One-Post Wednesday: Jacob Wrestling With God- Revisted

I have written before about the story of Jacob wrestling with God. I have to say that it continues to be one of my favorite stories in the entire collection of texts known as the Bible. The whole thing is so, somehow, familiar and close at hand. And yet, it is so alien, so totally other. Reading it, one has a strong sense that one is encountering the living God directly. This is divine experience poured out on paper.

Recently an alternative interpretation of the text from the one I've normally held to occurred to me. I often come at the same text from various directions, as I think that doing so can give one a fuller understanding of a particular scripture. I do not necessarily hold to all of the interpretations I give. But the very practice of re-interpreting a text from a different point of view is edifying and instructive. God is bigger than our thoughts about God, and everything we say concerning God's word is necessarily incomplete. Even seeming incommensurable interpretations may, in fact, somehow reconcile, even if how they could is not apparent to us. Some of the contradictions must be solved by picking one arm of a dilemma over another. Some contradiction in the Biblical text is the result of conversations that we have to choose sides in. Others are the result of the tension that results from a finite being encountering the Eternal One, the One who violates all our categories of thought.

So the story is as follows: Jacob, after 14+ years away from his brother, has decided to meet him again, to confront him and beg for forgiveness. Jacob had tricked and coerced his brother into giving up the right of leadership among Abraham's people. Since then, Jacob himself has experienced the kinds of evils he visited upon his brother. God has made life hard for Jacob, yet Jacob has held fast to God, accepting all that happens as just punishment for his own many sins against his family. Truly Jacob experienced God not as merciful but as just. For this God returned to Jacob exactly what Jacob had done for another. The story is a perfect illustration of 'an eye for an eye'. Yet on the night when Jacob was to ask for forgiveness from his brother, he hedges. He almost decides to run away. Standing at the edge of a river, he wrestles some mysterious divine being all night, only to demand a blessing from the being. The being names him Israel, which means 'God prevails', for (as God says in the passage), '[Jacob] struggled with God and man, and prevailed.'

Jacob's name is roughly a reminder that Jacob 'struggled with God.' It seems to me that one way to approach the text is a recognition that God had made life hard on Jacob. There is this scene in DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, where the devil says he gave the main character every opportunity NOT to sin. In other words, the devil made it hard to be evil, so that the man's evil would be clear for all to see. The devil made it hard, for his 'perfect sinner' had to be one that had been tested to see if he could do what the devil wanted.

Perhaps the point of the Jacob story is that God, to forge someone who is truly able to fight for HIS side in the war against evil, had to make it very hard for that person to be His follower. Perhaps the truly holy person has to grab ahold of God, and hold on no matter what God does to push him away. Perhaps for some people God's love has to be hard-fought, so that when he is finally renamed, finally forged into a person God will have relationship with, he can endure all he must in the fight against God's enemies. Think about that image: Jacob holding onto God, as God does all He can to get away, and forcing God to bless him.

Now do I really think God is like this? No, not really. But still there is something to the idea. I can identify with Jacob holding onto God no matter how hard God makes it, to prove to God that he is worthy of his love.