Genesis 32:22-32
This spring I had the privilege of coaching some Little League baseball here in Tri-Lakes, along with our lay leader Jim Ambuehl. That’s one of my passions, and I really enjoy being out there with the boys teaching them about the game and teaching them some life lessons as well.
We had a great season, finishing the regular season at 9-5 and making a run through the playoffs all the way to the championship game, which was a nail-biter that we lost 2-1. Of course, we should have tied it on a double up the third base line, which hit the bag and the ump called it foul. I thought a few non-pastoral thoughts about the call, but the ump came up after and said he blew it. Ah, well.
Rob was then privileged to make the Tri-Lakes All Star team, which competed in the District 5 tournament, again making it all the way to the championship game last Saturday where they lost to a team from the Academy Little League, which had some 12 year-olds who I think had to shave before the game. They pounded the ball all over the yard and we lost 11-0.
Good seasons, but not winning seasons. There’s a lesson in that. We’ve learned to be good losers, I suppose. But that doesn’t mean losing feels as good as winning.
Red Auerbach, longtime winning coach of the Boston Celtics, put it this way: “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”
Vince Lombardi, the NFL’s all-time winningest coach, said, “If you can accept losing, you can’t win.” A Nike ad that ran during the 1996 Summer Olympics dumped all over second-place winners when it proclaimed, “You don’t win silver; you lose gold.”
College World Series Baseball in 2004 provides a stark example. After the Texas Longhorns were beaten by Cal State Fullerton for the championship, the Texas team declined to attend the awards ceremony where they would have received the runner-up trophy. This snub caused a lot of people to brand the Longhorns as sore losers. Eventually Texas coach Augie Garrido issued a formal apology, but the original boycott of the ceremony demonstrated that many second-placers really don’t want to cheer the winners. If they can’t win, they’d prefer not to be “good losers.”
It’s a good thing that our biblical ancestor Jacob didn’t have that attitude when he suddenly found himself in an all-night wrestling match.
First, a little background. For a long time, Jacob had been wrestling with his own false self. You might remember that he cheated his older brother, Esau, out of his inheritance, getting Esau to surrender his birthright for a bowl of soup and pretending to be him in front of their blind father. Jacob was hoodwinked himself a few times, too, having lost a battle of wits with his uncle over marrying one of his daughters. He works for his uncle for seven years to get Rachel, the daughter he really loves, but on the wedding night he finds out that his uncle had slipped in Rachel’s older sister Leah instead—a mistake that could only happen because of veils and heavy drinking. He has to work another seven years to get the girl he wants until he winds up with two sister wives.
As this story opens, we find Jacob on his way “back home” where he anticipates a showdown with his brother, Esau. So afraid is Jacob that he sends his whole family ahead of him, along with a whole caravan of gifts, to try and “soften up” his older brother (Honey, you go talk to him first, ‘kay?)
Now, here in the middle of the night, Jacob finds himself in a wrestling match. The text calls the unexpected opponent a “man,” but when the nocturnal brawl ended, Jacob said he had “seen God face to face.” Whomever Jacob struggled with, Jacob thought he’d gone 15 rounds with God.
Certainly in a contest between a mortal and an immortal, God is the heavyweight favorite. But in this night-long struggle, we find no indication that God could wipe up the ground with Jacob at any given moment. Rather, God seems to limit his power so that the fight is a fair one, and Jacob holds his own. He isn’t whipping the celestial combatant, but he’s not embarrassing himself either.
As dawn breaks, this mysterious adversary knocks Jacob’s hip out of joint and insists that Jacob let him go. But Jacob refuses — unless this God-man will bless him. So the antagonist gives Jacob a new name, Israel, “the one who strives with God.”
That’s when Jacob discovers he is not going to get what he asked for, so Jacob asks his opponent for his name.
In other words, Jacob wants to understand the mystery of heaven and earth. God’s “name” was so holy that no one in ancient Israel would dare speak it (hence the commandment, “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain”). There was also a sense that if you knew a deity’s name, you could somehow manipulate that deity (like an incantation). But the God of Israel will not be so manipulated.
So the stranger will not give up that name. The opponent blesses Jacob, but will not give Jacob all that Jacob seeks. Some things have changed, but others will remain as unsettled as they were before the match began.
As the sun comes up, the stranger disappears, and Jacob limps away with less than he sought from the all-night battle. He survived seeing God face to face, and received a blessing, but he did not get God’s name.
Still, Jacob does not head for the locker room to sulk. Jacob is sore — literally — but not a sore loser, for he has received more than he ever expected. He is no longer merely Jacob, the deceiver; he is now Israel, the one who strives with God.
