FIRST UNITED METHODIST CHURCH                                                                            JUNE 18, 2006  

SERMON:  WRESTLING WITH GOD                                                                           GENESIS 32:22-32

THE HYMN AND THE TEXT

Today we are going to explore, and have been exploring, one of the strangest but wonderful passages of the book of Genesis.  This is the story that seeks to explain where Israel, as a nation, gets its name.  One of the questions early Israelites would have asked is, “What does ‘Israel’ mean and how did this meaning get attached to us?”  This story answers that question. 

The hymn based on the story has been a favorite of the Methodist church historically – note that our hymnal includes 14 verses.  Wesley wrote thousands of hymns many with 20 or so verses.  The fact that the editors of our hymnal include all 14 verses indicates what they thought of this hymn.  Charles Wesley wrote what Isaac Watts (the composer of Amazing Grace) said was worth all the songs he himself had written.  High praise indeed.  This was a very beloved song in Methodist history and it has been largely forgotten.  On a personal note, I once asked my father if he had ever heard of it.  He told me that when he was my age he had all 14 verses of this hymn memorized.  Put me in my place.

I also have some personal history with his passage.  When I was 20 years old or so, I attended Rader Memorial United Methodist Church in Miami Shores, Florida.  I got to know the pastor pretty well at the time – Jack Stroman – and he asked me to preach one Sunday for their “Youth Sunday.”  I picked this as my text and that was my first sermon ever.  I am not preaching the same sermon today, but at least the same text.

THE SETTING FOR THE STORY

This story demands some knowledge of the broader context.  In Gen 27, Jacob and his mother Rebekah had deceived old blind Isaac so that he gave the family birthright/blessing to the younger son, Jacob, rather to its rightful owner, Esau.  Jacob had run for his life because Esau was so out to kill him in revenge.  Jacob had moved to Paddan Aram where he married both Leah and Rachael and continued to prosper largely through trickery and deceit.  Finally he had to escape from there from his father-in-law who also was out to kill him.  God himself stopped Laban from killing Jacob.  This guy has a huge family by now, lots of wealth (sheep and goats) and mainly, lots of enemies.

So he’s making his way toward his home country southward toward where Esau lives.  He sent messengers of reconciliation ahead to greet Esau and they returned with the message, “We went to your brother Esau and now he is coming to meet you and four hundred men are with him.”  Some reception party – clearly Esau is up to no good!

What happens next is rather complicated and we can suffice it to say that Jacob divides his group into various sub-groups with his immediate family at the back.  He hopes to appease Esau with a series of gifts before he gets back to his family and himself.  Finally he puts his family on one side of the river and stays himself alone on the other.  The name of the river, Jabbok, is important because in Hebrew is forms a play-on-words with the name Jacob and the verb ‘struggle/wrestle.’  Jabbok is Jacob’s place of wrestling.  There is an actual Jabbok river that flows into the Jordan river from the east.

JACOB’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE MYSTERIOUS MAN

It is at that point the story becomes especially mysterious.  The text simply says, “And Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”  Who is this mysterious ‘man’?  If this isn’t strange enough, it later becomes apparent that this man is some kind of angel or even a god/God.  The prophet Hosea comments on this passage saying of Jacob (Hos 12:3-4) saying “In the womb he grasped his brother’s heel; as a man he struggled with God. 4 He struggled with the angel and overcame him. . .”  But we don’t know any of this yet.  The text starts out only by saying, “a man wrestled with him.”  And surprisingly, Jacob gets the better of him, so much so that the man is pleading for mercy!  Jacob must realize the glory associated with this ‘man’ because he insists, “I won’t let you go until you bless me!”  The reader can hardly but be struck with the irony of the story; Jacob is wrestling with a divine being and winning!

The ‘man’ miraculously touches Jacob’s hip and puts it out of joint.  But Jacob holds on anyway – in spite of the great pain that he must have felt.  This divine being ends up pleading with Jacob, “Let me go for it is daybreak!”  For all Jacob’s failures, the writer(s) of Genesis always portray him as someone who deeply sought after God’s blessing.  Maybe he used trickery to get it, but he still valued God’s blessing highly!  He tricked his father for the spiritual blessing.  Now he will not let the ‘man’ go until he has been blessed. 

There is something rather odd about this however.  Jacob knows that God has already promised this very thing.  In fact, in just earlier in the chapter, Jacob reminds God that God has already promised to bless him.  “O Lord, who said to me, ‘Go back to your country and your relatives, and I will make you prosper.’”  God had promised blessing to Abraham and all his descendants previously.  In fact, the divine covenant with Abraham’s family had been repeated already three times, each time with a promised blessing.  So Jacob is wrestling with the man/angel/God (whomever) to receive a blessing that God himself had already repeatedly promised both to the family generally and to him personally.

THE BLESSING AND THE KISS

Why was Jacob so insistent on being blessed?  Blessing is a big deal in the Old Testament.  Blessings are effective in the OT only when spoken by the appropriate person, with the appropriate disposition, at the appropriate time for the appropriate recipient.  When that was the case, good things came into being as a result.

The divine man doesn’t first bless him; he changes his name from Jacob to Israel.  This name is taken to mean, ‘He struggles with God” (v. 28).  We will come back to this.  But then he finally gives Jacob what he has been struggling for, not a new name but a new pronouncement of blessing (v. 29).  It seems to have worked.  The approach of Esau and the threat that poses is the obvious reason why Jacob was desperate to be blessed in the first place.  Jacob wants the kind of blessing from God that will deliver him from Esau’s hand.  When Esau arrives he is all hugs and kisses.  One can only expect a changed heart since Esau didn’t bring 400 men with him to give Jacob a welcome home kiss. 

THE QUESTIONS AND THE ANSWERS

This is the type of story that raises lots of questions in the minds of the reader.  Historically, interpreters of this passage have asked two questions.  First, who was this mysterious ‘man’ with whom Jacob struggled?  Second, what was the meaning of Jacob’s new name ‘Israel’?  Let’s look at these in order.

Who is the Stranger?  First, to many interpreters, the mysterious man must have been an angel.  That seems to be implied in the statement in Hosea about Jacob, “He struggled with an angel and overcame.”  But the ‘man’ changed his name to ‘Israel’ because, “You have struggled with God.”  And the name itself seems to be translated, “He struggles with God.”  “El” in Israel is an early generic word for “God.”  Struggling with an angel is not the same thing as struggling with God!  The solution was obvious to many; “God” here is a short way of saying, “angel of God.”  Josephus in his Antiquities writes, “He further ordered him to be called Israel which in the Hebrew tongue signifies, “the adversary of an angel of God.”  One rabbinic tradition says that the mysterious man was Michael the archangel, and he had to leave at daybreak to sing the new day into existence which was his chief duty.  This proves it is an angel and not God.

But Christian interpreters are not so apt to go this route.  We don’t have a problem in understanding God in an incarnate form.  For us, it is redolent of the coming of Christ.  We read this passage and say, “When God took up a human body in the person of Jesus, this wasn’t the first time.  We wouldn’t expect it to be.”  For some, the person was Jesus – or at least an earlier version of the incarnation of God.  This is exactly Charles Wesley’s interpretation in verse 3, “Art thou the man that died for me?”  That becomes a central theme in Wesley’s interpretation, repeating over and over, “Thy name and thy nature is love.”  Christ reveals the love of God at the cross – this is a great Christian interpretation!

What means the Name?  But what is the meaning of his name ‘Israel’?  Doesn’t it sound strange that the very name Israel would mean, “he struggled with God”?  Wouldn’t it be more likely to mean, “He struggled with God, for God, on God’s side”?  It sounds like God or the angel and Israel are enemies; yet as we noted, God had already promised to bless Jacob.  So some understand the name to mean, “He struggled for God” or “he struggled by God’s help.”  The early Greek translation of the Bible went this route.  It translates Gen 32:39, “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.  For you have been strong with God. . .”

Others translate the name a little differently – as three separate Hebrew words, “ish rahah el” or “man who saw God.”  This meaning became very popular in the early church also and it fits the context in that the text goes on to say, “So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been preserved.”  This took root in some Jewish but mostly Christian thought.  Hippolytus of Rome in the 2^nd century wrote, “Israel means “a man seeing God,” while other say it is a man who will see God.  This view became popular for Christians because it could be extended to a spiritual state; the true Israel is not simply Jacob but all those who seek to “see” God.

THE INTERPRETIVE IMPASSE

It seems to me that all this interpretive wrangling comes because people of faith have felt uncomfortable with what the text itself seems to actually say.  We need to let the text speak for itself and then deal with it.  And it seems to be saying that Jacob did indeed wrestle with some incarnate image of God himself – not an angel.  It also seems to say that Jacob struggled against and not for God.  God forced Jacob into this struggle even though it was God’s intention to bless him all along as promised. 

We’ve got to deal with this and simply figure out what it means on a theological level.  What is the message of the story?  Why is this story told?  Most importantly, as the church encountering the word of God, what is its message for us today?  How can you place yourself into this story?  In believing the Bible is the Word of God, we believe it is our story.  To faithfully read the Bible, we find our place in the broader narrative of God’s work in our world.  My job is to help you encounter what God is saying through the world so you place yourself into the broader narrative of God’s plan for humankind expressed through the Holy Scriptures!

MESSAGE FOR TODAY

This passage is saying that, from the very start of God’s story with the human race, Israel got its name from the fact that God allows us to struggle with him.  While God’s promises of grace and goodness endure, God allows us to live with spiritual tension.  Let me say this differently.  The life of Christian discipleship is foreshadowed by the story of Jacob.  True Christian discipleship involves both promise and wrestling; both encouragement and agony, but blessing and anxiety.  God has designed the world so that you both have the carrot and the stick – to speak rather crudely. 

There is a sense in which your life is, and ought to be, a spiritual struggle.  There is a sense in which the life of the church is a spiritual struggle together to appropriate the blessings God has already promised.  I hope you can see something of yourself is good old Jacob/Israel.  We are also Israel – that is, those who struggle with God.  This is a good thing; hard but good.  If you are going to make progress in the pathway of discipleship, it demands intentional, focused, spiritual effort.  It might require getting up earlier than you would need to for personal devotions.  It might require not purchasing everything you can – so you can give, save, live simply, go on a missions trip.  Discipleship demands effort – struggling with God to get what God already wants you to have.  Discipleship is a struggle.  We are still old Israel – struggling with God. 

Somewhere in God’s wisdom, God knew it was better to let us struggle than to simply give us all we desire and ask for.  The old adage, “Let go and let God” has little to commend it.  It simply doesn’t tell us anything meaningful about Christian living.  God will let you wait, sweat, struggle, agonize.  It forces you to do what you desperately do not want to do; that is, to grow up.  Discipleship is something of a struggle with God.  Is this a struggle you want to engage in?

The same is true as a church.  Churches can either take a struggling posture – wrestling with God for good things for the future – or a passive posture (maintain things a keep everyone happy).  This text is telling us that Israel’s very name came from the fact that their life with God was characterized by struggling with God himself.  Are you up for this?  Are you ready to struggle with God?  For your own spiritual growth?  For the spiritual growth of this church?