In the Ring with God (Genesis 32:22-32)

In the Ring with God

09-06-26

Genesis 32:22-32

By: Pastor Deepak Babu

“Don’t tempt me, Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo, I would use this ring from a desire to do good. But through me it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.” These are the words of Gandalf to Frodo in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of The Ring when Frodo attempts to give the one ring to Gandalf for safekeeping. Gandalf recognized that the ring promised something it could not deliver. If used, it would undermine the very reason for which the person chose to use it.

So… what if a tool you were given, a tool to presumably help you, turned out to be much like a crutch that kept you dependent and rendered you unable ever to walk? Most of us are probably quite accustomed to opening our bibles and reading it as though the section headings are a part of scripture. And we begin to think that the bible is divided into neatly separated portions that can be read in isolation from each other. Hence, when we read a passage like the one we heard today, we might think that it is about Jacob wrestling with God since that is what most headings tell us. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hold on to that thought.

This is my first Sunday as your pastor here at First UMC, Pocatello. I juggled with different ideas of how I should begin my pulpit time with you. I normally prefer going through books of the bible because that is how we receive our scriptures. I do not often like dealing with thematic series of sermons because very often they come across as contrived. However, you know very little about me and I know little about you. But we are beginning a relationship that will bloom and flourish only if we all know what we stand for and where our commitments lie.

And since the Conference and Bishop Cedric have blessed me with this commission and saddled you with me, it seemed best to me to give you an overarching idea of the perspectives that I take with respect to our faith and interpretation of the scriptures. Let this devil you don’t yet  know become the devil you know, as it were! Of course, my journey from Bangalore to Pocatello started in India on July 29th and has ended on September 6th, a period of exactly forty days. You could say it has biblical resonances.

Anyway, to get to know this devil, I will be taking you through a series I am calling “Identity and Vocation of the People of God.” In this we will learn together who we are as disciples of Jesus and what he is calling us to do in this world he loves. It will be a somewhat long series, taking us almost to Advent, mostly because the scope of our vocation is broad beyond our imaginations. It is my hope that you will get a big picture idea of my thought processes and the way I approach the scriptures. But before we get to the aspect of vocation, we must understand who we are.

I began today with all guns blazing, arguing that the section headings in our bibles can often be misleading or even counter-productive. You will realize that this is one of my pet peeves. After all, the section headings are not in any of the manuscripts. How does this affect the way we read the bible? If we were to remove the passage we heard from the text of Genesis we would go directly from Genesis 32.21 to Genesis 33.1. In that case, we would read, “So the present passed on ahead of him, and he himself spent that night in the camp… And Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, and four hundred men with him.” This would lead us to believe that, after a relatively uneventful night spent by himself, Jacob wakes up to discover that Esau was approaching him with a small army. In other words, without the passage we heard, the narrative would still make sense. So we have to ask ourselves, “Why did the author or editor of Genesis include this passage and why here?”

The Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov, has given us a principle commonly known as Chekhov’s gun. According to him “if you mention a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must be fired later.” In other words, every part of the narrative is important. This is especially true when it comes to the bible. After all, these books were written at a time when writing was a laborious process. Hence, nothing superfluous could be allowed to find its way onto the page - or rather scroll or parchment. Therefore, if the author or editor of Genesis found it necessary to include the passage we heard, it must be playing a role in the story being told, even though the narrative works well without it. So, to respect the author or editor, we must ask why this passage is included at all and why here.

You may wish to ask me here, “Deepak! Why are you making things difficult? Why can’t I just read my bible in the comfort of my home and simply take its meaning at face value?” That’s a valid question. What I am suggesting does make reading the bible more difficult. I cannot deny that. But why should I do this? In the words of Harrison Ford’s character in the 1986 movie The Mosquito Coast, “Dead things go downstream. Life is upstream.” To put it in other words, going with the flow does not yield the blessings that swimming against it does. Hold on to that thought.

Let’s see what our text says. We are told that, after Jacob sends his family ahead of him, he stays behind at the place where they had earlier camped. We are told that Jacob was left alone. But was he? Presumably not because no sooner have we read that he was alone than we are told about a man who wrestles with him. Unlike the start of chapter 33, where we are given information that Esau was approaching, we have no such thing here. Was the man already there, just waiting for Jacob’s family to go away? Did he suddenly materialize, as though the Jacob’s family hindered his appearance?

We are also told that the bout was started by this unknown man. It wasn’t Jacob who initiated the conflict. Presumably, the man had some kind of bone to pick with Jacob, though we are not told what it was. However, even though the man initiated the fight, we are told that he was unable to defeat Jacob. It’s like an ancient strait of Hormuz situation, if you know what I mean. Realizing that he was not winning, the man performs an illegal move and wrenches Jacob’s bone from the hip socket. But even this does not make Jacob give in. The man asks Jacob to let him go. The reason he gives is that dawn was approaching. Why? Was he afraid Jacob would see his face if the sun rose? Or was this man some kind of being that is unable to operate in the day time - a sort of biblical vampire? Of course, you may ask, “Deepak, wasn’t Jacab wrestling with God? Why would God be afraid? Why would God be unable to work during the day?”

But you see, in the narrative, the man is never identified as God. But you may ask, “Why

then does Jacob say, ‘I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved’? Surely this means that Jacob wrestled with God What else could it mean?”

It is here that we need to develop the discipline of telling the voice of a character in the narrative from that of the narrator. Jacob is not the narrator. The narrator always refers to Jacob’s sparring partner as ‘the man’. It is Jacob who mentions God. But note what Jacob says very carefully. He does not say, “My sparring partner was God.” Nor does he say, “I have wrestled with God.” Rather, he says, “I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” The narrator says that Jacob wrestled with a man. But Jacob says he saw God face to face? What gives?

