Commentary by Ray Webster
First reading: Genesis 29:15-28 Jacob marries
These great stories from Genesis tell us the story of the descendants of Abraham – our ancestors in faith, the first people (in the telling of it in Genesis) to believe in God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Today we come to the story of Jacob’s marriage. People are often startled by Jacob’s behavior in Genesis. He tricked his brother Esau out of his birth right, and now Jacob finds himself with a prospective father-in-law who tricks him in turn.
Robert Alter writes:
It has been clearly recognized since late antiquity that the whole story of the switched brides is a meting out of poetic justice to Jacob – the deceiver deceived, deprived by darkness of the sense of sight as his father is by blindness, relying, like his father, on the misleading sense of touch. The Midrash Bereishit Rabba vividly represents the correspondence between the two episodes: “And all that night he cried out to he, ‘Rachel!’ and she answered him. In the morning, ‘and, …look, she was Leah.” He said to her, ‘Why did you deceive me, daughter of a deceiver? Didn’t I call out Rachel in the night, and you answered me?’ She said, ‘There is never a bad barber who doesn’t have disciples. Isn’t this how your father cried out Esau, and you answered him?’”
Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2004, pages 155-156
Laban tricks Jacob into marrying his daughter Leah, and then his daughter Rachel – the one Jacob loved. In the unfolding story in Genesis, Leah is the mother of six of Jacob’s sons: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and Zebulun. Jacob had two more sons by the slave girl Bilhah: Dan and Naphtali. And then two by another slave girl: Gad and Asher.
Then Rachel would have a son, Joseph, whose story we will read – and then another, the youngest, Benjamin. These were the twelve sons of Jacob who was also called Israel, and the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.
By the way, I highly recommend Robert Alter’s highly praised translation of and commentary on the first five books of the Bible: The Five Books of Moses, quoted above.
Second reading: Letter of Paul to the Romans 8:26-39
When my home rector as a student, Bishop Wylie, died, many years ago, he left instructions that my old boss in New York, Bishop Rockwell, preach on Romans 8 – this great majestic chapter from the Letter of Paul to the Romans. Part of these words are indeed often read at funerals in the Episcopal Church and they are fitting statements of the central Christian belief in the resurrection in Jesus Christ.
Our passage this week starts with a less familiar verse – much less often read – but of equal importance.
The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.
There are times when we do not know what to say to God. Either the situation is too tough. Or sometimes are hearts are too full. The Holy Spirit, who is God dwelling within us, speaks in the silence within, too deep for words, in love.
And then come these great words of Christian faith and hope:
What then are we to say about these things?
These things that happen to us, that happen in this life. What are we to say about death and loss?
If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.
And then these great words. In many ways they are the center of my faith:
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Jesus put before the crowds another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."The mustard seed is tiny, but a great plant grows out of it. Just so the kingdom of heaven – the sovereignty of God’s love in our lives, and our trust in that love – can be as small, as tiny, as a mustard seed but out of grows something great. Our lives. Our Christian lives. The life of the Christian community.
