One of my closest friends is a long-time hospital chaplain. Whenever he would tell me a story of a particular tragic death, or a family that had experienced an unusual amount of loss or violence, he'd always end with, "I really wrestled with God over that one."
It was one of those things that went in one ear and out the other. "Wrestling with God" is such a familiar phrase that it washes over you when you hear it. But my friend wasn't that sort of guy: he wasn't trite, he wasn't particularly sunny, and he definitely wasn't theologically unsophisticated. So one day I asked him, "What do you mean when you say 'I wrestled with God'? What does that look like for you?"
"We go back and forth," he stated, matter-of-factly. "Like in a relationship."
In our story this week, Jacob sets the bar for wrestling with God. Read Genesis 32:22-31 at www.oremus.org, then walk through it piece by piece here:
Background: Jacob has been living for many years with his father-in-law Laban, and has been told by God to go back to where he came from. One big problem: he's got to cross paths with his brother Esau to get there. Jacob was living with Laban in the first place because Esau wanted to kill him. Oops.
Jacob has made preparations to meet Esau, including sending him gifts and dividing his family, servants, and livestock up so that if one group were attacked the other would survive (let's not even go into the way he plays favorites here). When we meet Jacob at 32:22, he's sent everybody on ahead of him and stayed behind, camped beside a stream (this looks a lot like where we found him when he was running from Esau in chapter 28).
He wrestles with "a man": Yes, it's God. God meets Jacob in the form of a human man and physically grapples with him until daybreak.
How do we know it's God? The story stands between two appearances of God at Beth-el (as noted, in chapter 28 and again in chapter 35). Interpretation of this passage has identified the assailant as God from the earliest times. Jacob knows that he is wrestling with God and shows us that by demanding a blessing from the man. Finally, the blessing comes in the form of a new name that only God has the power to give.
He asks for a blessing: Blessings are for real in the Old Testament. They are objective, permanent, active things that have power apart from the giver and the recipient. That's why Isaac can't take back the blessing he gives to Jacob, thinking he's Esau. When Jacob asks for a blessing, he's not asking for the man's goodwill, for the man to make a gesture over his head, or for the man to promise him something. He's asking for an immediate, verifiable, powerful transformation of some sort. He wants something new, now.
He receives a new name: What he gets is a new name, Israel, which in the version of the text that we read this week (NRSV), means either "the one who strives with God" or "God strives." That is, of course, exactly what has passed between the two. Jacob struggled with God, but so did God really, truly struggle with Jacob - so much so that in the end God had to stop playing fair and strike Jacob's hip.
How is the new name a blessing? It's not, really. The blessing is what the name marks, which is the bond between Jacob and God that has been forged and cemented in this struggle. In the words of my friend, they've gone back and forth, just like you do in a relationship. God has challenged Jacob to muster everything that he has within him in this wrestling match, right at a time when Jacob needs everything that the has in him to face his brother, Esau. Jacob walks away with a limp not because he failed, but because he was so strong and so tenacious that God had to do something extreme to call him off. He's now marked as a "striver" rather than a loser.
And here's the blessing for all of us. Jacob was forced to block out everything that he was afraid of - his brother, losing his family, losing his possessions - and take his fight to the source: God. When it was over, he had nothing left to fear and had gained the blessing of a powerful relationship with the one who is all power and all blessing. The biblical commentator Terence Fretheim writes that struggling with God "in the night" provides "a gracious rehearsal for the actual life circumstance." He continues, "To go through it with God before we go through it with others provides resources of strength and blessing for whatever lies in the wings of life" (NISB v.1, 1994, 569).
