Wrestling with God

We don’t always have sermons at Northcote - we generally go for a more conversational vibe. However, on 21/10 it was communion night, and Alister preached. It is the second in a two part series, starting with Doubt is Faith’s Wingman.

The story of Jacob and the mysterious stranger is, frankly, mysterious. But, at the same time, it is exactly right. It is all of our stories.

We are just living our life, going to work, going to church, watching a bit of Netflix, indulging in a bit of light doom-scrolling… and then something changes. It might be as unexpected as a lightning bold suddenly smiting us out a clear blue sky. It might be due something we have done. Something happens. A summons from life itself, something powerful enough to jolt us out of our everyday, sending us out into the wilderness, out on our unexpected, undesired, journey.

This is exactly Jacob’s story.

He has, I think it’s fair to say, a complex relationship with his older brother, Esau. He comes out of the womb clutching his brother’s heel, and that is the origin of his name, which means something like “the heel clutcher”, or, perhaps, “the supplanter.” He is obviously a lot cleverer than Esau, and tricks him out of his birthright for a “mess of pottage” as the King James has it, or a bowl of stew as we would say. And then, to cap it all off, he tricks his father Isaac out of his final blessing, so when Esau comes to receive his father’s blessing, it has already been used up.

There is obviously a lot going on here around inheritance law in the Ancient Middle East, but we don’t really need to know the details to understand why Esau is furious, and, I’m sorry to say, he consoles himself by plotting to kill Jacob the minute his father dies. So Jacob, warned by his mother Rebekah, finds a reason to make himself scarce – fleeing to his remote kinsman Laban. There, too, he has numerous exciting adventures, including being tricked by Laban into marrying the both his unmarried daughters in return for fourteen years hard labour.

Truly these Old Testament types had families complicated enough to put todays blended families in the shade.

Anyway, finally Jacob wore out his welcome with Laban and his sons, and he had a providential word from God telling him it is time to go home. So, with customary craftiness, he sneaks off, pausing only for Rachel, his wife, to steal Laban’s household gods, for reasons which are never adequately explained.

After yet more adventures, which need not detain us here, he arrives at the border of his late father’s lands, now occupied by Esau, who he had so comprehensively ripped off. Alarmingly, Esau has heard he is coming, and has set out to meet him with four hundred men.

Jacob is terrified, and, presumably because he wants to indicate that he has no ill intent, sends generous gifts, and his wives and property ahead of him. Only he is left behind on the western side of the river.

And then, suddenly, mysteriously, he is wrestling with a mysterious stranger. They wrestle all night, and Jacob refuses to let go of the man, who strikes him on the hip, dislocating it.

Let’s just pause there for a moment to ask, and I think I speak for everyone here when I say: What? Who is this man? In a book where everyone comes with lengthy introductions and explanations about who is related to who, where everything is foreshadowed and it moves about as rapidly as a multi-hour Bollywood epic or daytime soap opera, this sudden eruption of night-time conflict doesn’t even merit a new paragraph.

Suffering sometimes erupts out of a clear blue sky, Sometimes it is your own fault – as in Jacob’s case – and sometimes not.

Like I said last week, I once heard a stat that something terrible happens in people’s lives – either to you or to someone you love, roughly every ten years, which means that you are never more than five years away from it.

Which is a sobering thought. And it brings the questions raised by Jacob’s story into sharp focus.

I think there are, broadly, two ways to engage the problem of suffering. The first one, much loved by philosophers, we could call the “armchair” questions, because it involves sitting in a comfy armchair, perhaps with a drink in one hand, thoughtfully pondering questions like: if God is infinitely powerful and infinitely good, then why does suffering exist? Is this really the “best of all possible worlds”? Does it perhaps have something to do with free will? Or does it disprove the existence of God? And so on.

Now I have nothing at all against with sitting in an armchair with a thoughtful drink in one hand, or even leaning intently over a café table, gesticulating so hard I’m in danger of spilling my latte over a longsuffering friend, solving the problem of suffering to my own satisfaction. When we do this, we stand in a long line of philosophers and theologians, who call this attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of suffering the problem of Theodicy.

If you are interested in approaching things at this sort of conceptual level, then let me commend C.S. Lewis’s book The Problem of Pain to you. It’s a classic, written by someone who lost his mother young, endured a boarding school so terrible that, he preferred his service as a front-line rifleman in the First World War. He was a brilliant and amazingly well-read man, and as far as it goes, it’s a great book.

Last week we considered whether we could divide doubt into two types, corresponding to two modes of belief. We thought about assensus faith – the belief in truth claims about God and Jesus and so on, and so we had the corresponding assensus doubt in which we doubt ideas about God. This “armchair” debate is about ideas about God.

The other sort of faith we talked about is fiducia faith – faith as trust. In our case, faith in the trustworthiness of God. And, hence, the other sort of doubt – fiducia doubt. Doubt about the ultimate trustworthiness of God. To doubt the trustworthiness of God is not just to have an opinion about some ancient beardy dude in the sky, but, rather, to doubt whether the universe as a whole is a hospitable place for you. Whether your hopes and desires mean anything at all. Whether you have any value whatsoever.

