Wrestling with God

Wrestling with God

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 16, 2016

Scripture: Genesis 32:22-31

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s a strange story, isn’t it. The story we just heard from Genesis about the Patriarch Jacob I mean. In that story Jacob first isolates himself from his household, which he sends across a stream called the Jabbok along with all of his possessions. The story doesn’t tell us why he did that rather odd thing, it just says that he did. Then it says that “a man” wrestled with Jacob until daybreak. It doesn’t say who the man is, not at first at least. It doesn’t say why the man wrestled with Jacob, only that he did. The man somehow puts Jacob’s hip out of joint. Then this man, who seems to be winning the wrestling match at this point, asks Jacob to let him go. We’d expect Jacob to be the one needing to ask for release, what with his hip out of joint and all, but the story puts it the other way round. An exchange between the two wrestlers follows in which the man, whoever he is, changes Jacob’s name to Israel. A translator’s note tells us that Israel means “struggles with God.” The man says he has changed Jacob’s name because Jacob has “struggled with God and with men” and has “overcome.” Really? When has Jacob struggled with God? And how could any mere man overcome God? I don’t know, but that’s what this man says Jacob has done. Jacob names the place where the wrestling match took place Peniel, which a translator’s note tells us means “face of God.” He calls the place that because, he says, “I saw God face to face.” Really? The only way Jacob could have seen God face to face at that place is if the man he wrestled with was actually God, and it turns out that that’s precisely what we are to understand. Jacob thinks the man is God, and pretty clearly we’re to think that too. Indeed, there’s a hint earlier in the story that the man must actually be God. It comes when the man changes Jacob’s name from Jacob to Israel. In the Hebrew scriptures God sometimes changes people’s names, but no one else does. Earlier in Genesis God has changed Abram’s name to Abraham and Sarai’s name to Sarah. In our story this morning the man acts like God and changes our hero’s name from Jacob to Israel. So the man must indeed have been God.

This story seems to serve several different purposes within the Jewish tradition. In the verses right after the ones we heard the text says that Israelites don’t eat the tendon attached to the hip bone of an animal because that is where this man/God touched Jacob, so the story explains an otherwise odd Hebrew dietary practice. The story explains how Jacob became Israel, Israel not Jacob being the name of the entire Hebrew nation that descends from him.

But mostly this story is about a man wrestling with God. Yes, the man is one of the Jewish faith’s great patriarchs, but he’s still just a man like any other man, a person like any other person. And yes, the story says at its beginning that a man wrestled with Jacob, but we’ve already established that we are to understand this man to be God, or at least a manifestation of God. There’s certainly no fully developed incarnational theology here. Judaism has always rejected incarnational theology, but somehow this man is still an appearance of God. I think wrestling with God is the central theme of this story. Jacob, the father of the nation named after his altered name Israel, wrestled with the eternal God. And he won! Yes, God wounded him on the hip, but the man/God of the story had to ask Jacob to let him go, not the other way round as we probably would expect. Quite a concept, isn’t it? A mere mortal wrestled with God and prevailed.

Now, this story would be amazing enough if it were only a story about an ancient patriarch and an encounter he had with God. But see, the great Bible stories like this one are never just about things that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. They are about us. They are about God and us. They are about our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us. When we read or hear about Jacob wrestling with God the Bible invites us to ask: What does this story say to us? What does it say about God? What does it say about our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us? Well, this one seems to say that our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us is one of wrestling. Jacob wrestled with God, and his doing so both tells us that we are to wrestle with God too and gives us permission to wrestle with God.

Yes, I know. We’re supposed to be meek and accepting in our relationship with God, right? Well, sometimes right, but sometimes not so right. Yes, our relationship with God can be one of peace and quiet, of quiet confidence in God’s grace and forgiveness. But I think if we’re honest we sometimes wrestle with God too, or at least we want to. After all, God is ultimately the great cosmic mystery, the power behind all that is that somehow relates in love to fragile, mortal creatures like us. How can we not wrestle with understanding a reality so utterly transcendent, so infinitely far above and beyond us, so great that we can’t even really begin to understand how great? I think we do wrestle with God, or at least a lot of us do. I wrestle with God. I wrestle with trying to understand God. I have wrestled with God in print in the books I have written and am writing. I wrestle with God publicly in my sermons. I wrestle with God in private. See, understanding God, coming to terms with God, isn’t all that easy when you really stop to think about it. If God were easy, how could God really be God? How could that which is infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, and utterly transcendent be easy? How could a reality infinitely beyond our reality be easy? Sure, we can make it easy. We can decline God’s invitation to a wrestling match with God, but if we’re really going to live into a deep and transforming relationship with God I think we need to accept that invitation. I think we need to wrestle with God.

How do we do that? Well, we do it first of all by reading and really trying to understand the Bible’s stories about God. Those stories aren’t easy. They present many different visions of God. In those stories God is variously violent and a God of infinite peace. God is both judge and cosmic forgiver. God is both male and infinitely beyond human categories like male and female. In some passages in Proverbs God comes pretty close to being female. God both demands strict adherence to the Torah law and says law isn’t at all what God wants from us. Sometimes the Bible says God wants correct worship. At other times it says God doesn’t care one whit about our worship but wants justice from us instead. God is infinitely beyond the human and with us as a human in Jesus. Wrestling with that wonderful, complex, confusing, and comforting book we call the Bible is one primary way that we wrestle with God.

We wrestle with God in our prayer life. We take our confusion about God straight to God and ask for help. We confess our sin and open ourselves to grace. We ask for help with troubles in our lives and know that God’s help may come not at all as what we’re asking for. We wrestle with God in our life together as a church. What does God want from us? Where is God calling us to go? Those are not easy questions to answer. They need wrestling with. We wrestle with God in our personal lives too. What does God want from us there? Love, yes; but what does that mean in the specific situations we must deal with? That one too needs wrestling with.

So yes, I think this story of Jacob wrestling with God calls us to wrestle with God too. And this story has some very good news in it about our wrestling with God. We see the good news in the story in the part where in his wrestling with God Jacob prevailed. God had to ask Jacob to let him go. That’s a symbolic way of saying that in our wrestling with God we too can prevail. God changes Jacob’s name to Israel, meaning Struggles with God, because Jacob had struggled not only with people but with God and had prevailed. We can prevail in our struggling, our wrestling with God too. This story is telling us that truth. But of course we need to understand what our prevailing in our wrestling with God actually means. Of course we can’t overpower God. I doubt that we even want to. What we can do is wrestle ourselves into understandings of God that work for us. We can learn to live with and to love a God we can never fully understand. We can learn that our living with God takes place precisely in our wrestling with God. We find the meaning of our living with God precisely in our wrestling with God. We might well get a hip put out of joint in the process, or something else that changes our lives, makes us different than we were before. Indeed, that’s very likely to happen if we truly wrestle with God. And yes, that struggling, that wrestling, includes breaks between the rounds of the match. It includes times when we can go to our opposite corners and rest from the wrestling. Those are precious times that we should seek and cherish. But they won’t make the wrestling go away. God is too big, God is too “other,” for the wrestling ever really to end.

So let’s wrestle with God, shall we? We can do it alone, and we can do it together. God calls us to the match. Are we ready to wrestle? I pray that we are. Amen.