Wrestling with God
Texts: Genesis 32.22-31; Psalm 17. 1-7, 15;
Romans
9.1-5; Matthew 14.13-21
In 1885 the English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a sonnet in
which he describes the tribulations of a long battle with depression
and despair. I won’t read the poem to you, because it’s rhythm is
difficult and its imagery particularly dense. In short, I doubt
it would make any sense to you at a first hearing! But I would
like to dwell, for a moment, on a rather disturbing connection Hopkins
makes between two realities which are seldom mentioned in the same
sentence, namely, Despair . . . and God. If I understand
him rightly, Hopkins says that his year-long wrestle with despair might
also be read as a wrestling with God . . . In tones which
moves me more than I can say, Hopkins speaks of a God who comes by
night to call him into question – to question the calibre of his
devotion to God, even after many years of spiritual discipline.
Despair, he says, is like a tempest which comes to blow the chaff from
the grain of his soul. As such, he says, even despair appears to
be God’s instrument, the servant of a God who wrestles with all that is
not totally his own. A Love who will tolerate no rival.
There’s a terrible irony here, is there not? If Hopkins were not
so intent upon the love of God – striving to love with all his heart,
soul and strength – then this particular kind of sorrow would perhaps
pass him by! People who have no plans to live under God’s rule
are unlikely to become despondent about their lack of spiritual
progress! Such people may be troubled by many things, but I’ll
wager that the state of their relationship with God is not one of
them! No, it’s the person who genuinely longs for God who
is most likely to know that particular kind of sorrow which is the
realization that your devotion is not yet complete. It is the
sorrow of knowing that you are a sinner. Not just because popular
piety decrees that you are. But because you really are, and you
know you are. Deep down, where it hurts, in the heart of what we
call ‘the Truth’.
Jacob knew this on the night before he met his brother Esau. In
the cycle of stories we know as the book of Genesis, God’s messenger
had already appeared to Jacob in dreams aplenty, promising that his
descendants would dwell in the land of his father Isaac forever, and
that this company would prosper and become a great blessing for all the
peoples under heaven. But on this night, that promise seemed like
vain fantasy because, on the morrow, Jacob, and all his family, would
meet up with Esau, from whom Jacob has swindled the birthright and
blessing of a first-born son. Esau the wild man, who loved to
hunt. Esau the leader of four-hundred warriors. Esau the
one who had threatened to kill his brother, so that Jacob was forced to
flee in order to preserve his life. The promise and presence of
God was wonderfully real to Jacob. Yet, on this night, the fear
of Esau was even more so. On this night, Jacob’s faith in God
wavered precariously. After sending his family over the river
before him, Jacob returns to his camp to spend the night alone.
But he is not left alone. A man accosts him in the dark, and
wrestles with him, we are told, until daybreak.
There are many ways to read this strange story. There are many
ways to name the man without a name. If we were to read in a
Freudian way, we might see the man who comes to Jacob as the
externalization of his own fear about all that is likely to occur all
the next morning, the embodiment of his tendency towards despair before
the face of what is feared. Through the long night of decision,
Jacob wrestles with the urgent desire to flee from the face of his
brother Esau. The part of him which would flee is very strong,
but the part of him which longs to be rejoined to his brother is strong
also. And so the wrestling goes on through the night, with
neither side prevailing. Until, close to dawn, the fear finally
leaves him – and he is blessed with the courage to go and meet
with Esau.
Some theologians reject such readings out of hand because they
distrust, as a matter of principle, any tendency towards what is
called the ‘psychologization’ of biblical narrative. I am not one
of them. As a theologian who believes, utterly, that God has
taken human reality to his very bosom in Christ, I do not consider
myself free to dismiss the mysterious machinations of human imagination
and spirit as somehow beyond the ambit of divine activity. I feel
bound, rather (and this precisely as a believer in the Christ by whom
God knits the atoms together), to declare that every psychological
crisis within the human heart and soul hides, at its heart, a
profoundly spiritual encounter and confrontation with God that
functions as the very heart and soul of what it means to be a human
being. That is to say, with Louis-Marie Chauvet, that every
theological reality necessarily has a body, that every anthropological
analysis is not entirely itself until it is also theological.
