Two Blessings

Genesis 27
10/24/17

The stories of the covenant of God being passed through the generations in Genesis are raw and real. There are no idealistic, picturesque heroes here. There are no moral stories embedded in the text, no Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or models for good works. Today’s story of the patriarch Jacob is no exception. If Jacob’s story was a self-help book it would be called something like “How To Be The Worst Person Ever And Still Manage To Accumulate A Flock of Goats.”

In many ways the story we hear today is about two worlds, two conflicting worlds that collide into one another. The first is the world of Jacob.

Jacob comes out of the womb grasping and conniving. His whole life is a series of deceptions and reversals. He doesn’t wait for fate to move in his direction. His world revolves around getting hold of the things that have been denied to him because of birth order. Jacob has big dreams for himself and he intends to make them happen. He pursues those dreams with passion.

Jacob does not get along well with others. The epitome of his antagonism is his relationship to his twin brother Esau. From the beginning its clear to Jacob that their father, Isaac, prefers the older twin, Esau. The birthright, the good stuff, always goes to the older son. Getting around the transmission of those blessing to his twin will be difficult, but Jacob is the man for the job.

In this world there are winners and losers, those who have and those who are left behind. You do whatever it takes to win, to get not just what you want but what you think God wants. After all, it’s been clear to Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, clear from the time her children were in the womb that Jacob would be the chosen one. The prophecy comes to Rebekah while she is still pregnant – “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

Rebekah and Jacob think they know what this means. Jacob will get all the stuff. He’ll be the winner. God meant it that way. And now it’s getting serious. Isaac is about to pass on the blessing. He is on his deathbed. There’s no time left, no time to let God work this out. Rebekah and Jacob need to do whatever it takes to set this right, whatever it takes to secure what is surely the win God intends for Jacob.

That’s one way to see the world. We Christianize this by saying God gives imperfect people to achieve perfect ends, that God makes the most out of a bad situation.

I’ve been a fan of this kind of interpretation in the past; it helps to make sense of my own life. But this year I also began to hear the danger of this way of thinking inside the text. I’ve heard this excuse given for Donald Trump’s politics of white misogyny, to excuse war, to give reasons for the maintenance of prisons, to excuse police brutality. This is what we have to work with and God will find a way. We focus on the ends and not the means.

But there’s another story in Genesis, a competing narrative of how to see and encounter the world. And that is the world of Jacob and Esau’s father, Isaac. What Isaac has learned throughout his life, most notably in the story we heard last week–the story of when he was almost sacrificed by his father–is that we cannot make it on our own. You can’t force a blessing into submission. God steps in, even when it seems there is no other way, even when the end is in sight, even when no way is possible.

In Genesis, the blessing that hands down the covenant is linked by fathers and sons. Jacob and Esau aren’t the only brothers in this first book of the Bible who have to work out blessings and brotherliness. Isaac was also the second round, the unexpected choice for the passing on of covenantal blessing. Isaac, we may remember, had a half-brother named Ishmael. This was another time when the way for passing on the covenant was not clear. It seemed impossible for Isaac’s parents, Abraham and Sarah to have a child so late in life. They were over a hundred years old. So Abraham and Sarah took matters into their own hands. He took the much younger Hagar as a second wife and she bore a son named Ishmael.

But God did not intend the covenant to pass only through Abraham. God also called Sarah to the covenant. Isaac remember this next part. God did not abandon his brother Ishmael. Instead, he discovers there are two blessings, one for Ishmael and one for Isaac. “I will surely bless him,” God tells Abraham of his first son, Ishmael. “I will make him fruitful and will greatly increase his numbers. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and I will make him into a great nation.”

In Isaac’s world there it isn’t all or nothing. It matters that everyone is honored, that there are blessings for both the sons. It matters that each son is assigned the blessing that is right for him, the blessing that is in line with God’s intention not only to pass on the covenant but to bring wholeness to a people. It shouldn’t surprise us that Isaac also prepares two blessings for his sons, just as it had been done for him and his brother.