Moreover, we are also told that the man tells Jacob, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” But does this mean that the man was referring to the then ongoing wrestling match? Or could it be something else; something perhaps in Jacob’s past?

Of course, we know about Jacob’s past. We are told that, when Rebekkah was pregnant, she was informed that she would give birth to twins. She was also told that the expected practice which gave pre-eminence to the firstborn would not hold for her children. She was told that the elder child would serve the younger. We know that later, when Esau was famished, Jacob used his hunger to purchase the rights of the firstborn from him. Later, when Isaac was ready to bless his eldest son, Jacob fell in line with Rebekkah’s plot and stole the blessing.

When he ran away and joined Laban he met his match because his future father-in-law was as accomplished a cheat as  he. But this did not make him change his outlook on life. Rather, through an elaborate scheme, he arranged events so as to steal from Laban. You know, when someone insists on biblical family values, I love to point them to Jacob’s family. Dysfunctional in the extreme with barely any redeeming characteristics.

In all these ways Jacob demonstrated that he was simply going with the flow. In this world we are told to look out for number one. We are taught that the one with the most toys wins. We are seduced into collecting and accumulating more and more. That is exactly what Jacob did. He went with the flow. He went downstream. But life is upstream. And if following God leads to life, then going downstream is to strive with God and refuse to walk the path God would want us to walk. Of course, with all his schemes, Jacob had also antagonized his brother, his father, and his father-in-law.

Hence, well before the episode in Genesis 32, Jacob had lived a life of striving against God and humans. And no one had managed to make him understand that he was on the way downstream. No one had managed to make him see the errors of his ways. He had indeed prevailed against God and humans. But this is not a complement. This was an indictment of his scheming ways. But God…

Here I think we need a brief aside. The phrase ‘but God’ is one of the most powerful in the scriptures. It indicates a complete reversal in the narrative. If things are going well, the phrase ‘but God’ is devastating because it reveals that things are going to take a turn for the worse. However, if things are going poorly, the phrase ‘but God’ is full of hope because it indicates that things are going to improve.

Hence, the man indicts Jacob for his past by saying that he had striven with God and humans. But God uses precisely this weakness to turn it into a blessing. Jacob is told that he would now be characterized as someone who wrestles with God. He would become someone who recognizes that the path to life is the one on which he actively takes up the mantle of struggling with God. And his whole outlook changes. Hence, in chapter 33 we see him for the first time placing himself at the front in a situation of potential conflict.

And when he greets Esau he tells him, “No, please; if I find favor with you, then accept my present from my hand, for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” Did you notice that? He told Esau that seeing his face was like seeing the face of God. But in chapter 32, while wrestling with the man, Jacob had already declared, “I have seen God face to face.” And prior to that he had thought, “I may appease him with the present that goes ahead of me, and afterwards I shall see his face; perhaps he will accept me.”

Jacob had hoped to cajole Esau with gifts so that, when he saw his face, Esau would be favorably disposed to him. It’s the same floating downstream way of doing things. Rather than own up to how he had stolen from his brother, he hoped to sweep that under the rug with gifts. But then he wrestles with a man. And he comes to the conviction that, while wrestling the man, he had seen the face of God. And when he sees his brother he realizes that Esau’s face was similar to the face of God he had been convinced about earlier.

What Jacob realizes is that you cannot expect God to simply wave God’s hands and absolve you of the responsibilities you have toward others. Rather, it is in wrestling with others to heal your relationships that you are able to see God. In other words, what Jacob realizes is that God wrestles with us when God makes us face the stark realities of how we have allowed our relationships to fall apart. More to the point, when we finally do encounter God, it is often in the context of attempting to mend our relationships with others.

Indeed, as long as we remain like Jacob, expecting to cajole or bribe or flatter our way out of the difficulties presented by our relationships, we will only deceive ourselves. But if we, like Jacob after he was renamed, are willing to face the people who have hurt us or whom we have hurt, then we might just discover in their faces the face of God. You see, after Genesis 32, Jacob’s descendants are almost always called the children of Israel. While Jacob’s name is sometimes used to refer to the nation as a whole, it is rarely used to refer to the people themselves.

Rather, the people are named according to Jacob’s new name. They are the children of Israel, the people brought into being in order that they would strive with God and wrest blessings from God. But just as Jacob discovered that it was while struggling with the man that he recognized the face of God, so also the people of Israel were expected to discover while they struggled with other humans that in their faces was the face of God.

We who follow Jesus have been adopted into the same family. Paul called the church the Israel of God. We are the ones who have been called to wrestle with God while struggling with our neighbors. And when we genuinely struggle with them we will discover that their faces are for us the face of God. When we put the two greatest commandments together we realize that it is in loving our neighbor that we get the opportunity and privilege of demonstrating our love for God.

However, each person has their own priorities and perspectives, which we will need to struggle to understand. And because of this the task given to us is not easy. We cannot simply read our bibles and expect guidance for every situation. Nor will today’s solutions work tomorrow, just as yesterday’s solutions do not work today. If we use either the bible or our doctrines rigidly, we may discover that it is similar to using the ring of power - full of promises, but ultimately destructive.

But God invites us to love our neighbors. And love is not something easy because it depends on the beloved. Because of this God’s invitation is nothing less than the invitation to wrestle in the ring with God. This is how I describe our life with God. Unlike in most religions, we are not promised a life that is smooth sailing. Rather, we are told up front that we will have trials and tribulations.  We are told that we will be misunderstood.  We are even told that we will be hated. In other words, we are not called to a life as spectators, but combatants- combatants in the ring with God.