Sunday  21st October 2007tRINITY xX

Fr Julian Browning

Genesis  32  :  22 – 31   ; II  Timothy  3  :  14  -  4  :  5  ; Luke  18  :  1 – 8  

I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved. Genesis 32.30

Jacob wrestled his way from fear to faith. He entered a new dimension, a new understanding of the truth about himself and about God, a relationship built on blessing.


If you are depressed, or stressed, or just can't sleep, there is a  time of the night, about three or four in the morning, which is particularly grim. It's too late to have a good night's sleep, and it's too early to get up. In the Bible, the night is a time of fear, and this great story of Jacob wrestling with God takes place at night. It derives from old stories of spirits and demons, who guarded particular places such as this stream Jabbok, but who are powerful only at night. The story has been reworked many times, and is now mysterious to us, with its strange blessings and renamings. In our nitpicking modern literal way, we could say that the story is corrupt, mixed up, beyond our comprehension. But that's our loss. A short story might not be true, but it can reveal truth. A poem can remain mysterious, yet still open a new world to our imagination. The story of Jacob wrestling with God reveals to us our own struggle with religion, our lifelong battle to see God face to face.

Jacob is a treacherous man who cheated his brother Esau out of his father's blessing. Like most of us, he has a secret life of which he can not be proud. But matters come to a head, as they usually do in life, and Jacob has to cross this difficult stream, on his own, on a journey which will bring him to the day of reckoning with his brother. He is in danger of his life. This is Jacob's rite of passage, from danger to safety, from night to day, from shamed outcast to the one who is blessed by God and given a new name. During the night he does not know the name of the man with whom he wrestles. This is only revealed when day has broken, and Jacob can say, I have seen God face to face. The story is a marvellous description of a man at the crisis of his life, wrestling with his own meaning and destiny. Our journey will be like that. The weariness, the confusion, the anguish which is part of every human life might well be part of our struggle with God, our fear of the truth, but in the darkness we won't know that. We just think God's not there. We don't know God until the day breaks. Faith isn't knowing the answer, faith is the decision to wrestle till dawn. When day breaks, Jacob is a changed man, expressed physically in the rather odd limp which he now has, but we know he's changed because he has received God's blessing, and is to be known as the founder of the nation Israel.

There is one strange feature of this story which makes it, I believe, a story for our time. To the embarrassment of later commentators, Jacob wins. He defeats God in a wrestling match. The man who cheated his brother out of a blessing now forces a blessing out of God. Why is this shocking? Because we have been brought up to believe in a God who always wins, who demands submission, the God of thou shalt not. If you wrestle with that God, you lose. This is the Old Testament God whose face you can not look upon and live. This is the angry fundamentalist God who is gaining supporters in Christianity and Islam. But the agenda of that God is set, not by God, but by his supporters. They say: This is what God says, this is what you must do. The danger we face is just what St.Paul warns us against in the epistle. The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate teachers to suit their own likings. I am delighted that Jacob won his battle. Here is hope for all of us struggling to be Christians. Maybe you find it easy to be a Christian. I don't. But stories like this help me.  In the story of Jacob wrestling at the ford of the Jabbok, we get a glimpse of the wonderful God preached by the Anglican Church in her less dotty moments down the ages, the God who accompanies us through the night of doubt and sorrow, whether we recognise him or not, the God who is all-powerful but who comes down from heaven for our sake, the God glorious in defeat, the God whose natural relationship with us is one of blessing, the God who sees us face to face. This was Jacob's achievement over  that terrible night. He crossed from fear to faith. Mad mullahs, including the Christian ones, usually take us in the other direction, from faith to fear. Jacob wrestled his way from fear to faith. He entered a new dimension, a new understanding of the truth about himself and about God, a relationship built on blessing. The effect of all this on his own life, we learn in the next chapter, and this is not just a story, it is a truth of religion being handed down the generations in story form. What Jacob most feared, retribution from his brother, never happened. Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. Reconciliation with God leads to reconciliation with each other. The one who struggles to the end receives the divine blessing. So, as Jesus says in the Gospel, there is every reason not to lose heart, however long the night.