'The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.'
--Genesis 32: 22-31
'In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.'
--II Timothy 4: 1-5
'Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, `Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"'
--Luke 18: 1-8
I have a confession to make. I am closet fan of professional wrestling. I got hooked when I was in high school, thanks to Kenny Mullins, the senior in my 8th grade algebra class who said to me one week, “Just watch it!” I did and it’s been all downhill ever since. I gave up religiously watching several years ago, but I’m still fascinated by it. It may be predetermined, but at its core it represents something fundamental about the human condition: the struggle between the babyface good guy and the heel bad guy, and in the end there is always a resolution.
However you may now think of me, pro wrestling is what I first thought about when I read our Scriptures for this past week. In Genesis we find Jacob running for his life, and to be honest, he’s kind of the heel in this story. He has cheated his brother Essau of his birthright, stolen a blessing from their father Isaac that was reserved for Essau, and altogether cheated and lied to get what he wants. Classic heel. Essau is out to get Jacob, who we find in today’s reading on a mountain where he wrestles all night with a stranger. It is widely accepted that this stranger is some kind of earthly form for God. All night long they struggle, grappling with one another. God knocks out Jacob’s hip, but Jacob is relentless and won’t quit until he receives a blessing. When morning comes the blessing is granted, God gives to Jacob a new name, Israel – literally, one who wrestles with God. Jacob even names that Peniel – the face of God. Wrestlemania’s got nothing on this bout.
Our epistle from II Timothy paints the picture of an early Christian community that is struggling, wrestling both with their leadership, and probably with one another, as some are jumping ship. This letter, written to the community’s leader, is less of a chastisement of struggle and more of encouragement to persist and persevere through those kinds of struggles; to wrestle with one another in ways that lead to healing and shared mission within the community.
That same persistence is what Jesus is articulating in the parable from the Gospel of Luke. Let’s be honest, this isn’t the easiest parable in Jesus’ bag. If the judge in the story – often called the Unjust Judge – is a stand-in for God, he’s no babyface. He refuses to grant the widow’s request time and time again; she finally wears him out, wrestles with him, until he gives in to her demands, weary that she will exhaust him, or as the literal translation of the Greek reads: ‘Give him a black eye!’ I don’t believe, nor do any biblical scholars I could find believe, that we are meant to view the judge as a stand-in for God. Our relationship to God is not one where we have to pester God to the point that our request is granted – that is a pretty immature kind of faith; God isn’t some sort of cosmic vending machine that will eventually give us what we want. Yet sometimes, it can definitely feel like we are wrestling with, or even pestering God. The moral of the parable, then, is that our faith should be persistent and relentless, not so that we get what we want, but so that we always remember that God is not like the Unjust Judge, and does, in fact, hear us and bring about a resolution, even if it is not always the kind that we’re seeking.
The story of Jacob, the commentary on the community of II Timothy, and the parable of the Persistent Widow speak to something to which we all can relate, and that is the struggle we sometimes feel with God, and maybe even with one another. There isn’t a person out there who has not wrestled with God, sometimes all night like Jacob. There isn’t a person out there who has not felt like they have pestered God again and again with their request. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there, maybe in the last year, certainly in the last five years, and even in the Before-Covid Times, we found ourselves in those knock-down, drag-out struggles. When change came suddenly and without warning. When we lost a job, or a loved one died. When everything we thought we knew to be true about ourselves was challenged. We’ve all been there, and some are there now.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people over the years who have been really going through it and are scared because they had been taught that you don’t wrestle with God or question God. You just accept everything that comes your way, without complaint. Yet this is contrary to what the Bible actually shows us. It’s not just in these Scriptures for this week. Maybe the best example, of course, is Job. We don’t read nearly enough from Job, but that story is one that often gets misinterpreted. We celebrate his patience or the fact that Job coined the phrase, ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ but we sometimes forget that even Job eventually cursed God and cursed the day he was born. Job is old, one of the oldest stories we have, whose roots can be traced back to an era long before Judaism existed, and its lesson is older than our Scriptures themselves, the lesson that part of what it means to be human is to wrestle with the Divine.
I actually believe that that is Good News. Here’s why. It’s the lesson of the cross, the lesson of struggle, the kind of realization that comes from wrestling with God in such a way that, like Jesus in that moment, we exclaim, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” To accept a message that says we should not wrestle with God, or that struggle with God and one another should never happen, minimizes our experiences of pain, and we no longer ground ourselves in reality, the reality that the writer of II Timothy knew, which is that living in community is hard, whether that community is a family, a church, or even just our one-on-one relationship with God. The wrestling matches we get into may not be easy or shot – they are seldom either- but in the end, out of those struggles, comes clarity and. an understanding of who we really are, like Jacob getting a new name, and a new path forward, like the empty tomb in place of the cross.
We may often come to the Scriptures looking for the message that makes us feel good, only to be hit with stories like these. They remind us that when we wrestle with God we are not doing anything wrong. We are, in fact, growing deeper in our knowledge and love of God, becoming more mature in our faith. It is similar to a marriage. I’ve probably learned the most about my wife, myself, and our relationship in the times we’ve wrestled with each other. They’ve actually made our relationship even stronger, more mature and meaningful. Cynthia Bourgeault, who is an Episcopal priest and contributor with Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, says in her book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, that the hallmark of a healthy relationship is not so much how well you get along but how well you fight, how you move through those wrestling matches, and come back to each other; the resilience that is at the heart of the relationship that tells you never to quit on each other. God doesn’t quit on us. Why should we quit on God or each other?
So if you find yourself today questioning God, wrestling with God, know that it’s ok. If you feel like you’re pestering God, that’s fine because God can take it. And in the end, you might come away changed, maybe with a limp or a new name, but one way or another, when the bell sounds, you’ll discover who you really are.
