What Is God’s
Blessing?
Three weeks ago, we began our journey with the character of Jacob. Jacob was wrestling then. Even before he was born.
Today he is wrestling still. Not much has changed.
But today, everything is changed. Today Jacob receives God’s blessing.
What is God’s blessing?
Up until this point, Jacob has striven for human blessing, which is to say, anything he’s been able to get his hands on. For him, blessing means taking what’s there for the taking. Blessing means success: power, prestige, possessions. So far, Jacob has had a lot of success. He has been able to get his hands on his brother’s birthright, his father’s blessing, his father-in-law’s daughters, and much of his father-in-law’s fortune. Jacob has done alright for himself.
The Dark Side to
Jacob’s Success
Or so we might think. But in Jacob’s success, there is a dark side.
The dark side to getting what you want is struggle. Not only the struggle to get ahead, but also the struggle to stay ahead. The struggle not to lose what you’ve won.
In the verses that immediately precede today’s story, we are told that Jacob is “greatly afraid and distressed” (32:7). Why? His brother Esau is coming to meet him. With four hundred men by his side. To Jacob, this is dark news. All that he has won could soon become lost. The struggle never ends.
At the beginning of today’s scripture, night has fallen. Jacob sends his family and all that he has across the river ahead of him. It seems a rather odd move. Why doesn’t he join them? Perhaps he is a coward and simply wants a shield between him and his brother. But more likely, I think, he’s in a reflective mood and wants to be alone.
It has been said that before you die, your entire life flashes before you. Perhaps sensing the end, Jacob wants to stand back for a moment, separate, alone, to try to drink it all in: to look across the river upon the sum total of his life, all that he has won. Perhaps he is trying to claim the success for which he has been struggling his whole life. Perhaps he is trying to feel it. Because perhaps right now all his success feels strangely hollow. And so he stands back and gazes upon all that is his, and he tries to savor it.
Defeated
And it’s in the pitch black of that moment, when Jacob’s happiness feels hauntingly hollow, that a shadow seizes him and throws him into the dust of the earth. Dislodged from his lonely thoughts, Jacob does what he has always done. He wrestles. He and the stranger tumble about the ground, seizing at each other’s heels, holding fast to whatever can be grabbed, never letting go.
Jacob exerts every last ounce of energy and appears to be gaining the upper hand. But then as the night nears its end, Jacob suddenly feels his hip put out of joint. How did that happen? The stranger merely touched it. It is almost as though the stranger had been waiting to touch his hip just so, as though he had been waiting until Jacob had given everything, so that when he was suddenly overcome, he would know that he was truly and completely overcome. He had given the fight his all but had been defeated. For once, he would have to acknowledge he was not in control.
With his hip thrown out, the tide has turned. Jacob still hangs on—only now he grabs the stranger “not [out] of violence but [out] of need, like…a drowning man.”[1] As the dark of night gives way to the new light of morning, the stranger speaks for the first time. “Let me go, for morning is upon us.” But Jacob holds on for dear life. “Not until you bless me,” he gasps. So the stranger asks his name, and Jacob tells him. Then while the two remain in an embrace that looks less and less like fighting and more and more like friendship, the stranger proclaims: “No longer will you be called Jacob, but Israel” (32:28).
From Wrestling with
Humans to Wrestling with God
In the Old Testament, names contain entire stories. Do you remember Ishmael and Hagar? Ishmael’s name means, “God hears,” and Hagar’s means, “the outsider.” Put them together, and you get the truth of Ishmael’s and Hagar’s story. “God hears the outsider.” The name Jacob means something like wrestler. The name Israel means something like wrestler, too. In other words, Jacob’s new name is not a great departure from his old name. But there is one tiny difference, and it makes all the difference. It’s the “El” in “Israel.” “El” means God. In the past, Jacob wrestled with the world: his brother, his father, his father-in-law, all in an effort to get ahead, to get what they had. But now the terms of conflict have been reversed. No longer does Jacob wrestle with the world. Now he wrestles with God.
From “Jacob” to “Israel.” The names tell the story. The stranger seems to be saying, “In the past, you, Jacob, held onto the heels of others. Now you will hold onto God. You will not let go, and neither will God. Now…let go of the heels you have been grasping at so that you can hold onto God.”
And sure enough, when Jacob meets Esau the next day, he lets go of his older brother’s heel: he gives him many possessions and also a blessing. He essentially returns what he has stolen. Power, prestige, wealth—whatever happiness can be found in these things—this is no longer what Jacob is grabbing after. Now he is wrestling with something else.
Wrestling with God,
Hoping to Lose
A Greek writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, recalls from his early years a visit to an old monastery, where he spoke with an old monk, Father Makarios.
He asked the monk, “Do you still wrestle with the devil?”
“Not any longer, my child,” Father Makarios replied. “I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength…. [Now] I wrestle with God.”
“With God!” Nikos exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?”
“I hope to lose, my child,” the monk said. “[But] my bones…continue to resist.”[2]
“I Am Poor and Needy”
The good news of God’s blessing can also be difficult news. Because it means accepting our brokenness. And I don’t know about you, but accepting my brokenness is something I resist.
By brokenness, I do not mean defectiveness or sinfulness. I mean simply the reality that we are finite, limited creatures, subject to powers greater than ourselves, whether that’s the weather or another person or our cultural heritage or an addiction or a disease or our biology which demands things like sleep and nourishment, whether we want them or not. By brokenness, I mean simply that we are not in control and cannot do it on our own.
The surprise of Jacob’s story is that the real blessing is not in control or getting what we want, which actually leaves us empty and exhausted. The real blessing is in our brokenness. Only after Jacob could not escape his brokenness, only after his hip was thrown out of joint, could he receive God’s blessing and grow into the fuller, richer life of clinging to God, wrestling with God instead of for worldly gain. I’m reminded of how the psalmist repeatedly declares, “I am poor and needy.” A true Israelite, a true son of Israel, the psalmist is declaring his brokenness and his need for help.
I’m reminded also of Jesus. At the table, he blessed the bread, broke it, and gave it to others, just as his own body was blessed, broken, and given for the life of the world. He understood his brokenness to be not an obstacle but an opportunity. In his death—and death is the supreme brokenness—he would trust in the love of God. And the love of God transformed that most woeful brokenness into a gift for all the world, a story of God’s steadfast faithfulness and mercy for all creation. The cross, which was a symbol of death, has become for us a symbol of life. It is the good news that God is with us to the end, and that the end is actually a new beginning.
Prayer
Who comes supremely close to us
In our moments of weakness,
Our moments of vulnerability,
And invites us into an embrace
That is both a struggle and a blessing:
Soften our hearts
That we might accept and be honest about
Our own brokenness
…
We dedicate our limitations to you,
Asking that your love
Transform them into a gift of life,
For ourselves and others:
In Christ, blessed, broken, and given for the life of the world: Amen.
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