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.
Barbie meets Wrestling Jacob, courtesy of Gustav Doré’s 1854 painting.
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.
That human condition means that to follow the Christian path is to embark on a journey that, by definition, can only end once we have left this earthly life. We can’t be complete while were in this life. “For now”, as St Paul famously wrote, “we see through a glass darkly”; only in heaven shall we see “face to face.” Moreover, as St John wrote, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” In this life, we shall never know the full truth, nor will be able to live entirely as Jesus Christ would wish us to. Doubts will always beset us and, at least from time-to-time, we’ll also all do things that are obviously wrong.
We can choose to see this as a depressing, rather negative vision. I don’t think so, however. I think it is a profoundly uplifting one, especially for our time. Let me explain why.
So often assume we are made to be perfect, and torment ourselves because that is the one thing we can never be. Our post-Christian culture is as tormented by guilt as it ever was in the days when Christianity was assumed.
On Friday night, the Rector of St John’s and I went on an outing to the cinema to see the Barbie movie. Purely as a piece of missional self-education to help us understand the current zeitgeist, you understand. In one scene, the movie’s main female human character gives a long monologue on the impossible and often entirely contradictory demands that women today are expected to fulfil to be considered good. The speech wasn’t wrong, but I found myself muttering to myself, “Do you think it’s any different for blokes?” Our society is riddled with unrealistic expectations, often pushed on people with a heavy dose of shame and guilt, and we are mostly rather exhausted of it.
Before the great religious crisis of the West of the last two generations, most people assumed that an atheistic society would inevitably be a less moral one. Indeed, sometimes Turkish friends, especially those who have lived in this country for a relatively short space of time, will tell me on finding out that I am a priest, how shocked they are at how few people here have any religious faith, and how this dooms our society to immorality. But actually, I don’t think that abandoning God made us any less moral – our understanding of what is right and what is wrong may have shifted, but we remain deeply concerned with being moral. In fact, we’re consumed with questions of morality; more than that, guilt and shame are as widely used to shame people who are too fat, or smoke or drink too much, have the wrong opinions or say the wrong things, as they ever were to stigmatise, say, sex outside marriage. The difference now is that there is no longer much sense of forgiveness and repentance.
We are also sadly misguided about how capable we are of bringing a moral society about. We grossly overestimate the degree to which politics can bring about a moral world, convinced that goodness and justice can be secured through the right set of laws and government policies. That might explain why the verbal wrestling bouts of our own time, the sort engaged in by our media pundits, seem to be characterised by genuine mutual detestation. It might explain, also, the online armies who follow those media pundits, joining in gleefully with attempts to wreck the lives of those they disagree with and, if that is unsuccessful, simply to mute any opinion that might upset their carefully worked-out but usually over-simplistic certainties.
In trying too hard to be perfect, we simply expose how deep our flaws are. In contrast, we can trust that God made us to be the flawed creatures we are, loved by Him for what we are, yet struggling and wrestling towards something better and indeed much greater.
We seem to have landed ourselves in a spiritual desert, and we’re in a worse position than the five-thousand who followed Christ into the desert in this morning’s Gospel reading. We live in a society which has already been fed with a great spiritual banquet of God; that finished long ago, and we are left only with the fragments of what was once a Christian culture.
Yet the fragments of that ancient bounty were enough to fill twelve baskets; I think we’ll find that enough remains to spiritually re-feed our own culture. If we seek how, in faith, God will show us the way.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, so let me leave you with these little fragments to wrestle with. I don’t think it’s wise for Christians to pretend to have easy answers, in a society where people are faced with constant demands to believe that all sorts of over-simplistic, over-confident, propositions are somehow unanswerable scientific truth. I do think it’s wise to remember how much God has forgiven us, and to share that forgiveness, in a society where that is in short supply. I think we should remember that history does not move in straight lines, that the Holy Spirit often blows where it is least expected. Finally, we should keep wrestling with God, for it is in the wrestling that vision, and imagination, and new ideas, often emerge.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
