We can learn from Jacob wrestling with God

This Sunday’s Old Testament church reading, according to the Revised Common Lectionary used jointly by a number of Christian denominations, contains arguably one of the oddest passages in the Bible.

Amid a lengthy Genesis story about Jacob and his large entourage traveling to see his brother Esau, we reach the famous, but strange, tale of Jacob spending all night wrestling an unnamed and mysterious “man” who couldn’t defeat Jacob but who did knock Jacob’s hip from its socket. By the end of the passage, though, it is said that Jacob actually had “striven with God” and “seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.”

As pure narrative, this interlude seems like a blind alley. It interrupts, but seems to have absolutely no thematic continuity with what comes before and after.

As metaphor, though, the passage seems to abound with meaning and insight.

To be sure, some blessed people seem to have a relationship with God suffused with nearly pure peace and joy. It seems to me, though, that far more of us, of widely varying degrees and styles of belief, feel that the bulk of the time we are wrestling with God rather than experiencing beatific harmony.

Part of this involves the age-old question of how God can be omniscient, omnipotent, and all-loving while allowing so much pain to exist in his creation. The pat answer about man’s own bad choices allowing evil into the world do not, cannot, explain sufferings from cancers and other dread diseases or from natural disasters, none of which involve human decisions or human agency.

Heck, I want to put God on trial even for some far more quotidian annoyances, such as allergic rhinitis (bad “hay fever”) and mosquitoes. If sneezes and itches are part of His design, those alone can seem like evidence of incipient cosmic sadism.

Again and again, then, we wrestle with God. We wrestle to understand His full nature and His intentions. We wrestle with His silence and apparent abandonment of us when things go terribly while our prayers seem to disappear into the ether. And, at one time or another, surely all of us have felt like Gene Hackman’s doomed priest character in “The Poseidon Adventure” who, before the ultimate self-sacrifice, yells at God: “We didn’t ask you to fight for us — but, dammit, don’t fight against us!”

Here, though, is the interesting thing: Aside from the disjointed hip (which is no fun: I dislocated my own hip in first grade!), God doesn’t actually punish Jacob for wrestling with Him. Instead, God rewards and blesses Jacob and gives him the new name of “Israel” that would also apply to Jacob’s descendants forever.

The metaphoric message is evident: While wrestling with God is never “safe” (again, the hip!), God seems to actually want us to wrestle with Him. He wants us brave and resilient enough to grapple with who and what God is, a human being directly encountering divine being: striving, striving, striving.

God demands from us not mere obedience nor facile bromides of belief, but strenuous effort from the wholes of our bodies and souls.

Frankly, this isn’t the God I would choose if I were in charge. The God I want, the God many of us humans want, would be easier. But that’s not the God we need — nor the one who really does give us unfathomable blessings.

Advocate/Times-Picayune columnist Quin Hillyer has a degree in theology from Georgetown University. He is an Episcopalian who attended an Episcopal grade school and a historically Jewish high school, studied Martin Luther at a Jesuit University, and taught at a Baptist college. His novel “The Accidental Prophet,” a melding of theology and satire, grapples with exactly the questions in this column.

The end of the full column. The link is here.

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