The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 2014 – Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7,16; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21
The Yiddish word ‘Chutzpah’ describes the quality of audacity and derives from the Hebrew word which means ‘insolence.’
I heard a good story about chutzpah the other day. It’s about a Yiddish grandmother, a bubba, at the turn of the century in a Jewish market somewhere in Eastern Europe. She has a bagel stand with a homemade sign propped up beside her with the price of her bagels painted in large letters – $1. She does pretty well, but looks cold and grumpy sitting there all day. A kindly gentleman passes her on the way to the office everyday and he takes pity on her and without taking a bagel, drops a dollar in her change box. This goes on for months and months. He drops his $1 in her till daily. No word passes between the kind man and the bubba. Time passes and soon inflation hits. She must raise her price. Now the sign is painted $1.25. The kind gentleman comes by as usual and drops in his dollar and the bubba says, “Hey! Read the sign. The price went up.” That, my friends, is chutzpah.
And that is what lies at the heart of our Old Testament story this morning about Jacob wrestling with a stranger all night.
The background is important. Jacob is the twin of Esau, sons of the patriarch Isaac. Jacob is born second, but he steals or tricks Esau into selling his birthright and with it, the crucial final blessing from the father. Esau, the stronger of the two, and the hunter, is furious with his brother, Jacob, who now runs away to live in the far country with his uncle Laban. Along the way he sleeps beside the road and God visits him in a dream – you will recall the ladder going up to heaven and the angels going up and down. In that vision or dream God confirms his promise of blessing; land, descendants and protection.
At least 20 years pass during which time Jacob, the trickster, is himself tricked by his uncle and has to work 14 years instead of 7 for the woman he loves.
Now Jacob is returning home. He is told that Esau is on his way to meet him with 400 men. Jacob prays, but he knows a thing or two about the ways of the world. So he sends a large amount of money and a significant portion of his wealth to Esau by way of appeasement. He’s afraid that Esau will kill him.
Jacob waits to see if the gift had its affect. Hearing nothing, he sends his wives and his children ahead. Now he is alone in the open country as night falls. This is when he encounters a stranger on the banks of the river Jabbok. He wrestles all night with this man. With the dawn comes — as so often happens in the Bible — a profoundly transforming event.
Let’s get the sequence and the highlights of this story right. The stranger, whom we later find out is an angel or an agent or someone connected deeply to God, tries to call off this long wrestling match. But Jacob won’t let go, so the angel dislocates his hip.
Even so, Jacob persists. He says to the angel that he will not let go till he receives a blessing. In that request for a blessing we can see that Jacob must have known that he was in the midst of an encounter with the living God.
The angel then asks Jacob what his name is, and when Jacob responds he is told that his new name will be Israel, which means something akin to “God wrestler,” or one who contends with God: “for you have striven with God and prevailed,” says the angel.
Now let’s stop and think about this for a moment. God is honouring something in Jacob’s character, that chutzpah-like trait of audacity that veers towards insolence. “You have striven with God and with humans and prevailed,” says the angel. Jacob still has the nerve to ask the angel for his name, to which there is no answer. God gives him the blessing for which he asked and sends him on to look after his family and he raises them to know the God of this encounter.
If you read the two previous chapter in this portion of the book of Genesis, you will find that Jacob is a very shrewd operator. How can this deceitful and irreverent trickster possibly be deserving of God’s enormous favour, asks a commentator? How can Jacob be a model for faithful readers?
God doesn’t reject Jacob’s obviously conflicted character. Rather, God molds and reshapes and transforms it.
We see this as the story unfolds in later chapters. Jacob is the one who carries forward God’s promise to his people. Jacob is the one who grieves for his favourite son, Joseph, given up for dead who later turns up in Egypt. Jacob is the one who when very, very old sees the promise of God being fulfilled.
The truth is that God takes all kinds of people into a larger and more-glorious purpose. He respects and almost favours those who have chutzpah like Jacob – who wrestle with God all night and refuse to give up. You have to ask, Why would a sovereign God engage with Jacob on Jacob’s terms? Why would he bend to this flawed and audacious man?
There is a very fine and now well-known piece written by a columnist who was struggling with this very question that arises from the story of Jacob’s wrestling. The writer had chanced upon a story in a mid-west newspaper about a high school wrestling match between two leading local schools. One team had a senior student with Downs Syndrome. He was not capable of wrestling at the competitive level of both teams and so, posed no threat to any wrestler. The coaches asked if there was anyone on the opposing team willing to take on this special student. One wrestler agreed and he not only wrestled with him for the entire six minutes but allowed his opponent to beat him on points. He gave this special student the thrill of not only competing, but of raising his arms in victory. Not a dry eye was there in the house said the paper. In the words of the columnist, “For the first time, I understood what that Genesis story of a man wrestling with and prevailing against God was about.” There is indeed a larger purpose hidden in the prevailing and in the winning.
There is a sense in which to be spiritually alive we must be like Jacob. We must be unafraid to wrestle with God.
The almighty and sovereign God will come to us at whatever level we are capable of engaging him. As the columnist wisely said, this is what God ultimately did in sending his beloved Son, Jesus into the world, to wrestle with us, and to allow himself to get pinned to a cross: “That’s what it took for us to experience the love that flows from God.”
If in all our struggle and turmoil in life we can understand what it meant for God to struggle with Jacob, to bear with him through the long hours of the night and then to bless him in the morning, we will know how much he values straightforward persistence and audacity. Perhaps it is what lies behind Jesus’ words, “Ask and it will be given you. Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.” He could have added: wrestle and prevail, and God will show you the way.
I think we cannot live a life of faith if our expectation is that God will turn up with a checklist. He wants living, breathing, debating, wrestling, daughters and sons. Perhaps you are wrestling with God about a child, or a principle of living, or with people who have hurt you, or with those you simply cannot understand. The worst thing you can do is give up. God is calling you through this to something larger and far more glorious in his purposes for you.
