Blessed and Limping: Jacob's Wrestle with God in Proper 13, Year A

A man spends the night fighting a stranger by a river. His hip gets knocked out of its socket. He hangs on anyway, all the way to dawn, because he wants a blessing and he will not let go without one. At sunrise he limps away with the blessing, a new name, and no idea who he was just fighting.

That's Genesis 32, the first reading this past Sunday for Proper 13, Year A. When I laid it next to Romans 9 and Matthew 14, here's what jumped out at me. Nobody in these readings is okay. Not one single person. And God shows up anyway, right in the middle of the not-okay, and hands out a blessing.

What Happened at the Ford of the Jabbok

Jacob is about to meet his brother Esau for the first time in twenty years. The last time they were in a room together, Esau wanted him dead, and for good reason, because Jacob stole from him.

So Jacob does what Jacob always does. He manages. He sends the wives across the water, then the kids, then the herds and the servants and everything he owns, arranging the whole board like a man setting up a chess problem. And then Genesis says he was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

Alone. In the dark. On the wrong side of a river, with everything he loves already sent to the other bank.

The wrestling goes all night. When the stranger sees he can't prevail, he strikes Jacob's hip and puts it out of joint. And that's when you get the strangest exchange in the book. The man says let me go, it's almost morning, and Jacob, dislocated and exhausted, says he will not let go unless he's blessed.

He gets the blessing. He also gets the limp. The reading ends with the sun coming up over him as he passes Penuel, limping.

So who was he fighting? Genesis uses the flattest word it's got: ish. A man, a husband, a person. Not an angel, not a spirit. And then the scene spends the rest of its length quietly taking that back. The man asks Jacob's name and won't give his own. You only withhold a name when you've got one worth withholding. He renames Jacob, which men don't do to each other. He blesses him. And the explanation of the new name says Jacob has striven with God. Jacob names the ground Peniel, the face of God, because he says he saw God face to face and lived.

The narrator says a man. Jacob says God. Genesis lets both stand. That vagueness reads to me like the honest report of a man who was in the dark. It was the best he could do.

Ye'aveq: A Wrestling Word Made Out of Dust

There's one Hebrew word here worth sitting with, because it changes the picture.

The verb for "wrestled" is ye'aveq. It shows up in verse 24 and again in verse 25 and nowhere else in the entire Hebrew Bible. Two uses, this scene only.

The root looks like it's built off avaq, which means dust, the fine powder you kick up off a dry road. I'll be straight that this is a proposal and not a settled fact, and scholars argue about whether the verb really comes from the noun. But if it does, the picture underneath the word is two bodies gripping each other and grinding into the dirt until the air is full of it. Close, sweaty, unglamorous work.

I love that, because it means that when the Bible describes what happened to Jacob that night, the word it reaches for is a word about dirt. Which tracks, because remember what Genesis says we're made of. Dust. Adam out of the adamah. The closest encounter with God in the whole book, and the word for getting close is a word about getting filthy.

That's worth holding onto if you've ever assumed that meeting God is supposed to feel clean.

Paul's Anguish and a Grieving Man on a Beach

Romans 9 is only five verses on Sunday, and it opens with Paul practically coming apart. Great sorrow. Unceasing anguish. That's a man telling you he does not sleep well.

Then he says something that should stop you cold. He could wish himself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of his own people. Read it slowly. Paul, who spent chapters of this same letter arguing that nothing can separate us from the love of God, says he'd take the separation himself if it bought his people in. That's a purchase he's describing, so be clear on the terms. The price is Paul. What it buys is everyone else.

You know this ache if you've got somebody in your family who used to be at the table and isn't anymore. A kid, a brother, a parent. Somebody raised in it who walked out of it. That ache doesn't resolve, and Paul doesn't resolve it here either. He just tells the truth about carrying it, out loud, in a letter, to strangers.

Then the Gospel. And this is the one that got me. Matthew 14 is the feeding of the five thousand, probably the most familiar miracle in the book. But look at the first line: Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. Why? Because of what Matthew told us in the verses right before. Herod had just executed John the Baptist, beheaded at a birthday party, on a whim, to save face. John's disciples buried the body and went and told Jesus.

His cousin. The man who baptized him. Gone, stupidly, cruelly, for nothing.

So Jesus does the most human thing in the Gospels. He goes to find somewhere quiet. And he doesn't get it. The crowds walk around the lake and are waiting on the shore when the boat lands. And when he goes ashore and sees them, what rises up in him isn't irritation. Matthew says he had compassion. The word is about the gut, something turning over inside him. It's mercy.

Then five loaves and two fish. A sack lunch. Not enough, and everybody knows it's not enough. The disciples say so out loud. And Jesus says: bring them here to me.

You Don't Have to Be Okay First

I don't want to turn this into a tidy equation where suffering is God's ingredient list. It isn't. John the Baptist should not have died. Jacob's hip did not need to be wrecked for the world to work. Paul's grief isn't neat, and Romans 9 doesn't tie it off.

What I'm saying is smaller than that, and I think truer. You don't have to be okay first.

There's a version of faith a lot of us picked up somewhere that says you get yourself in order and then you come to God. Get the doubt handled. Get presentable, then show up. Sunday's readings don't know that religion at all. Jacob doesn't get cleaned up before the encounter; he gets dusty in it. Paul preaches out of the middle of the sorrow instead of waiting to be past it. And Jesus doesn't wait until he's done mourning to be merciful.

Somewhere in your life right now there's a thing that isn't enough. Your patience with a person. Your energy at the end of the day. The amount of yourself you've got left over for the people who need you. The instinct is to hide it until it's bigger. Sunday says bring it now. Bring the five loaves. Bring the limp. Bring the anguish you can't fix.

Jacob walked away from that river with a blessing he'd hung on all night to get, and he walked away limping, and Genesis lets both of those be true in the same sentence. He was blessed and he was hurt, and he kept going.

That's most of us. Blessed and limping. Both at once, still walking.

Listen to the full episode for the whole walk through Genesis 32, Romans 9, and Matthew 14. And if you only take one line into your week, take this one: bring them here to me.