What that means for the story at hand is this: that within and
through this recognisably human confrontation of Jacob with his fear
and despair one must also look for an encounter with the living
God. And that is indeed what the story suggests, does it
not? Is not the traumatic visitation of Jacob’s fear at the dead
of night also the means by which God comes close to ask his disturbing
questions: “Do you really love me? Do you really trust
me? Do you really believe in what I have promised?”
Finally, after a long struggle, Jacob’s answer is ‘yes’. But not
before he feels the full power of the temptation to despair
absolutely. Not before he is wounded for life. Not before
he loses his name, and his very self with it. And so Jacob
emerges from his night of prayer chastened and humbled, and made new in
the waters of the river in which the struggle took place. ‘I will
name this place’ Peniel’, he says, ‘because here I have seen the face
of God and lived’.
The Jewish sages knew that seeing God’s face was dangerous. Their
God was not as sickly and sentimental and harmless as many modern forms
of devotion would have us believe. ‘It is a terrible thing’,
wrote Paul, ‘to fall into the hands of the living God’. When
Jacob saw God’s face, he died indeed. And the wound he bore for
the rest of his life reminded him of that death. But, in the
mercy of God, he was raised to life from the waters of his
drowning. He received a new name, Israel, which functions in the
story as a symbol of his new identity: ‘one who has wrestled with
humanity and divinity, yet perseveres’. In the power and hope of
this new identity, Jacob is finally empowered to face his brother Esau,
not with his usual cocktail of bravado, bluff and deceit, but with
humility. It is by this newfound humility, given him in the
struggle before Peniel—literally “The face of God”— that he finally
prevails.
So, the bible tells us that fear and panic, even despair, can be the
messengers of God, the means by which we are led to choose for God once
more. Indeed, the Jewish and Christian traditions say that Satan,
also, is the servant of the Lord. But we should be careful to
distinguish the servant from the Master. The servant is not the
Master, though the Master’s purposes are fulfilled through the
servant’s action. That is why Hopkins, in his poem on the dark
night of tribulation, begins by declaring that he shall never give in
to despair absolutely. The messenger of God these feelings may
prove to be at times, the means by which God wrestles with those
remaining vestiges of ego and sin, certainly. But God they are
not. And that is important to know. Giving in to despair,
you see, is like setting up a false god. It is believing that the
God of Abraham and of Jesus is a liar who will not come through on what
is promised. When we are tempted to despair, we are tempted
to bow down and do obeisance to a very dark god indeed. A god who
would have us destroy ourselves absolutely, never to rise again.
That is why Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish contemporary of Hopkins, even
suggested that sin is another name for despair.
As for me, I am one of those who is visited, from time to time, by the
dark angels of the Lord. Those messengers which ask the
question: do you really trust me? Is there really any point
to your devotion? But, at such times I am reminded of Jesus, who
persevered in faith against odds far bigger than mine. One who,
when his friend John the Baptist was murdered, withdrew to a quiet
place to wrestle with his own fears and anxieties and find his faith
once more. One who continued to preach and to heal, even when the
establishment decided to go after him. I remember the cup of his
suffering. I remember the plea to his disciples: ‘Stay with
me. Watch and pray’. I remember his arrest, torture and
crucifixion, and his cry upon the cross ‘My God, my God, why have you
abandoned me?’ I remember the way his disciples scattered in
every direction, and denied that they knew him. But, most
importantly, I remember this. That Jesus rose to God.
That God vindicated his cause, and owned his life as a paradigmatic
icon of the way that God lives and moves in the world. And so, in
the story of Jesus I see how even the most monstrous of evils can
become the instrument by which God offers healing and wholeness, not
only to me, but to everyone . . . And I
am encouraged to have faith in God. Yes, and even to imitate the
Psalmist in seeking the face in which I know I will find my
death. For in dying to myself, to my fears and worries and
ambitions, I believe I will become what Christ became. And that
is what I want most of all. As Hopkins says in another poem:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Glory be to God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – as in the beginning, so
now, and forever. Amen.
Garry J. Deverell
12th Sunday after Pentecost
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