I’ve been wrestling with a part of the story of Jacob this week.
Not the part where he wrestles with God, more the wrestles with himself part.
You can find his whole story in Genesis chapters 25-49, more or less. Jacob’s the father of Israel, literally, but he has quite the checkered life. He makes a very unfair deal to get his older brother’s birthright, steals their father’s blessing by pretending to be his brother, runs away to some less than stellar wheeling and dealing elsewhere, wrestles with God, plays favourites with his children and, oh yeah, is repeatedly blessed by God. For all his failings, God still works through him, he just never seems to realize it.
Early on in his story, he’s treated his older brother Esau so badly, he has to run away to his uncle. On the way there, he has a dream. He sees a ladder between earth and heaven “and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” God appears to reaffirm the promise made to Abraham and Isaac, of land and a great nation in the future, and Jacob will become the father of that nation. The ladder isn’t just a sign that heaven and earth are close, they’re connected. Angels travel between them. There is something of heaven here and Jacob realizes it. He wakes up and says to himself “surely God is in this place and I did not know it!” “How awesome is this place!” he says. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”And he marks the spot with a stone and calls it Bethel, which means house of God.
I wonder, though, if he didn’t mark the wrong place. What if God’s presence wasn’t just in some “thing,” a place or time. What if it was in Jacob himself and he didn’t realize it. He keeps on his deal making, even with God, and his life continues to be, well complicated by his behaviour. But would his life have been changed if he’d realized that divine presence was in him all along? What if he didn’t leave that experience of the divine behind at a place, but took it with him? His story may well have played out differently. Hmm. I wonder if things might have changed.
I wonder how often we have an experience of the divine spirit , of meeting God, and we celebrate the moment and then leave it behind or set it apart.
Would it be a different world if we could all see the divine in ourselves and each other and say “how awesome is that! Surely God is in me and you and now I know it?” Maybe it would be as if heaven is here, not just connected by a ladder that only angels - those that we see as special and set apart - can travel.
Later, much later, Jesus will try to do just that. He’ll provide an experience of the divine, a moment of engagement with God, and try to teach us that we are not just full of the divine spirit, but capable of knowing it, engaging it and living it.
It’s challenging for us to see, though, and, like Jacob, we’d rather just commemorate the moment with something set in stone, than carry it with us. Maybe we need to wrestle with it some more.