Which isn’t to say that these two types of doubt don’t have anything to do with each other. Of course they do, and the solutions to your Assensus doubt will help you deal with your fiducia doubt, and, of course, learning to trust God helps to make sense of the various truth claims of Christianity.

Jacob wrestling all night with the mysterious stranger –a symbolic level, it starts of being like some debate about assensus faith. You stay up all night arguing the truth of Christianity, or whatever, with your fellow first year students. The sun comes up, you have a lecture to go to, and it becomes a fond memory of being young and idealistic.

But what Jacob is engaged in is something altogether darker. Don’t forget his situation – fleeing from his father-in-law, even though they parted on reasonably good terms, walking towards a brother who, the last thing he heard, was plotting to kill him, and with good reason. Not to mention that this angry brother is advancing towards him with 400 hand-picked men, which doesn’t exactly sound like he is coming in peace. Perhaps he is also burdened by the knowledge of all the trickery and underhand behaviour which got him into this fix in the first place. I’m no expert in Ancient Near East inheritance law, but I suspect that stealing one’s older brother’s birthright is not exactly approved of. And Jacob did it twice.

So I would imagine that he was in a bit of a state, standing alone as he waved off his wives and their maidservants and the last of his trusty retainers, watching them splashing across the ford in the golden light of the evening, and vanishing over the brow of the hill.

Fortunately for Jacob, and indeed for all of us, God seems a lot keener on well dodgy geezers like Jacob, and other assorted sinners, than he is on righteous people. Like Jesus said, it turns out that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than a hundred righteous people who have no need of repentance.

Like Jacob that night, sometimes we are alone in the darkness. Our prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling and fall back onto our heads. Like Jesus said, it’s like we are pleading with an unjust judge, who has precisely no interest in responding to our prayers.

Lewis wrote another book about suffering, a book so controversial that he published it under a pseudonym and it was not published under his own name until after his death. In it, he talks about the intense grief he felt after the painful, tragic death of his wife, Joy. His confident reflections in The Problem of Pain must have felt very, very distant, as he swam alone through a vast ocean of grief.

How does one believe in that sort of situation? How does one retain any vestige of fiducia faith, of trust in God?

When Anne and I were first in Australia, had basically no friends, I was un- and under-employed for years on end, when a tree demolished half our house, we were in an terrible road accident, and we were deep in the awfulness of our infertility journey, this was pretty much exactly our situation. Everyone else seemed a long way away, and it was hard to even see them, let alone to listen to what they had to say. Which was, to be fair, generally pretty useless.

Where was God in all this?

Did God, in fact, exist at all?

But I did hear one useful thing in the midst of this. Which was, essentially, I’m having the worst time of my entire life, and you are telling me there is no God? You are taking my one problem, and, in return, giving me two problems. I still have my original problem, and also this new problem that there is absolutely nothing to hope for? No reason or point to the universe, just a collection of atoms running into each other and sub-atomic strings vibrating or whatever, and nothing else? How, precisely, is that meant to help?

The thing about a journey of suffering, is that it’s a lot being Jonah in the whale.[1] It just takes the time it takes. It’s much more like a three-day voyage in the belly of a fish than it is like arguing about the necessary existence of God in the university union. It is much more like being buried in the grave for three days than it is like sitting in an armchair with an interesting idea. It is much more like being planted than it is like thinking something.

It is a lot like wrestling with a mysterious, nameless stranger all night long. The key is to not let go.

The stranger dislocated Jacob’s hip, gave him a blessing, and refused to tell him his own name. Instead, he gave Jacob a new name: Israel. The one who wrestles with God.

The next morning, Jacob, though he had been blessed, walked with a limp towards his brother. When we wrestle with our own suffering, through our own long, dark nights, we, too may be given an ironic blessing. The blessing that, having suffered, we are more able to be a blessing to others in their own suffering. The blessing that God is able to reach us, even when we don’t understand the point of what is going on, Cannot feel God’s presence, and cannot see how it could possibly fit into God’s plan. 

Jacob held on, and, insofar as a story this strange has a moral, it is that he held on, and that’s the way we get a blessing from God. But God is also the God who chased after Jonah and refused to let him go, the God who is fully expressed in Jesus Christ, the God who leaves the 99 to find the one. So, even if we cannot hold onto God, God is still holding onto us.

It is OK, to wrestle with God, to hold God to account. Like Jonah washed on the beach, like Jesus buried in a stranger’s tomb for three days. God is, in fact, faithful. Even when we are not. Jacob held on until he got a blessing, though he never learned the stranger’s name.

The God who writes straight with crooked lines, the God who chooses what is weakest, most vulnerable, and not always the most morally impressive people, the God who loves each of us individually and by name, chooses us  - chooses you - to bless the whole world.

[1] Yes I know the word is better translated as a giant fish, but if your main issue with the story is whether Jonah was rescued from certain death by a giant fish or a whale, I feel like you are perhaps missing the point.