Red Stuff
Genesis 25: 19-34

July 14, 2002

My favourite baseball writer, Tom Boswell, wrote a book a few years back entitled How Life Imitates the World Series. I don’t have the subject and object turned around: grammar does matter: .

The death of one of the greatest baseball players this week, Ted Williams, is sad, more so because of the conflict generated so publicly among his family. We like to believe that people of great accomplishment are great people and all who surround them are of similar ilk. Yet most of us know from up-close and personal experience that that seldom is true.

It is not that we or even the Ted Williams family imitate Esau and Jacob with their fraternal strife, aided and abetted by a father and mother taking sides for and against their own children. No, Esau and Jacob imitate us. So let’s see how we look.

The story begins with an old story for Old Testament patriarchs: Rebekah was barren. You can’t keep God’s promise of a great nation going without any heirs, so Isaac prayed, off stage, effectively. We seldom hear Isaac actually speak. Being barren, unable to conceive, appears to have been a prerequisite for most Biblical mothers of important people. The only one who isn’t barren is Mary, the mother of Jesus; she simply is pregnant when the world does not believe she should be.

Rebekah was an older mother, having been married 20 years before giving birth. The twins inside were already battling away for supremacy and in that day and age, this could be mortally dangerous for the mother. She prayed too, on stage, effectively as well. Two nations are struggling within you, God tells her. The elder shall serve the younger, the best way to really mess up the way society was organized. The issue of the Promise is not an issue.

The children were born healthy, and Rebekah apparently was all right as well. But it had started. Many in reading this passage have sensed a humorous tinge to everything being said, a tinge of red.

The first of the twins appears, all red and hairy, so Esau is his name. The second followed so close behind, he had his hand holding on to the heel of his brother. Jacob seemed the perfect name, a pun on the word for “heel” with the idea that he was one who would trip you up and jump into your place. The name actually means “may God protect,” but that was lost in the shuffle.

Then the boys grew up, but they seemed to be in different worlds, being raised separately. The description of Esau as the hunter and Jacob as a man of the tents, a settled farmer, borders on being the replay of the legend of the two groups which were in continual conflict in ancient, even modern times: the hunters and the farmers. On the borders of civilization the two groups worked in counter purposes to one another.

The narrative is not neutral - nobody ever asked the Bible to be neutral. The author not surprisingly would come from a settled agriculturally-based community, so Jacob being a “quiet man” implies someone who finds an unobtrusive place for himself in a society. The hunter has to be more independent, and therefore less sociable. That the farmer was considered a more cultured individual living in a cultured society is our modern pun that is painfully close to the perspective of our author.

Danger now appears in the shape of favouritism. Isaac preferred Esau, “because he ate of his game.” Did they really mean this, or was this a subtle caricature? Isaac loved Isaac because he liked to eat steak? A man who lives by his stomach, we have long known, is headed for heartache, or is it heartburn?

Rebekah just loved Jacob with no reasons attached. Did she need any? Jacob would be the one closer to her in the tents. Yet, as we saw in the tale of her procurement for Isaac as a wife, Rebekah is a powerful personality in her own right. When she knew what she wanted, she knew how to get it.

Then the real story begins. Esau is coming back from an unsuccessful hunt, famished from the days of exhausting pursuit. Jacob is cooking something and Esau spies it lustfully. His language suddenly becomes crude by the usual standards of the Book of Genesis. “Give me some of that red red - some of that red stuff.” Esau gets the additional nickname of “Edom” which is the land of red clay. The name of the first man Adam is from the same word - a creature of pink colour. Not a multi-cultural observation.

Jacob sees an opportunity where others wouldn’t, though this proves nothing virtuous about his moral character. “First sell me your birthright.” Esau is portrayed as an impulsive person who sees no good in anything he does not hold in his hands. Definitely, a bird in the hand kind of guy. The transaction is sworn to and like the other parts of the tale it seems almost a spoof. Can they be serious? Can you actually “sell” your birthright?

You can despise your life and the worth it really possesses. You can make one part of life so important - liking eating steak - that the rest is irrelevant, except that it isn’t.

Nevertheless, we have to be cautious about drawing too much of an easy moral from this story. Jacob is not the model of ethical behaviour we are looking for, despite Esau’s crudeness. We remember the infamously ludicrous legend of his donning a sheep skin in order to fool his blind father that his skin was hairy like Esau’s and cheat his brother out of a blessing - with his mother’s active assistance.

Jacob was the one who would carry the flame for God’s promise. His name would be changed later on to Israel, the one who wrestled with God. Despite his shifty subterfuge, God chooses him and for no good reason at all from our perspective.

We can never be sure that we have sorted out who is the righteous person in our midst. If to be righteous means following our human interpretations of what God desires of us, then in many instances we are chasing our own tail. If to be righteous means that God walks with you, in good and in bad, then most of our judgments are way off the mark. Don’t be quick to judge people according to the way they act or the way they look, or even their sordid histories. God chooses the oddest people who sometimes have done things we abhor or don’t approve. You and I can never be too sure who is holy.

On the alarming side, God might just choose you despite who you have been. That might be hard road to live.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan