Sunday, August 3, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

Wrestling a Blessing

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 17:1–6, 15
Romans 9:1–5
Genesis 32:22–31

"I will not let you go, unless you bless me."
Genesis 32:26b (NRSV)

O God, keep us human
obsessed with tenderness
in the midst of inhumanity

William Sloane Coffin

Jacob would do anything for a blessing. He would turn to trickery and deceit. He would plot and impersonate. Taking advantage of his aging father’s blindness, Jacob dressed himself in his older twin brother’s clothes and covered his own smooth skin with the hairy skin of a kid—all to fool his father into mistaking him for Esau and thereby giving Jacob the birthright and blessing that, according to custom and law, should have gone to his older brother. Esau should have been given the “fatness of the earth,” the abundance of grain and wine, lordship over nations, and authority over all his brothers. But because of Jacob’s trickery, Jacob inherited it all.

Can you imagine the anger and bitterness Esau must have felt when he discovered what his younger brother had done? Is it any wonder that, as the narrator tells us, Esau came to hate Jacob and vowed to kill him? Upon discovering what had transpired, stunned and in some amount of panic, Esau cried out to his father, “Bless me, me also, father!” But it was too late. His father had already blessed his brother, and there was no blessing left for him to receive.

As the younger of two, I remember being very aware of how every good thing—whether it was a special treat to eat or something fun to do—was distributed between me and my sister. Even though I was four years younger than my sister, I expected things to be fair and square. Fortunately, my parents respected this sensibility and did their part to ensure that we received everything in like measure. They wouldn’t have wanted either of their daughters to think that one was more cherished over the other.

It wasn’t until I traveled to Korea at the age of nine that I encountered for the first time in my life the phenomenon that simply by virtue of my accidental existence I could be perceived as less worthy of blessings, as less of a blessing. At every threshold of every home of every friend of my parents or of every distant relative we met, just after the adults’ initial excitement in exchanging greetings died down, my sister and I would, without fail, hear someone say sympathetically, “Just two daughters? Not a son?”

I remember defiantly thinking, but deferentially refraining from saying aloud, “Hey, aren’t we blessing enough?” At those moments, I must have wanted greetings to be blessings. I wanted words of blessing. I wanted to hear that my sister and I were blessings. Later, when I could whisper the question that was more a demand into my mother’s ear, she turned to me and reassuringly said, “Of course you are.” Fortunately for my sister and me, those moments were fleeting. As far as I know, they were aberrations and did not have any long impact on our lives.

For the character of Jacob, however, it was different. From birth and far into adulthood he seems to have carried within him a deep existential and long-abiding need to be blessed. According to the narrative, even before his birth, Jacob struggled with Esau in their mother’s womb. Even in birth, Jacob was born holding onto Esau’s heel, for which he was given his name Jacob, literally meaning “heel-grasper.” Growing up in a society whose custom and law privileged the firstborn son to be favored with birthright, inheritance, and blessing, Jacob grew up envying and vying for these things. And he prevailed. Cunningly navigating his way around all the given norms, Jacob prevailed against his brother Esau. And Esau, having done everything he was expected to do in order to live into the privileges with which he was born, always seemed to be taken by surprise.

It’s hard to know for whom to feel more sorry. Although Jacob is the hero of this story, it is clear that he is no saint. Both he and his brother are flawed, and yet both could make a case before the world. According to society’s norms and laws, Esau has been wronged. He is clearly the injured party. According to another perspective, however, one that questions the justice of those norms and laws, Jacob too has been wronged. Given those laws, he never would have been given a fair chance for his future.

Whether our sympathies lie more with one or the other brother, the story doesn’t finally lend itself to taking sides. At first we might think it does, because Jacob himself seems to think it does. He seems to think the story of his life will depend on whether he wins or loses, on whether the blessing will belong to him or to his twin brother. It is for him a zero-sum competition for scarce goods in which someone wins and someone loses. But the story of Jacob, especially when read in its entirety, turns out to be not so much about who should win and who should lose, but rather about a consummate striver who from birth wants more than anything to be blessed and how over the course of his life he changes his understanding of what it truly means to be blessed.

As I read the dramatic and drawn-out story of Jacob this week, it was this question that came to the fore for me: In what way does Jacob’s understanding of blessing change? This is an important question, not simply because we all, like Jacob, want to be blessed and therefore can learn from him our own personal lesson, but also because at the same time that Jacob newly understands what it means to be blessed, he also undergoes a significant God-given change in identity. At the same time that Jacob newly understands what it means to be blessed, he is no longer the “heel-grasper” and instead becomes Israel. This simultaneity is, I think, no coincidence. How could they be? For I imagine that whenever God gives a person a new, larger calling, a new, public identity, a zero-sum understanding of blessing is never sufficient.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s return to the question: How does Jacob’s understanding of blessing change? If we read the whole story about Jacob and Esau carefully, from chapter 25 through 33, we can, I think, observe the dramatic change that Jacob undergoes. Clearly, until now, Jacob has preoccupied himself striving after material goods: not only while he was living at home, vying with his brother for a birthright and blessing, but also during the past twenty-two years of their estrangement, when he built up his fortune in a foreign land, and more recently, as he prepares to meet his brother. Having been commanded by God to return home, Jacob is quite worried. He remembers Esau’s wrath and worries that Esau is still out for revenge. Jacob’s preparations, therefore, include no small amount of calculation and strategy. Jacob makes plans and alternate plans. Though his plans do not involve military might, they rely completely upon material bribes. He sends emissaries ahead of himself to bear material gifts for Esau, and when they return with a report saying that Esau is coming to him and he has 400 men with him, Jacob antes up. Dividing up his livestock into large droves, he sends them, one drove after another, to disarm Esau.

Ironically, it turns out that his meeting with Esau doesn’t go at all as Jacob had anticipated. Reconciliation, not revenge, takes place. So gracious is Esau that he doesn’t expect any of the material gifts that Jacob sent to him. So gracious is he that he resists receiving them. Instead, when from a distance Esau saw Jacob approaching, Esau ran to his brother and embraced him. So overcome by emotion, the brothers wept.

And it is at this point in the story that we have evidence that Jacob has changed. When, even though Esau refuses to receive all the material goods that Jacob sent to him in order to disarm him, Jacob nevertheless insists and gives it all to Esau, that is when we notice that Jacob is no longer the “heel-grasper” that he once was. He is no longer preoccupied with material goods and how to leverage them. He no longer engages in a zero-sum competition.

Of course, this remarkable change did not come about easily. In the particular lectionary passage we read this morning, we are brought into the intense and exhausting struggle that seems to have culminated in this change. Left alone, in the darkness of night, Jacob wrestled. It’s hard to know exactly with whom Jacob wrestled, but it seems that Jacob himself thought he had been wrestling with God, for on the following morning, he said to himself, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”

You would think that, after wrestling throughout the night, Jacob would have been worn out and breathless, but in that moment, when his opponent tried to get away, Jacob held onto him, saying, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” It should be no surprise to us that Jacob insisted upon being blessed. After all, he tricked his father into blessing him. If he could have, he would have demanded that society bless him. Now we find Jacob demanding that God bless him. And in the end, God does bless him.

For Jacob who has wanted nothing more in life than to be blessed, what could be a happier ending than to receive a blessing from God? But the story doesn’t end there, because, you see, blessings from God come with their own demands. There is, in the Bible, a long tradition in which being blessed by God goes hand in hand with the call and charge to be a blessing to others. The tradition goes back three generations earlier when God blessed Abraham. To Abraham the Lord said, “I will bless you . . . , so that you will be a blessing. . . . And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2–3). Blessed by God, Jacob is now expected to be a blessing to others, and not just to others with whom he already gets along, but to others from whom he has been estranged, and not just to others in his family, but to all the families of the earth. So rather than the perfect happy ending, it is a wide open, new beginning.

It has always boggled my mind that God expects so much to happen through individual persons. When God says to Abraham, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” and when God gives Jacob a blessing and renames him Israel, intimating that he will become the patriarch of God’s people, and when
God provides Jesus Christ for the redemption of the whole world, I marvel at the possibility and potential God places in individual persons.

Of course, we know that it is possible for people not to fulfill their God-given potential. As we see in Jacob’s life, it is not until he finally understands what it truly means to be blessed that he can be given a new identity in order to fulfill God’s ambitious plan. It’s not until he gives up being a heel-grasper and being preoccupied with material goods that he can open himself to the marvelous possibilities God has in mind.

Reflecting on the difference between material and spiritual goods, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that spiritual goods—things like love, trust, friendship, the pursuit of knowledge—are such that the more we share the more we have (Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation, p. 232). In God’s economy of grace, spiritual goods, unlike material goods, don’t run out; instead, they multiply. We can add to this list many other spiritual goods, including being blessed by God. If we learn the lesson that Jacob learned, if we learn what it truly means to be blessed by God, there is no telling what marvelous and ambitious things God will be able to do through us. Amen.