Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, 10:30am service

admin | 28 February 2010

“Your name shall no more be called Jacob but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed”

It is one of the most outstanding statements in the whole of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, in what Christians know as the Old Testament. It marks and establishes the real meaning of Judaism and its further fulfillment, dare I say, in Christianity, or at least, in Jesus Christ in the Christian understanding. Nowhere does the striving with God and man appear more completely and more concentrated fashion than on the way of the Cross, the way of our Lenten pilgrimage.

The tragedy of our age lies in our ignorance, wilful and otherwise, of this understanding and perspective. We have become so accustomed and cynically inured to the endless posturing and manipulations of power politics, on the one hand, and the defeatist mentality of victim and entitlement politics, on the other hand, that we have little or no capacity to grasp the transcendent truths that the Scriptures constantly open out to us. We are, I fear, as dead to metaphor as we are to metaphysics (read God). And yet, these stories, by virtue of their being proclaimed, speak to our need and our situation.

Jacob is the deceiver, the trickster, the supplanter, a clever fellow, we might say, perhaps too clever by half and, no doubt, that view of things has influenced the whole tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment and bias which, in turn, issues in the hideous realities of anti-Semitism and racism signalled so graphically and so disturbingly in the unforgettable horrors of the Holocaust. The Jews of Europe, after all, were betrayed by the culture which betrayed itself. Such things are the very spectacle of deceit and betrayal. But that is not, ultimately, who he is.

This is, I think, what makes the story of Jacob so compelling. It is the picture of a soul who in his struggle persists in the quest to understand and be faithful to what is understood such that there is a remarkable transformation. Indeed the transformation of Jacob into Israel complements the Eucharistic gospel for this day, where the Canaanite woman shows herself to be a true Israelite, indeed, precisely because of her tenacity of intellectual spirit in holding on to what she has rightly perceived as the truth of God in Jesus Christ. She will not be put off and her struggle, akin to Jacob’s, is the great struggle, the great struggle of faith that reveals the true nature of Israel. It is accomplished in its fullness and truth on the Cross.

Such is Lent. But to return to the story of Jacob. Notice his concern to be reconciled with his brother Esau. Why? Because he knows how he has tricked him. In one way, it is his birth nature, we might say. Jacob and Esau are twins, birth brothers, but in their birth Jacob had taken hold of his brother’s heel; it was taken as an indication of his stronger spirit. He supplanted his brother. To add to the picture, Jacob later “stole” his brother’s inheritance in a remarkable act of cunning and deception. First, Esau allows his hunger to get the better of him and to “sell” his birthright to his twin, Jacob, for “a mess of potage.” Secondly, Jacob tricks his blind father, Isaac, by pretending to be his first-born, Esau, putting on the skins of lambs so as to make him appear hairy like his brother Esau. There is just the sense that Isaac realises this. “The voice is Jacob’s voice,” he says, “but the hands are the hands of Esau.” Just so, we might say, in the manner of the philosopher, Descartes, our senses deceive us. Of course, they do. In this case, as Isaac says to Esau, “your brother came with guile, and he has taken away your blessing.” “Is he not rightly named Jacob?” Esau laments with real chagrin, “for he has supplanted me these two times. He took away my birthright; and behold, now he has taken away my blessing.” Needless to say, this does not exactly make for good brotherly relations! Esau hated Jacob.

Our story takes place years later. The context is Jacob’s concern for reconciliation. Where does that come from, we might ask? What does it mean to want to be reconciled with those whom you have offended and from whom you have become estranged? It means “a sea-change,” as Shakespeare puts it, into “something rich and strange,” a sea-change into a whole new way of looking at reality. It means that we are no longer taken up with the enterprise of dominance and power, the lust to triumph over others for our own advantage either psychologically, politically, or materially. No. A larger concern and interest has intervened. It is not too much to call it a philosophical moment, a moment of reflection and self-examination; a Lenten moment, we might say.

It is this which provides us with a way of grasping the nature of this extraordinary encounter between Jacob and one who is described as “a man” and yet indicates that Jacob has actually wrestled with God! It is, in the ancient understanding of things, one of those super-extraordinary encounters between God and man. “Two of a kind are we,” Athena says to Odysseus in the Odyssey, “deceivers both.” Here Jacob, the deceiver, becomes Israel through the wrestle with God; Israel means “one who strives with God.”

This defines faith, really, and it is something which cannot be reduced to the dynamics of family and culture. What happens in this scene is testimony to the change that has already taken place in the deceiver, the supplanter, the master of one-up-manship, namely, Jacob. It is, more importantly, about the power and truth of God who engages our humanity to bring about who we truly are. For that is the point. Jacob becomes Israel because he is above all else, open to the transcendent truth of God. That defines him and propels his desire to be reconciled with his brother Esau.

It defines a whole people; the Hebrews become the people of Israel from this moment. It enters into the Christian discourse in numerous ways. Jesus will say of Nathanael that he is “an Israelite indeed,” because there is in him “no guile,” no tricks, no ulterior motive, just the simple desire to know and love. The Canaanite woman is also a true Israelite, even though she does not come out of any of the tribes of Israel. Her directness of approach to Jesus, her refusal to give up and give in, parallels Jacob’s wrestling match with God. In that sense her behaviour and attitude are like Israel. Like him she receives a blessing.

The lesson from Hebrews, then, takes up the argument, showing us that the wrestle with God is unending and requires our complete devotion. The wrestle, the striving has changed in a way, but in a fundamental sense, it remains the same. Our struggle is about our commitment to the truth which is, as Augustine says, tam antiqua, tam nova, at once ever ancient and ever new. Hebrews keeps us focused on the necessary things which belong to this experience, the things that belong to the disciplines of Lent, actually, the things of study and prayer, of service and ministry, “not forsaking the gathering” but persevering in ministry and service, encouraging one another.

There has, perhaps, not been a whole lot of this in our own Anglican Church. The story has been one of betrayal and folly. Regardless, we rejoice in the lessons from Genesis and Hebrews and, without presuming upon our own righteousness, hope that we can continue to grow and mature in the faith and in our witness to the faith.

To be blunt, it is our vocation. Only so does Jacob become Israel. It happens through the struggle.