Jacob Wrestles Through the Night
Jacob Wrestles Through the Night
Genesis 32:22-32
So, when I was in high school, I played a lot of different sports. To be honest, though, I was a “jack of all trades, master of none.” I enjoyed baseball and basketball, golf, tennis, and track, all for varying lengths of time and with varying levels of commitment but in each case with decidedly slightly above average results. As an athlete, I was a “B” performer. For the most part, I had fun playing, although I still live with some of the physical fallout of those days.
Back in the day, I had undying admiration for two sets of athletes: cross country runners and wrestlers. I mentioned a few years ago that I went to a cross country meet to watch my daughter, Sarah, run. One team showed up with t-shirts that read: “Our sport is your sport’s punishment.” I laughed so hard when I saw those shirts because it was so true. It was a bad day at basketball practice if the coach got mad and made us run a few extra sprints: “How could he be so mean?” In contrast, every now and then, I would see the notes on the chalkboard for the cross country team’s workout. Their warmups would be sets of quarter mile sprints! That was just to get loose! Unbelievable!
The thing was, though, that wrestlers were even tougher. Maybe it was because wrestling season ran concurrent with basketball season and we shared a locker room but I was just so aware of these guys who were from some other planet. They came in every size and weight class but what linked them together was this distant but intense look in their eyes. They congregated in the wrestling room, the single worst smelling place on earth. As you passed and tried to avoid the smell, the sound of bodies slapping on the mats was unavoidable. The other thing that was obvious was how high they kept the heat in that room. It was like an oven.
It wasn’t that we didn’t work in basketball. However, as basketball players, we worked hard and then we went home and ate…a lot! I remember drinking blenders full of chocolate milk shake and eating a whole box of Ritz crackers and then having dinner. What was unimaginable to me about those wrestlers was that they worked so hard and then they ate nothing. Everything was about making weight. That was a level of discipline that remains unimaginable to me. What’s the point of exercising if you don’t get to eat afterwords? In the end, I looked at every one of those guys, even the smallest and lightest of them, and thought, “I really don’t want to mess with these people!”
All of this admiration at the time was grounded as an Iowan in the universal worship of Dan Gable, a 5’9”, 150 pound native of Waterloo, Iowa who went on to wrestle for the University of Iowa, wrestle for the United States Olympic team and coach the University of Iowa wrestling team. Gable’s career wrestling record at the University of Iowa was 117 victories and one defeat. (The one defeat was in his very last match of his final season.) In the 1972 Olympics, Gable won all six matches without ever giving up a single point. Gable’s teams at the University of Iowa had a dual meet record of 355 victories, 21 defeats and 5 draws. He coached 152 all-Americans, 45 national champions, 106 Big Ten champions and 12 Olympians. His teams won 21 Big Ten Conference Championships and 15 NCAA Division 1 titles.
In Iowa, Gable was a god. In the locker room that I shared with those wrestlers, Gable’s pictures adorned a lot of lockers and his coaching style impacted teams across the state. However, the story of what drove Gable didn’t come out until much later. I remember the day when I learned that when he was in high school, when he was just 15 years old, his 19 year old sister was sexually assaulted and murdered. Gable called his sister’s death his “biggest loss.” However, he took all that grief and pain and anger and channeled it into his wrestling. He took it out on every opponent who came his way. To know the story was to understand the fury.
Although that pain was funneled for a long time into Gable’s wrestling, eventually that pain arose deep inside him and challenged him to actually deal with the loss, itself. The world’s toughest man had to turn and face the world’s toughest challenge: to grieve the loss of his sister, years ago. No amount of victories and championships could make that pain go away. In the end, it was just him and that loss, one-on-one, on the mat together. Grief was definitely the toughest opponent Dan Gable ever faced.
Last week, we watched as Jacob got hustled by Laban. The conman was conned. He ended up married to the wrong daughter after seven years of labor. Then, after also marrying the daughter he loved, he put in another seven years of hard work. He had two wives and a growing family so he did what any self-respecting conman would do: he turned the tables once again, finding a way to cheat his father-in-law out of the best of the herds. Now, if you are keeping score, this means that he has cheated his own brother out of one estate and now he’s cheated his father-in-law out of another. The problem is, he’s got plenty of stuff but nowhere to live. Essau, his brother, wants to kill him. Laban’s sons are out to get him, too. Eventually, with his brother-in-laws growing increasingly angry, Jacob is warned by God in a dream to return to the land of his birth. The only problem is that this means confronting Essau.
Jacob had spent years running from Essau. Dan Gable spent years running from his sister’s murder. All of us have the stuff that is deep inside of us which we will do pretty much anything to avoid. Then, one way or another, we just realize, it’s time. It’s time to face what needs to be faced. It’s time to work this through. It’s time to go to the mat and wrestle for all we’re worth.
