Foot Dragging
Genesis 32:22-31; Luke 18:1-8
October 17, 2010
When the scriptures are read in worship, we usually expect to hear and read something encouraging and enlightening, a good example or model for how we should proceed to live our lives. The irony is that none of these characters - the unjust judge, the persistent widow and the scoundrel Jacob - are particularly attractive models for good behaviour. All are flawed, though who are we to talk? Yet, all, we, are recipients of the grace that only God grants.
Jesus rarely tells us the point of a parable beforehand, but so that they will keep praying and not lose heart he will offer this parable. Sitting back expecting an uplifting tale with a memorable moral tacked on, the disciples had to be thrown off by the unpleasant contentiousness of this legal case.
If something went wrong in that time, there were no police to report it to and have them arrest the perpetrator. If someone murdered another, nothing would happen until someone brought the murderer before a judge. While judges were extremely powerful, they were seldom impartial, so when this widow comes before the judge with her complaint, looking for a judgment or justification in her favour, this is no unique event. For whatever reason, corrupt or straight, there was no way she would receive justice. Justice is an overrated concept anyway.
Nevertheless, this woman was persistent, which is the nice way to say it. None of us would like to be on the judge’s end of her remonstrations. This judge did not fear God, had no respect for people, a professional foot-dragger, a person ideally equipped to be immune to all sieges upon his stubborn self-interest, but she did lay siege to him and wore him out. He admitted defeat and ruled in her favour. She did not care about how she appeared to the judge or to the public as long as she was vindicated. As the saying goes in sports today, she won ugly.
Even uglier in all of this is the realization that this Godless judge who disrespects all people is according to Jesus the model for God in his parable. OK, God’s going to do it a lot better with more compassion, but still works this way. Keep praying, don’t lose heart, it’s never over in God’s eyes. And keep in the front of your mind that you don’t have to be angelic to be vindicated by God, and there are times when God doesn’t appear to play by God’s rules. When the Biblical authors and Jesus talk about grace, that utterly, wildly free gift of God, they mean that God doesn’t play by our rules. God doesn’t always play fair by human standards, nor do the people who are vindicated as righteous as we want to insist they should be.
The pivotal story in the Old Testament saga of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people is set on the lonely dark side of the Jabbok River. Long ago God had set Abram out on a long uncertain pilgrimage to a Promised Land, and along the way everything seemed to threaten that promise. Progress is our most important product was put to serious test while Abraham and Sarah had no children to people this new nation. Then Abraham came within a razor’s edge of sacrificing his only-begotten son.
The greatest challenge was the twins, Esau and Jacob. Esau never seemed to fit the role of promise keeper, and Jacob was one not to be trusted with anything. He manipulated his brother and deceived his father for the birthright. Thank goodness he had his mother, Rebekah, who protected him and sent him off to her brother Laban up north to keep out of trouble. Jacob found happiness with Rachel, but his relationship with Laban was also one of deception on both sides. Finally, after reconciliation with Laban, Jacob heads home, but his scoundrel past has caught up to him big time, for Esau is coming for him.
Jacob sends his family and property across the river to safety while he contemplates his deservedly sorry state. It would have been the logical pattern of human nature for the brothers to have destroyed one another at that time. If that had happened, we would have never read about it, for the promise would have disintegrated and the Bible we know would never have been written, and very possibly we would not be sitting here doing this today. Cain and Abel with a final twist.
With no other notice, Jacob starts wrestling with a man in the middle of the night. Where he came from and why the wrestling match was initiated are equally mysterious. As day is starting to dawn, Jacob has long sensed that this is not a mere homo sapien, but an angel, a messenger of God. Jacob may have been dishonest and a cheat, but he was persistent and unrelenting, like the widow with the judge. Some interpreters believe this was a dream, a metaphor, of Jacob’s soul wrestling with God for the stakes of who he is to be. The Bible is full of these living parables in which the boundary between the spiritual and the physical are heavily blurred. Nonetheless, the wrestler-angel realizes that Jacob won’t let go, so ironically the angel pulls a dirty trick and dislocates Jacob’s hip. God wins this one ugly and dirty.
Yet after cheating - how does God ‘cheat’ anyway? - the angel blesses Jacob, giving him a new name Israel, the wrestler with God. The angel, like God later on Mount Sinai, refuses to be named and defined, but the Promise is on again. Jacob knows he has been changed and calls the place Peniel, “the face of God,” for somehow he has seen the infinite God and lived. He limps away, dragging his feet, not a good way to fight a battle, but now he is a wounded healer. Like his leg he humbles himself to his brother Esau and the two warmly reconcile. There is a haunting declaration by Jacob to Esau as he insists upon giving gifts to his formerly estranged brother. “Truly, to see your face is like seeing the face of God - since you have received me with such favour.”
The face of God you expect to find on an angel, or at the very least on a fairly angelic, almost perfect human being. That’s the way our religion is supposed to work, that’s the way God is supposed to keep things moving, no foot dragging for goodness and righteousness. Yet to see the face of God on your most intimate enemy and live, only God can make that up.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan