In the words of the great Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” I’ve been gone for a bit more than a month. Like the kid who missed class, I want to ask, so: did I miss anything?
Actually, it’s good to be back. Over the last several weeks I have managed to survive a trip to Michigan without contracting cyclosporiasis, 10 days of Canadian wildfire smoke, and (perhaps most heroic of all) sitting through Christopher Nolan’s 3-hour film of The Odyssey. I’ll save my review for coffee hour, but if you have followed the Sunday Old Testament readings for the past month it’s hard to miss how closely Homer’s hero Odysseus resembles Israel’s patriarch Jacob. Both heroes live under constant stress, both are wily, and both ultimately persevere.
In today’s reading, Jacob approaches a meeting with Esau, the brother he has cheated, and he is wracked with fear and guilt. He knows he has wronged Esau, and he fears the consequences. Now, on the verge of the encounter, an angel of God wrestles with Jacob until daybreak. I’m not a psychiatrist, but it’s clear that this wrestling match represents Jacob’s internal struggle. Like many of us, he projects his inner conflict onto the world. As an epic hero, Jacob, whose name will be changed to Israel, stands for his people. They carry the mixed blessing of living as God’s chosen. Their life is a constant struggle with themselves, with the world, and with God. It is telling that the angel can only subdue Jacob by wounding him in the hip. God, it seems, does not always play fair.
Today, I am interested in what Jacob’s divine smackdown tells us about being human. As did Jacob, so do you and I live our lives under constant stress. As did Jacob, so do you and I carry the burden of having done things we’re not proud of. As did Jacob, so do you and I find ourselves under the uncomfortable scrutiny of God’s attention. Stress, remorse, and judgment: let’s think about these three things in turn.
As to stress: if you are alive on planet Earth, you know that life is stressful. Heck, if you drive in Los Angeles, you know that too. A lot of what my son calls “Newsweek sociology” tells us that life today is harder than it was in pre-modern times. But reading the Bible or Shakespeare or history, I’m not so sure. Jacob may not have checked his iPhone every fifteen minutes, but he did face constant pressures from his society and environment. The Bible’s Garden of Eden story is our shared cultural fantasy about how we wish the world were: peaceful, abundant, and pleasant. The Jacob story is a reality show about how life actually is.
Our desire to live a life without stress is both universal and understandable, but it is a fantasy. The point of the Jacob story—indeed the point of the whole Bible—is to show us how one can live a life of joy and abundance in the world as it actually is. If you know the rest of the Jacob story, you know that Jacob will go on to be the embodiment of God’s blessing. His life will be full, but it won’t be easy. His wrestling with the angel in many ways stands for the way humans best handle adversity. Jacob looks his adversary full in the face. They wrestle around in the desert. He finds a way both to go forward and to thrive.
So stress will always be with us. Living with remorse makes it worse. As Jacob contemplates his reunion with the brother he has wronged, he cannot help but struggle with his own conscience. A good deal of the anxiety he feels comes out of his awareness of his own fault. If he hadn’t stolen the birthright he wouldn’t be who he is today, but he also wouldn’t experience the guilt of having wounded his brother.
All of us live with regret and remorse. We all have done things we wish we hadn’t, things we wish we could undo. Even if we are well-intentioned, we often hurt others in the daily give and take of life. Pursuing our own interests, as Jacob does, sometimes impinges on the prospects of others. The Jacob story is an extended reflection on the costs of living in human society. I’d like to go to my grave knowing that I’d always made everybody around me happy. But, like the dream of a stress-free life, that wish is also a fantasy.
If Jacob’s story is a tale about how we live in the world as it actually is, then in some sense it advises us about how to make peace with our regrets. Jacob rues the things he has done to his brother, and he only gets out of the angel’s grasp when the man dislocates Jacob’s hip. Wounding others hurts not only them but us. Jacob’s encounter with God hurts him because it is always painful to come to terms with the truth about oneself. Jacob will persevere, but he will do so “limping because of his hip”. Regrets and remorse are real, and they come with a cost. But they only immobilize us if we give them the power to do so. We make our peace with our past and move on, but the cost of the past is always a part of us.
And then there is judgment. When Jacob encounters the angel of God in our story, it is he, not the angel, who insists on continuing the contest. “I will not let you go until you bless me.” In these Genesis stories, God’s blessing is always at risk. It is carried by Jacob’s forbears Abraham and Isaac, and now it is Jacob’s turn to carry the blessing like a fragile flame through the surrounding darkness. Jacob prevails here, and the angel tells him, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” This wrestling match turns out to be a moment of judgment, and the primary judge turns out to be Jacob himself. Under the stress of living, Jacob has made some bad decisions, but also some good ones. This coming to account has wounded him, but that wound has not fully disabled him. He has taken a personal inventory, regretted his mistakes, and resolved to go forward. The things he feared will turn out to have been illusions. The brother he wronged will embrace him. He will have a new name. “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”
The Odysseus/Jacob comparison only goes so far. As good as Matt Damon is at portraying Odysseus, Homer gives him a character we know solely from the outside. Our biblical hero, Jacob, is another story. We see both his actions and his soul. He’s a subject, not an object. He’s exactly like you and me.
The Bible is a book about making our way with God through life in the world as it actually is. We live our lives under stress. We achieve things we can celebrate, and we make decisions we come to regret. Life is a mixed bag. Jacob’s encounter with God shows us how we can come to terms with ourselves and go forward. Jacob survives the night and greets the dawn if not as a new person than as the old one forgiven, blessed, and healed. This, in a nutshell, is the Christian life. We come to terms with our past, confess our regrets, and then meet the new day with joy, even if we must do so limping into the sunrise. Amen.
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