Oh, the other thing that I forgot to mention is that wrestling (in all of its forms) hurts. In gym class, there was a unit on wrestling. This was fine unless you ended up wrestling one of the wrestlers, which, of course, the gym teachers made sure happened to all the basketball players. Clearly, there were incredibly strategic decisions that wrestlers made in the course of a match. Equally clearly, I would never have time to even consider strategy because all I could think on that mat was, “Oh my God, this hurts!”
Jacob manages to cut a covenant with Laban and establish a truce—that was peace on one front. He seeks to appease his brother, Essau ahead of his arrival. He sends some servants to Essau to let him know that Jacob is heading home. Who hasn’t tried to build a little momentum before we face what we need to face by announcing, “Hey, I’m over here and I’m going to finally face this!” At that point, one person usually is kind enough to say, “That’s great!” Someone else just mumbles, “I’ll believe that when I see it!”
When the servants come back to Jacob, they have big news for him: “We came to your brother, Essau, and he’s coming to meet you, along with the 400 men he is bringing with him!” Jacob is terrified. In fact, he is so utterly afraid that he divides all the people and the flocks and the goods who are with him into two camps, in the hopes that if Essau destroys one, then perhaps the other will survive. As the option of last resort, when all else is failing, Jacob prays, not so subtly reminding God of the promises that God had made to protect him and his children and his children’s children. Then, because he’s Jacob, the hustler, he sends wave after wave of servants, bearing wave after wave of presents to Essau in the hope of buying him off. Finally, he takes his two wives, his eleven children, and his two maids and sends them across the river. (Is he trying to keep them safe or using them as a diversion? We’ll never know…)
What we do know is that at this point, night is falling and Jacob is all alone. This is the long, dark night with which most of us are familiar, the time when everything that might distract us has been stripped away and what we are left with is the deafening noise of everything that rumbles deep inside of us. We have no other choice in that darkness than to face what needs to be faced. For most of us, what we need to face is the truth of what we’ve done or the sadness that we’ve tried to flee or the change that we’ve known we needed to make all along. We argue with such truths. We make the case for continuing on our present path. We come up with all the reasons why change can’t happen. Then, the truth fights back, and fights back hard.
In Jacob’s case, his battle, we are told, is with a man. Who is this unnamed man? Is he a man at all or is he an angel? Is he God? What we know first is simply that this man is there in the night and he’s there to wrestle Jacob. The text tells us that they wrestle until daybreak. They are exhausted and at a dead draw. Realizing this, the unnamed man strikes Jacob on the hip and dislocates the joint. Still, in a moment that would have made Dan Gable proud, Jacob would not let go. Finally, the man says to Jacob, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” Jacob says that he won’t let go until the man gives him a blessing. The man renames Jacob: “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed. (“Israel” literally means, “the one who wrestles with God.”) Then, Jacob asks the man his name. The man scoffs and essentially says, “What do you mean, ‘What’s my name?’ You know who I am.” At that point, Jacob names the place. He calls it, “Peniel” which literally means, “the face of God.” Jacob chooses this name, he says, “For I have seen God, face-to-face, and yet my life is preserved.”
Jacob’s life is preserved but he has a new name and one heck of a limp. Life, even a faithful life, is not pain free. For years now, Jacob has lived in the fullness of God’s promise to bless him. However, he has also struggled mightily. Nothing has been easy, especially when it comes to dealing with the fallout of his own choices. Now, he has spent a whole night—the night before the biggest day of his life, the day when he would meet his brother again—he’s spent this whole night wrestling with God. He’s exhausted and wounded and vulnerable which might just be exactly how he needed to be on the morning when Essau and Jacob were reintroduced.
For any of us who have spent a long night wrestling with our stuff, exhausting ourselves fighting against the grip of what brings out the worst in us, grasping onto any handhold, wondering if the night will ever end, Jacob’s story is a reminder. When we ask, “Why did this have to be so hard?” the answer may be because we had to reach the end of our rope, we had to exhaust ourselves, we had to be on the brink of tapping out before we could be ready for something different. We had to face what we never wanted to face before we could see the face of God. We had to feel like we had been made new and renamed before we could greet the dawn of a new day or the face of our dreaded brother or any other dreadful stuff that might be waiting for us. We had to learn to walk with a limp before we could learn to walk with our arm around our brother.
A long, hard night of wrestling is what precedes a day of reckoning—the chance to live this truth: that the way out is almost always the way through. Next week, we’ll hear what awaited Jacob with the dawn…