Jacob does not want to have any of that. Isaac’s God is not quick enough for Jacob. In all the recorded history of Jacob, from the time he is born until he leaves his house as a young man, Jacob mentions the name of God only once. It is in the story we heard today. Lying to his father about how he was able to catch and prepare the game soup so quickly, Jacob replies “Because the Lord your God sent me good speed.”

Not “my God” but “your God.” Jacob doesn’t need Isaac’s God. It turns out that it’s not that hard to manipulate history, to get what you want. What normally requires an act of God, Jacob accomplishes with a bowl of soup.

It will not surprise you to learn that the purpose of the blessing passed along from generation to generation is not to get all the goats and all the silver and all the power. The purpose of passing on the blessing is to trace the line of God’s covenant from one generation to the next. The blessing is passed on as a sign of gratuitous grace, of a people called from nothing to bear a sign of God’s love for the whole world. A blessing is a calling. To be blessed is to be called to a way of life, to be called to a life of grace. What Jacob sees is gain and honor. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that along with this blessing comes the responsibility of the transmission of grace, a grace that is dependent, relenting, and vulnerable. The blessing is grace.

 

Of course, Esau, Jacob’s twin brother, is no gem either. Many of the descriptions of Esau in Genesis reinforce his brutalism and simpleness, his physical domination and gluttony. Some of the language used to describe Esau is language typically used to describe wild animals. Esau is a very hairy dude who roams in the fields, killing animals. In an early scene in Genesis, Esau trades his birthright to Jacob. The exchange is made, once again, over a pot of stew.

Maybe the story of Jacob and Esau gives us a chance to see that God’s sovereignty, God’s ability to move in the world, can coexist with us being wrong. Maybe this story helps us to see that God’s sovereign work is also to undo wrong, to undo us.

Maybe Jacob and Rebekah were wrong. Maybe Isaac, who lived to see his brother blessed, to see God take the knife from his father Abraham’s hand, maybe Isaac over his long life has learned to see this other world, the world of two blessings. Isaac has learned to see it and live it for his sons.

A different interpretation of this story is that father Isaac had prepared all along two blessings for his sons. All along he knew them both and what would suit them, what blessings he could offer according to their lives, to who they were. Esau was to be given the blessing according to who he was – wealth and power. Esau gets the fatness of the earth and mastery over his brothers.

But in this blessing intended for Esau, we don’t find the two things that define the blessing of Abraham, the covenant that was passed down from God to Abraham to Isaac, and should now he passed on the Jacob. We don’t see a blessing for land or a blessing for children. This was the blessing that was intended for Jacob all along.[1]

Jacob can’t see that possibility. In Jacob’s world there is all or nothing, first or last, eat or be eaten. So he goes after what he thinks is better, what he thinks is the best offering. He takes what is intended for Esau. Because the blessing of the covenant was not meant for Esau, by the time his brother appears for a blessing there is nothing left, only ruin and brokenness that will stretch out for years.

Jacob spends the rest of his life undoing what he had done. He spends the rest of his life returning the blessing he stole back to Esau. And that’s how God works in the world. God redeems relationships, God sets things right—not just in the end, but all along the way.

After years of separation, living under the consequence of deceit, Esau and Jacob are reunited. Here is what Jacob says to his brother, “Please accept the blessing that was brought to you, for God has been gracious to me and I have all I need.” Jacob discover the truth of God, a God he encounters at Bethel, making a way between heaven and earth, a God who wrestles Jacob to the ground and marks him for life. “I have all I need.” This is what Jacob discovers about God. And in the end the blessing is returned to its rightful recipient. The blessing intended for Esau is given back to him.

The gift of this story is not that everything turns out all right in the end. The gift of this story is that God’s rightness makes a way for Jacob’s undoing and that this undoing makes things right for Esau. What we hear in the story of Jacob and Esau is the persistence of God towards the good of all, not at all costs, not without amends, but in learning to discover the blessing intended for each of us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Robert Sacks