Genesis 32:3-31
Gauguin, Jacob Wrestling, 1888
In this story, God comes in the form of a stranger – an angel, a messenger – to wrestle with Jacob & to change his name, that is, who he is. He no longer is Jacob, but Israel, one who recognizes that God is the source of his life & existence.
Jacob moves on to face his crisis as one who has been changed by an encounter with God. It’s a new person who crosses Jabbok brook. He no longer moves with the old self-confident, cocky gait. There’s a noticeable limp; his power is no longer in himself. He is healed by being wounded.
What difference did it make the next day when Jacob crossed the river & stood face to face with his brother? Well, Jacob wasn’t the same person anymore. Even though he was limping, he wasn’t running away. And when the two brothers met, instead of unleashing the years of pent-up resentment, hostility & guilt, they threw their arms around each other & wept with joy. These two, twins who were the half parts of one, were now together.
It just might make a difference that God comes to wrestle with us in our doubts & fears, in our strained relationships & our ever-present crises. By such an encounter, God may not necessarily remove the overwhelming problems & obstacles which confront us, but God may make us different enough to deal with them, not merely with our own resources, but in faith.
The God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob; the God whom we know as the Father of Jesus Christ, will come to in the face of crisis even if we’ve tried to do without God in the past, if we’ve pretended, like Jacob, that we could handle the problems of life on our own, God will still come.
God will come to encounter us even if we’ve made such a mess of things that they seem beyond repair. God will come when we don’t know who we really are; when we don’t, figuratively, know our own names, & are separated from our true selves. God will come when there’s a deep gulf, a wide abyss, between us & someone we love.
God comes to you to wrestle with you, so that this time you might be different. And when the struggle is over, He’ll send you forth with His blessing to face the problems and obstacles of your lives that stand in the way of your peace and wholeness as changed persons.
It is in that encounter that we come to know the distinction made by the poet Rilke: “How small, that with which we wrestle, but how great, that which wrestles with us.” And it is also in that encounter that we become, to borrow the phrase of Henri Nouwen, the “wounded healer.”
