Genesis 32:22-32

One of my favorite contemporary poems is “The House of Belonging,” by David Whyte. The speaker in the poem awakens one morning and ponders a series of truths in the quiet of the house he calls home – the home he has made as an adult. Here are the closing words:

This is the temple

There is no house

It’s clear that the house is physical, but it has awakened something that is inseparable from the speaker. He seems to speak from a place that is both precarious, but also deeply secure in its foundations.

At this pivotal moment in the life of the patriarch Jacob, I see both the sharp edge of this aloneness and the fruit of belonging waiting to be revealed.

“Jacob was left alone … and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”

I imagine the scene as a stage play: The stage is crowded with Jacob’s wives, their children, their maids, and with the invisible presence of Esau, the brother from whom Jacob stands self-alienated. He now prepares to meet that off-stage character, around whom so much anticipation and dread have gathered.

Jacob wants nothing more than to return home, the home from which he fled when he stole his father Isaac’s blessing from Esau by deception. In that longing and that terror, the protagonist stands alone … with a shadowy figure, whose identity is never precisely revealed.

Who is it?

The Christian scholar of Hebrew scripture Walter Bruggemann writes, “It is part of the power of the wrestling that we do not know the name or see the face of the antagonist. To be too certain would reduce the dread intended in the telling. It is most plausible that in the present form, the hidden one is Yahweh. On this way to his brother, whom he wants to appease, Jacob must deal with his God to whom he had made intercession (32:9-12) … But if it be Yahweh, we are shown something other than the promise-filled aspect of Yahweh known in the daylight … The power of the stranger is as much in his inscrutability as in his strength.”

Jewish scholar Aviva Zornberg notes that this story begins a unit of Torah readings that continues with Jacob’s reconciliation with Esau but is followed by a season of deep suffering: the rape of Jacob’s daughter Dinah by the prince of Shechem; the revenge exacted on Shechem by Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi. The joyful birth of his son Benjamin introduces hope, only to be followed by the death-in-childbirth of his beloved Rachel and the death of his father Isaac.

In other words, the mature man Jacob faces life’s consequences rather than engineering other outcomes from the sidelines. Previously, he has survived by manipulation – borrowing or even stealing the power of others. At times consciously, but largely unconsciously, he has refused to use his own power – with all the attendant risk and vulnerability that comes with it.

That is, until he wrestles a divine antagonist, prevails over him, is wounded by him, and receives his blessing.

He becomes Israel, and from that moment onward – come what may – he “belongs to his aloneness as he belongs to his life.” He knows what he must do, with whom he must seek reconciliation, how he must endure hardship. He lives in the house of belonging, which is ultimately the heart of God.

Our Rule of Life contains only few direct references to Hebrew scripture, yet this is one of them. In the chapter “The Mystery of Prayer” we read:

“There are many conflicts on the way into the experience of divine love. Sinfulness originates in a deep wound to our humanity which hinders us all from accepting love. As the Spirit exposes it to Christ’s healing touch in prayer we shall often have to struggle with our reluctance to be loved so deeply by God. Christ himself will strive with us, as the angel strove with Jacob, to disable our self-reliant pride and make us depend on grace.”

The name given by the angel, Israel, means “one who strives or struggles with God.”

The fruit of Jacob’s struggle is a face-to-face encounter with God: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” The cost of that struggle is his limp.

The “strength made perfect in weakness” that confronts our self-reliant pride from the pages of the New Testament has its roots spread deep in the Old Testament revelations of God, with whom our ancestors in faith argued, bargained, grappled, spoke as a friend, and sometimes walked away limping, but blessed and re-named nonetheless.

Likewise, we who stand in their lineage through our Lord and Rabbi Jesus learn again and again what it means to obey God not only by acts of gentle consent, but by faithful wrestling. With him we bear the wounds where we have been nailed to his cross. The fruit is that, come sunrise, we rise with him from every tomb.