While on a literal level this whole story is strange to us, it is not that difficult to relate to when we plug in our own experiences. How many of us have had a sleepless night struggling with our conscience or trying to justify ourselves for some hurt we inflicted? How many of us have suspected God was calling us to something we weren’t keen on and found sleep elusive while we tried to rationalize the whole business away? And how many of us have sought God’s blessing, and been given it, but left without a clear sense of what to do next?
That leaves us with an interesting theme – God the Attacker. Even the disquieting picture of God as the attacker isn’t that hard to comprehend. Haven’t we sometimes experienced God as the one who needles us to change, who provokes us to try harder, who bullies his way through our defenses to demand our commitment, who hounds us to surrender to him? This is no namby-pamby God who sits quietly on the sidelines of life waiting for us to notice him. When it suits his purposes, God is an in-our-face figure who confronts us through our conscience, through other people, through Scripture, through worship, through gut-wrenching situations or through other means to pressure us to deal with him. In those times, it is not that we cannot find God; it’s that we cannot get him off our back.
Actually, God-as-adversary is a theme that occurs in Scripture more frequently than we might expect. Consider these examples:
• Exodus 4 tells about Moses, heading to Egypt at God’s command to lead the people of Israel out of slavery. He is doing what God asked him to do. Yet on the way, “the LORD met [Moses] and tried to kill him” (Exodus 4:24).
• There is a peculiar story in Numbers 22 where God sends an angel with drawn sword against Balaam the soothsayer, who also was heading off to do what God had told him to do (Numbers 22:20). Had it not been that the donkey on which Balaam was riding was able to see the angel and turn aside, Balaam would have had to fight for his life.
• 2 Samuel 24 says that God incited David to conduct a census of Israel, an action for which God later punished David. Startlingly, the parallel version of that incident, in 1 Chronicles 21, says that it was Satan who incited David to take the census, perhaps suggesting that sometimes, God’s actions were so inexplicable that observers had trouble deciding from whence they arose.
• In the book of Job, God gives Satan permission to attack the righteous Job, taking from him his family and goods, and inflicting him with sores. (But no sore loser was he!)
In none of these cases was God attacking someone who was coming against him. These were not enemies of God. Rather they were people who were either actively attempting to do God’s will or who were at least people expected to play a crucial role in passing on the divine covenant.
But the fact that God takes action against those who are obediently loyal to him suggests that there is a tough-love component to God’s compassion. Perhaps one aspect of God’s love is like that of a parent who puts obstacles in the way of an obedient child to make the child learn the hard but necessary lessons that enable movement toward maturity. Or, as the writer of Proverbs puts it, “for the Lord reproves the one he loves” (Proverbs 3:12).
A similar dynamic must have been going on during Vince Lombardi’s reign with the Green Bay Packers. Sports writers noted that one particular player seemed most often the object of Lombardi’s anger. A Green Bay pastor had a team member in his congregation and asked him if the sports writers were right. “Definitely,” said the player-parishioner. “He’s Coach Lombardi’s favorite.”
Jacob’s glory in this dusk-to-dawn duel is not that he went looking for trouble, but rather that when it found him, when he was faced with the most formidable of foes possible, he stayed with the struggle until he received God’s blessing.
And that’s where our glory comes in, too. When God assails us with guilt or doubt or menaces our comfort with an unwanted challenge, we always have the option to deny the reality of the experience, to attribute it to “crazy thoughts” or an over active imagination. Better than denial, however, is to go on the mat with God and stay in the struggle until we have wrung from the Divine Adversary/Lover the blessing he wanted us to have all along.
The fourth-century church father St. Augustine gives us one flavor of that experience when he tells of the brutality of God’s call. Augustine says that God attacked him through his senses:
You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, scattered my blindness. You breathed odors, and I drew in breath and panted for you. I tasted, and hungered and thirsted. You touched me and I burned for your peace.
For another flavor, consider how one 21st-century man describes his call into the ministry. He had been feeling the quiet tug of God for quite some time, but he wasn’t interested. Then, he says, “God started to shout at me.” It seemed that he could hardly get through a day without something in his usual routine suddenly taking on new confrontational meaning — and what had been a gentle “Please respond” became a provocative “Well, what are you going to do about this?” The man says that when he finally yielded, he was blessed with great peace and joy.
We might say that differently. Some might discuss this in terms of perspective. When we encounter God, we undergo a perspective change, an attitude adjustment. Jacob could’ve said, “Well, I got whupped.” Or he could say, “Hey, I got a new name.”
God is in the business of perspective change. We encounter God and we’re a different person, with a different name. We might have asked for this, but we got that. We might not have gained what we wanted, but we got what God wanted for us.
We might be sore losers in all of this. No struggle is pleasant. Our pride may be wounded, our bodies may be tired, our minds may be abuzz with new possibilities.
We are bearers of a new name — “one who strives with God.”
Sore losers, maybe. But good losers always.
