I have no doubt that many of you are familiar with the Wrestling
programs on Television – The W.W.F. and W.C.W. and all the rest of them. Yet do you know who the most famous wrestler
of all time is? The Rock? Jessie
Ventura? Hulk Hogan? None of the
above.
The most famous and influential wrestler of all time, the one who has had more written
about him, more pictures painted of him, and who has had the account of his one and only fight read in places where they have
never heard of The Undertaker, Hulk Hogan, or Wrestling Federations, was Jacob, the same man we’ve been thinking about
these last few weeks.
Jacob was born fighting, holding onto his twin Esau’s ankle as he came out of the
womb. He fought and won the birthright that should have been his brother’s by right. He fought to win the hearts of
the ladies he loved. He was ready to fight Esau again should his twin brother seek to get his birthright back.
That’s how we find him at the beginning of our Bible account - getting ready to meet
Esau. Jacob has a large family and many possessions. He splits them into groups
so that if they were attacked, not all would be lost. Always the wrestler, he has alternative strategies up his sleeve. “I
will win Esau over with gifts, and when I meet him, perhaps he will forgive me!”
Jacob isn’t a particularly godly person. Despite his visions of ladders descending
from heaven and his life being the recipient of numerous promises and blessings from God, he is constantly maneuvering and
manipulating, often without any thought of how his actions may have been hurting others. It’s almost as though God needs
to really get a grip on him and teach him that there was more to life than serving his own desires!
That seems to be exactly what happens. As he seeks to cross the river, Jacob is set upon.
His attacker is sometimes described as a man, sometimes as an angel. Some suggest that the figure he wrestled was Jesus. The
assailant’s exact identity is unknown. Yet when the bout is over, Jacob recognizes that it had been no normal fight,
but that he had been struggling with God. Verse 30: "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved."
That’s why Jacob is the most famous wrestler of all. He wrestled God and survived to tell the
tale! Out of the struggle he gained a new name, Verse 28 tells us "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and
with humans, and have prevailed." He was also left with a limp in his walk having
suffered a dislocated hip in the fight. Orthodox Jews today still avoid eating the muscle of the thigh, in honor of Jacob’s
wrestling match!
Jacob never intended to be a wrestler. Neither do most of us. Even those who enjoy watching
bouts on the television would feel very nervous if it was they who were actually in the ring with some big bad bone-crusher!
Yet life has a habit of throwing us into the ring, time and time again. A sermon I saw on this passage had for its title;
“Life’s a wrestling match.”
Life surely can be that way…A wrestling match...A struggle...A fight. Things come
along and get a hold of us: health problems. Money problems. Family problems. Personal struggle. Private battles. Corporate
problems and things we face together. It’s not all sweetness and light. There’s so much that could get us down
and keep us there.
Our dilemma is much like Jacob’s, in that some of these struggles are things we have
brought upon ourselves. It has been our own selfishness, unprepared-ness, or sometimes just plain stupidity that has gotten
us into a mess. We’d like to have a magic wand to wish it all away, but this isn’t Harry Potter. It’s the
real world. Other struggles just seem to come at us from out of nowhere. “Didn’t see that one coming!”
One thing I like about this story is the vagueness of the attacker’s identity. Could
be a man, could be an angel. Could be some manifestation of the pre-incarnate Christ or personification of the Holy Spirit.
Could be something as earthly as the river in which Jacob stood, or as heavenly as the river of life that is pictured flowing
through heaven’s garden.
We are not given an exact identification. But we are told that in some mysterious way,
God is mixed up with it, involved in it, and a part of it! There are struggles in our lives that we can name and others that
we cannot seem to get a handle on. Dare we believe that in the midst of our struggles, God is involved?
Dare we, as did Jacob, get such a grip on our struggles that we have the audacity to pray;
“Out of this, there will yet be some blessing, some insight, some treasure that I have yet to glimpse and make my own!”
Is it not the case that we learn far more from our struggles than from those times when things are just too easy?
These struggles may indeed leave us limping as we go, yet even that can be a reminder to
us that we have wrestled and made it through to the other side. Whilst Jesus Christ promises us that in His name we have the
victory, we are never promised that we should travel through the battles without receiving any scars.
I wonder, if through faith, we can see that in the midst of these struggles we are not
alone but, in the same mysterious way as God was mixed up in Jacob’s struggle, God is also there in the midst of our
conflicts. Sometimes it can be about conflicts in relationships. Sometimes it can be about getting ourselves to live as God
wants us to. Sometimes it can be a conflict going on inside of ourselves. In these different situations the mystery is that
we can actually be wrestling with God.
Reflecting on this passage one writer reflects on the journaling that they had started
to do at the end of each day.
“Finally I’ve found a space to be alone at
the end of a hard day. I’ve just begun to relax when suddenly some monster out of the darkness jumps me and my face
is in the mud. I’m pitched into battle with something I cannot see, but which, if I don’t struggle with it, shall
be my downfall.
As I grow older, I’m aware that each major struggle
I undergo takes on these same familiar characteristics. And so Jacob wrestling with the angel becomes an increasingly poignant
metaphor for me. Every personal conflict begins to look like that one, with its many forms:
It’s
a struggle in the darkness.
It’s
a struggle with the unknown.
Jacob
wrestles an angel who seems just as afraid as he is.
Jacob
wrestles his own fears.
Jacob
tries to kill the angel, whose intent is to bless him.
The
angel gently allows Jacob to defeat himself.
Jacob,
remembering the consequences of stealing his brother’s
blessing,
stifles the angel’s blessing.
Jacob
and the angel eventually collapse in exhaustion.
In
the light of the morning Jacob discovers, that through wrestling
with
God, he has been wrestling also with himself.
Inevitably, such a struggle leaves me wounded and I will
limp forever afterward. But it’s not until later that I realize that I wasn’t wrestling with some other creature,
but with that which we may call the spiritual, or the holy, or even the divine. And
it is then that I realize that I, too, have been blessed. The strange thing is that I never really remember who won!”
There’s the strange thing about this wrestling match between Jacob and God. Who won? It would
be ludicrous to suggest that God would lose! The intent of the angel is to bless Jacob, to establish him in a new relationship
with God. This is a defining moment marked by Jacob’s name being changed to that of “Israel”, the name eventually
adopted by the nation. God’s purposes were achieved. God won!
God won, but Jacob didn’t lose. Jacob also won. He gained the blessing. Jacob is
listed in the ‘Hall of Faith’ of Hebrews Chapter 11. Despite his many failings, weaknesses, and subsequent sorrows,
there remained an underpinning of faith that enabled him to rise above his often-misguided actions.
But such a faith does not come without struggle. It would not come to Jacob, which implies
that neither will we reach a maturity of faith without conflict, struggling, nor wrestling with both the things of God and
the circumstances that life brings our way.
There is a line in the Presbyterian Confession of Faith of 1967 that reads, “Life
is a gift to be received with gratitude and a task to be pursued with courage.”
So, too, is faith. Faith grows and life becomes enriched only as we commit together to worship, work, study, and pray.
There are no short cuts on the spiritual road God places before us.
To be a disciple means that we have to take on the mantle of being a wrestler. There are
things in our lives we need to work through with God. There are things God seeks for us to let go of, and we don’t want
to. There are things that will come our way that will catch us totally by surprise. They may be pleasant, or they may be harsh.
So take courage. Be empowered by the Holy Spirit. Seek for God’s blessing in the
midst of the struggles, and refuse to give up till the blessing is yours. May the example of Christ encourage us. May the promises of Scripture inspire us. Let us seek to help
each other as we travel, maybe even limp, along the road that leads towards better days. AMEN.
