Genesis 32: 22-31

The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

While on vacation I had a dream.

In the dream I’m in a large office building and am in a meeting with a group of people talking about a project we’re all working on together, True to form, I’m the one in the meeting talking to the team about how we can do things so that we will succeed on our efforts. In fact, I can remember saying in the dream that I was not going to be involved I the effort unless we could succeed.

And then all at once things change. We get word that a dangerous intruder has entered the office. Those of us in the meeting flee the meeting room, trying to get away. Another woman and I go into the women’s bathroom where we hide in one of the stalls, both of us standing up on a toilet so that our feet can’t be seen from below, but the intruder who we don’t ever see, discovers us, blows the doors off the stall and sends us scrambling away out of the bathroom to escape.

I’m then running by myself down a hall. This leads to another hall and then a third hall. As I make my way down this third hall, I sense the presence of something or someone behind me. I’m terrified. I know that it’s the intruder.

I keep running but it’s as if I’m in slow motion or in quicksand. I know I’ll soon feel something or someone grabbing me from behind, but this is not what happens. Instead I begin to feel warmth bathing my entire body: an intense, pleasurable warmth. And then it comes to me. This is not someone who wants to kill me; this is someone who wants to love me. I stop where I am, feel the sensation of warmth again, all the time fearing that the warmth will turn lethal. I then turn around toward the intruder and this is what I see: the face of a young man: dark feathery hair, almond-shaped eyes, an expression not awash with romantic love but strong, steady and peaceful.

I think it’s no mistake that it was while on vacation, out of the fray of the everyday, that my psyche set this picture of God before me—a picture of God as intruder into my well-intentioned plans, one whose coming I perceived as threatening to annihilate me, but who comes in fact to love me.

It’s not exactly the picture of God we encounter in the story of Jacob wrestling with the man-angel at the bank of the river Jabbok, but it somehow seems akin to it.

For there’s Jacob alone at the riverbank, out of the fray for just a moment, on the evening before his reunion with his brother Esau, a significant life-altering event to be sure, the success of which means everything to him and means everything within the history of the Jewish people. There’s Jacob at the riverbank, and it’s there that he suddenly meets an intruder, the man-angel who could be both his brother Esau and is none other than the living God, the Holy One who allows himself to be wrestled with and who must be wrestled with before Jacob can move into the future. This Holy One, we discover, is the one who gives his wrestling partners new names, new blessings and new wounds.

Hebrew Scripture scholar, Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on Genesis notes this ambiguity in the identity of the figure Jacob is wrestling with. This is what he says:
“Perhaps it is important that the narrative is not explicit. In its opaque portrayal of the figure, the narrative does not want us to know too much. It is part of the power of the wrestling that we do not know the name or see the face of the antagonist…It is most plausible that the present from, the hidden one is Yahweh. On the way to his brother whom he wants to appease, Jacob must deal with his God to whom he has made intercession….The adversary is identified only as ‘a man’ which leaves all options open ..Jacob anticipates the wrath of his brother. But first he must face an assault from the deity…In the night the divine antagonist tends to take on the features of others with whom we struggle in the day.”

It’s an amazing, some would say, scandalizing picture—a god who engages in the kind of personal and physical contact that my own dream stops short of—a god of intrusion and struggle—and a god who in the narrative ambiguity is portrayed as coming to us in the very places in our lives where we are struggling and who gives us a new name and a new vulnerability, both of which will shape our path forward across whatever river is before us.

What do I mean by this?

Consider for a moment that the situation, the issue, or the person who repels you, frightens you or provokes you, the situation or person you struggle with, the situation or person you most want to flee, to judge or to knock into the middle of next week, consider that this is where God as necessary intruder, as loving wrestler, is waiting to struggle with you, to push and be pushed against, until in your reconciliation with it, you have a new name and a new, life-giving vulnerability.

Or consider for a moment that the situation, the issue, the people who most repel the group or organization you belong to, the situation that most frightens or provokes that group, the situation or circumstance that group or organization would like to flee or avoid. Imagine that this is the place where the Holy One who works for the sanctification of all human endeavor, is waiting to struggle, to wrestle, with your group, your organization, to push and be pushed against until you collectively have become reconciled to it, gaining a new name and a new and life-giving vulnerability and openness in the process.

And imagine, dear people, that the group or organization I just spoke of is our dear St. Paul’s: our St. Paul’s, who has faithfully carried the gifts of its progressive Anglo-Catholic heritage for so many years, St. Paul’s standing at the river’s edge ready to go forward with so many things but in that process still needing to engage the Holy One who is the necessary intruder into all our plans, a loving wrestler who wants to feel our flesh against his, pushing and being pushed back upon, who wants us, yes, to be who we are but also wants us to be reconciled to the people and things that we fear or even loathe, thereby taking on a new name, a new vulnerability and a new openness in the process.

To say it like this is enough to strike fear into my heart, the same kind of fear I felt in my dream upon hearing that an intruder had found a way into the building. For on one level I would always prefer tranquility to wrestling, simple success to transforming process, thinking about or praying to a God who is at a distance rather than glimpsing the face of God up close.

But as Jacob discovers in his wrestling match and as we discover in our encounters with the Holy One in the person of Christ Jesus, our God engages us at the level of flesh, at the level of the real struggles in our lives, personally and corporately. Our God is a God who came and who comes in order to reveal his or her face to us—in order to send us transformed across the river to meet our brothers and our sisters and ourselves.

In his book The Spiritual Life of Children, Robert Coles describes the various pictures the children he interviewed drew when Coles asked them to draw a picture of God. Of the 293 pictures children of all religious backgrounds drew, all but 38 were pictures of God’s face. Many of the children drew faces that looked like themselves in terms of hair color, eye color and skin color. And, this, of course, makes all the sense in the world. But Coles, himself, ever the struggler, was reminded of another way of imagining the face of God:

“Sometimes as I (sat) and watch(ed) a child struggle to do just the right job of representing God’s face….I (thought) back to my days of working in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker soup kitchen. One afternoon after several of us has struggled with a “wino” a “Bowery bum” an angry cursing truculent man of fifty or so, with long gray hair a full scraggly beard a huge scar on his right cheek, a mouth with virtually no teeth and bloodshot eyes, one of which had a terrible tic, she told us, ‘For all we know he might be God…so (let’s) treat him as an honored guest and look at his face as if it is the most beautiful one we can imagine.’”

People of God, fellow strugglers, we do not wrestle alone or wrestle in vain. For with us is Christ Jesus: intruder, adversary, lover and friend—the one who has taken on all our struggles and still lives, the one who has worn all our faces.

Works Cited or Consulted

Walter Brueggemann: Genesis: A Bible Commentary for Preaching and Teaching

Robert Coles: The Spiritual Life of Children

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