Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot
Readings – Genesis 32.22-31; Matthew 14.13-21
“And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.”
The vision of God whom Jacob encounters by the ford at Jabbok is different from the one depicted in some other Old Testament writings, where it is impossible to see the face of God and live; here, Jacob smells God’s breath and lays hands on His sweaty body.
Wrestling with God is an experience familiar to most of us. One thing that jumps out at us from this story is that God doesn’t mind having a good wrestle with Jacob – in fact, it is God who seeks Jacob out and begins the bout with him. God is not some sort of divine Kim Jong-Un; we aren’t called to live in terror of some cosmic tyrant who will punish us in fury if we ask difficult questions. Instead we are called to be God’s friends – deeply beloved friends. And friends are allowed to wrestle with one another, to challenge one another with their different perspectives. Like Jacob, we are called to smell God’s breath and lay hands on His body, to wrestle with Him being honest about what we think and feel, about Him and the world.
God doesn’t demand that Jacob submit and acknowledge defeat. God has no need to end this bout by dominating Jacob to prove His superiority. Nor does Jacob run away, as presumably he could have done—but instead remains engaged in an exhausting contest right through the night. What God asks of us is not fearful obedience; nor even a childlike dependency; but instead the sort of deep and loving friendship that can cope with a healthy degree of struggle. Our strongest human friendships are ones that can survive wrestling with one another, indeed our deepest friendships are often those that actively thrive on difference and debate. God should be our most deeply loved friend of all, with whom we can wrestle as we change and grow throughout our lives.
All of our lives contain enough experiences of day-to-day suffering, whether our own or that of others we encounter, to make any sane person wrestle with the gap between a world created by a God of love and goodness, and the suffering and pain that we all suffer and witness afflicting our loved ones. As St Theresa of Avila once prayed, “If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.” That’s before we start thinking about the state of the world, or the unresolvable tragedy of the human condition.