From Our Archives

For earlier essays on this week's RCL texts, see Dan Clendenin, The Lord is Your Keeper (2022); Debie Thomas, The Bothersome Widow (2019); Dan Clendenin, Keep Praying and Don't Give Up (2013), Fighting the Long Defeat (2010), and Hijacked? (2004).

This Week's Essay

By Amy Frykholm, who writes the lectionary essay every week for JWJ.  

Genesis 32:24: “Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” 

Jacob is a striver. In the course of his life, he ricochets from one ambition to another, always looking for more. The last thing he says to his father is, “I am Esau.” In that moment, he claims the birthright that belongs to his brother, and also plunges himself into a life-long crisis of identity.

In The Murmuring Deep, scholar and biblical commentator Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg elaborates on this moment in which Jacob lies about his own name. “Who am I? Jacob or Esau? Who was it that received Isaac’s blessing? An original simplicity has been disrupted.” Jacob is now divided. What could have been “I am who I am” is now a self that has denied itself. 

From this point, Jacob moves from struggle to struggle. Every encounter is fraught; every experience brings about another inner war. In Genesis 28, which recounts the famous dream in which Jacob sees a ladder between heaven and earth, the passage begins, “Jacob came upon the place.” In English, this is a fairly unremarkable statement. But Zornberg points out that the original Hebrew for “came upon” could easily be rendered as “collided.” This makes a lot of intuitive sense, since Jacob is always colliding with people and places—he is a turbulent whirlwind of a person. 

Between the time of Jacob’s ladder dream and his wrestling encounter in Genesis 32, he has collided with Rachel (and fallen in love), as well as with Rachel’s father Laban. He has been in a long-running conflict with his wife and Rachel’s sister, Leah, and maintained another protracted conflict with Esau, of whom the text says Jacob was “greatly afraid and distressed” (Genesis 32:7). 

Marc Chagall, Jacob Wrestling With the Angel (no date).

Before he crosses the Jabbok with Leah and Rachel, Jacob divides his possessions in two, so that if Esau’s people attack while he’s gone, they may only come away with half of his belongings. This is Jacob in a nutshell: divided companies, divided heart, divided self. 

He departs with his wives and children, but then leaves them and goes off alone. Zornberg says that the word “alone” is uniquely associated with Jacob among all the patriarchs. Despite his many children and his four wives, he has never recovered from his initial loneliness. This isn’t solitude. This is a kind of aloneness that is darker and more sinister. He lives in an exile that is both internal and external. When he leaves Rachel and Leah across the stream, along with “everything he had” (32:23), he is turning toward this inner darkness. 

Then he is “left alone and a man wrestles with him until daybreak.” This is a very strange sentence. It can’t be both: he can’t be left alone and be with another person. The and—one tiny little letter in Hebrew—contains both volumes and silence. We have to make some kind of interpretive choice, and how we fill in this blank says everything about us. It’s our invitation to become involved, or maybe a trap door through which we fall. 

Is the man an angel? The tradition has gone this way as if to resolve the tension and explain it away. But the text says nothing about a divine messenger. Is it, as the poet Derek Walcott might say, “the stranger who is himself”? Or is it God? Later Jacob says, “I have seen God face to face,” which invites yet another paradox. And if it’s a dream, then Jacob paradoxically comes away with a very real injury. 

Whoever it is, Jacob grabs hold of this person and will not let go. This is the familiar Jacob with his genius for tenacity. He worked seven years to earn the right to marry Rachel. He sustained a lengthy conflict with Esau without capitulation. He spent 22 years in exile. Now he won’t let go, no matter how much it hurts. 

Marc Chagall, Jacob Wrestling With the Angel (c.1963).

The first words that Jacob’s adversary speaks are “Let me go” (32:26). Yet true to form, Jacob does not relent. Instead he makes a demand, “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (32:26). Through this dark night, Jacob has come to understand that the struggle is a holy one. There is blessing in the unknown, and he will have that blessing. 

In response, as if going to the very heart of the pain of Jacob’s life, the wrestler says, “What is your name?” This time Jacob answers, “Jacob” (32:27). Perhaps he is finally ready to claim his own name. 

If that is the case, though, as soon as he lays claim to it, the stranger gives him a new name, “Israel,” “one who struggles with God” (32:28). It is not easy to see this name as a blessing. And it furthers the theme in Jacob’s life that no matter how much he strives to attain, his true path is dispossession. Eventually, he is called upon even to surrender his own name. 

In a similar way, the stranger will not give his name, but he does offer a fraught blessing. As the sun rises, Jacob comes away from this dark night with a new name, a limp, and a sense that his struggle is holy. 

As tempting as it is to leave the story there, we must note that nothing gets easier for Jacob after this. He does manage to reconcile with Esau, maybe because he has finally learned and accepted his own identity. But whereas until now his struggles have all been about how he can get what he wants, after this mysterious encounter, they all become about loss. 

Marc Chagall, Jacob Wrestling With the Angel (c.1963).

His wives die; his daughter is raped. This puts him at odds both with his sons, who want to avenge their sister, and with the royal family, whose son is the rapist. It’s a personal and diplomatic nightmare. Later his sons kidnap their own brother, his beloved Joseph, the only son of Rachel, out of jealousy, and Joseph is lost to Jacob until the very end of his long and largely unhappy life. 

If we turn to the Bible for assurance that life will be easy and comfortable, and every prayer will be answered and God’s blessing will continually rain down upon us, the story of Jacob is not the place to look. 

What we can take from this story is that the struggle within us—those dark nights of the soul—is holy. We live in and with a God who is willing to be intimate in that struggle, to engage the mystery of ourselves, and to bless the struggle even as it wounds us.

We could read the final words of Jacob in this passage as triumphalist, “For I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved” (32:30), but it seems more fitting to read those words through a kind of awe—through the knowledge and mystery of the struggle, the wounding, and the prevailing. 

Weekly Prayer

St. John of the Cross (1542–1594)

Flame of Living Love

        Oh flame of living love,
so tenderly you wound
my soul in its innermost place!
Now that you are no longer elusive,
end, if you wish,
rend the cloth of this sweet encounter.

        Oh soft healing of the flesh!
Oh delicate wound!
Oh tender hand! Oh delicate touch,
that tastes of eternal life,
and pays all debt!,
Killing, you have changed death to life. 

        Oh lamps of fire,
in whose shining
the deep caverns of sense,
that was dark and blind,
with strange exquisiteness
cast light and heat near its beloved!

        How meek and loving
you awaken in my breast,
where secretly you live;
and in your delightful breath,
full of glory and goodness,
how delicately you love me!

Translated by María Baranda and Paul Hoover. 

St. John of the Cross (1542–1594) was a mystical poet and Carmelite, who with his lifelong friend Teresa of Avila was involved in attempts to reform the Carmelites. In the midst of his attempts at reform, he was kidnapped and imprisoned in a cupboard in a Carmelite priory in Toledo, Spain. His escape is at least one impetus for his most famous poem Dark Night.

Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Medium.com; (2) Artchive.com; and (3) WikiArt.org.