Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Genesis 32:3-33:17

Who Is This God Person Anyway?*

We are once again rescued from the angels of Christian boutiques by the real article you can fight with all night long, work up a good sweat, and have your hip put out of socket. Like the gentlemen at the Oaks of Mamre, one is never clear where God begins and angel ends (or by a stretch, where the Creator begins and the flesh and blood ends). Let us be Jacob for a moment. One thing's for sure: here, at this particular creek-crossing, the stranger is not like us, and we need him. We need the stranger in all his strangeness. Revelation is not some subtle species of our own self-reflection. Jacob is no more in control of his reflections or his life than we are. Or his God. If the only way Jacob can understand advantage is by tricks and bargains and wrestling matches, the Lord will take it to the bell. Good 'ol “J”** tells it like it is. 

And what's at stake? The pending meeting with Esau, the jilted twin, whose last words for little brother, those years ago, were murder and vengeance. Jacob has to come home even though he is not a nation. He is not a people. Not yet. He is a sojourner, and here, on this turf (32:3), he has no claim on Esau. Indeed, by the way he addresses him, it is quite the contrary (32:4). Politically speaking, there is nothing brotherly about this upcoming meeting. And Jacob has to pass through Esau's country which God gave the rejected brother as a conciliation for his stolen birthright. If Esau chooses the sword, Israel is just so many carcasses strewn across the Seir plain. Another ancient ethnic blip fallen off the radar. That's what's at stake.

So once again, Jacob is at the mercy of those who have no reason to wish him well. And once again, it's the people he's facing who are “carrying the guns”. Jacob never carries the guns. Jacob's blessing is in flocks and family, not armed might. This man, toting around the promises of the God he met at Bethel, is trying to make a go of it in the world of middle Eastern politics where smiling uncles extend the hand of friendship with one hand and hold the dagger under the cloth with the other. Uncles who make nice while cooking the books to keep their clients in perpetual debt. Jacob has just barely escaped Uncle Laban's clutches without blood. He has what God promised him, but there's no going back. In fact, Jacob's bridges are all burned behind him. Now he's got to re-cross an old burned bridge: the ford of the Jabbok. He has sent rank after rank of livestock to Esau's approaching expeditionary force hoping to make a theater of peace offering. He has divided his people and flocks to minimalize the carnage when and if the offerings are rejected - that is, merely confiscated - and his people slaughtered or enslaved. Not that the dividing will help against the marauding force of 400. It feels hopeless. Jacob feels totally set up. Now Jacob is not perfect by any means, but the man has only been doing his job for heaven's sake! If he has been an occasional trickster, God has endorsed his shenanigans. And whenever God has said “Go”, by dream or command, he has gone. Jacob has had it with this “going and gone” business.

Here, at Jabbok, it becomes personal. He has done what he can to prepare for the meeting with Esau. He has sent his family on. Now, he has some personal business to conduct with the God of Bethel, or whoever this God is. Whatever name this God has. I think Jacob is tired of being set up, and this burned bridge that he now has to cross, risking the lives of his loved ones, is the last straw. Jacob is not afraid to fight with God. And for us, the readers, it all comes backkairologically, retroactively: the wandering Jew; the pograms, and yes, the Holocaust God on trial. A Galilean on a cross who screams into the darkness as he dies. One on one. 

They fight. They fight all night long, Jacob and this stranger with no name. The stranger who refuses to be named. But he gives Jacob a new one: Israel: "The one who strives with God." Israel comes away from it limping into the sunrise. I wish I could have been there. Maybe joined the fray. 

There are a lot of places this story could end. But I think one of the best is in a scene that follows, when Esau, dropping all formalities and protocol, rushes through the crowds to hug his little brother. The One Jacob fought at Peniel never gave a name, but as Jacob, now Israel, looks into the compassionate eyes of his brother Esau, who could have killed him, but chose to love him instead, he says, as the whole Church of Jesus Christ joins in: 

                    truly, seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.
                    - 33:10

Israel has met the enemy and come to love him. To see in his face, this face of Esau - Edom, the rejected brother, the rejected people, Israel's archetypal twin and foil - to see in this face of Esau, at least on this day, the unnameable God.

May it be so. It is probably the only hope we have of crossing this ford without the annihilation of our species.

Amen.

* The title of a book by Oolon Colluphid, a character in Douglas Adams'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

**The Jahwist of the source critical studies.

© 2010 Andy Gay