted with in the ‘I – Witness News Team’ play we just saw: the realization that the little things matter. In fact, maybe we could say that when it comes to our own integrity there are no little things. It’s all important. It all matters – a lot!  Every little decision we make helps define who we are. 

Do you think that this – i.e., Jacob’s integrity –  might have been the basis for the lesson that Jacob learned through his night of wrestling? Think about this: for twenty years Jacob has been living with the knowledge that everything he had, (and he had a lot) had started with dishonestly. He cheated, pure and simple. He got what wasn’t his, and he lied to get it. And this was his life’s pattern. And while God was with him, he couldn’t get past the plain fact that even his name ‘Jacob’ described his character – the word in Hebrew means ‘heel-grabber,’ or ‘the supplanter’, and in fact, his life was one of ever reaching to get more than his due, whatever the means. 

I wonder if his extreme fear at meeting Esau the next day was not so much about being killed, (this was a tough age to live in, at the best of times.) But I wonder if it was more about his reluctance to finally come clean from a long standing wrong. A reluctance to be honest, to face his real self. This, surely, was a spiritual issue. 

Not just about property or even justice… it was about his own integrity. Who are you, Jacob? 

I can’t give much of an explanation of the wrestling match, except to point out the obvious imagery that comes to mind when we think of someone ‘wrestling with God’. Many of us can identify a time in our lives when there was something that we needed to do, and we didn’t want to it; or a time when we needed to give up our own self will, and we didn’t want to; a time when we needed to change our way of looking at things (kind of like we were talking about two weeks ago, with the ‘eternal perspective’…) 

But the truth is, we don’t want to!  No change! And we resist. But we find that God doesn’t let us go so easily. And we wrestle with God. We know what it means! 

And look at the result – the dawn is about to break…the ‘man’, or ‘angel’ or whatever, touches Jacob’s hip and dislocates it, speeding up the end of the match. 

²⁶ Then the man said, “Let me go, for the dawn is breaking!”
    But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 

“I will not let you go unless you bless me…”   I need your blessing! And what is the response of the man?  He asks Jacob a curious question, and I get the feeling that this is what it was all about: 

 ²⁷ “What is your name?” the man asked.
      He replied, “Jacob.” 

Well, on the surface that seems to be just another odd part of an odd story. Did this heavenly messenger really not know who he was wrestling with? Did he just show up and find this guy in the wilderness and decide on a whim to take him on? Hardly! 

He asks Jacob, “What is your name?” as they are locked in each others grip. If you listen hard, maybe you can hear the echo of another question, from another time when someone else who could barely see asked Jacob to identify himself. “I am Esau,” he said at that time, but twenty years plus this night have changed him. This time, he answers “I am Jacob,” and the name falls away from him like an old coat. He is no longer Jacob the supplanter, the heel- grabber. He is Israel, the survivor, the striver with God...

In this night of wrestling with God Jacob finally comes clean before God. Back in Bethel when Jacob had the vision of the ladder ascending to heaven he made all sorts of prayers for protection and God’s blessing and help. And here, tonight, was God’s answer to those prayers. 

Not the ‘comfort and safety part’, but the God-be-with-me part. This was the end of his making deals with God, the last act in Jacob’s struggle to control. Jacob had finally learned. And God gives Jacob what he needed instead of what he wanted. Within that wounded, blessed relationship, Jacob saw the face of God and lived to tell the tale. These encounters are often painful and difficult. They typically come through times of pain and suffering, perhaps because these are the only times our resistance is low enough to receive them. 

I love the words of a pastor named Barbara Brown Taylor who in speaking about those times of struggling with God, those dark nights of the soul, those painful encounters that we all have, and how they are actually good for us, writes this: 

“Of course this is all just talk until you have got a stranger on your back, smelling of heaven and pummeling you for all he is worth. When it happens, do not let anyone tell you there is something wrong. Do not let anyone convince you that if it were really God it would not be so scary and it certainly would not hurt. Hang on with everything that is in you, even if it hurts. Insist on a blessing to go with your wound and do not let go until you have got one. Then thank God for your life, limp and all, and tilt your way home.”[1]

We are defined in times like these, as the hot iron on the blacksmith’s anvil, wrestling with God, taking the blows, becoming who we are through the painful process we know as living and growing.  And this shaping can happen to us at any time, at any age; around the water cooler with a friend, or in church service, or in a dark field alone at night… the time comes when the running must stop and the heart must open. 

What is your name?