citizen who brings blessing to others. Isaac, this man of blessing, enters into solidarity with those who are less fortunate. He marries a woman named Rebekah, and their union gives rise to twin boys named Esau and Jacob. In those days, the oldest male child was greatly favored. It was he who inherited his father’s wealth at the time of death. It was he who carried on the family promise. But, this established social norm was rife for conflict, particularly in a family as wealthy as this one. For clearly, this “same practice which protects the order of society” through the inheritance rights of the eldest son “is also a way of destining some to advantage and others to disadvantage.” We can easily imagine, then, what it might be like to be one of these sons, with the youngest, perhaps, feeling slighted, and the eldest seeking to protect his privileged place in the family. Yes. Surely, “the world is filled with those… who insist on their culturally bestowed rights and privileges. These will not welcome the new community of the younger. If such guardians of the present order have a means, they will eliminate the younger to preserve their particular privilege.”
Our fascination, then, with the Jacob story has much to do with an evolving worldview regarding what is just, and upon Jacob’s “refusal of routine subordination.” Here “that world of privilege and denial is disrupted by the God of blessing who will sojourn with the ‘low and despised.’” And, in the end, this whole narrative calls into question a conventional settlement of power. But, this need not surprise us, as this scandalous God of the Old Testament is the same one who challenges the way in which society is ordered in the gospels by choosing “a Crucified One as the way to make all things new.” Still, in contrast to Jesus, “it is not argued here that Jacob is good or honest or respectable.” Instead, “the purposes of God are tangled in a web of self-interest and self-seeking.” “The call of God places Jacob in a series of unrelieved conflicts. The entire narrative is marked by strife,” foreshadowed when the twins struggle even in the womb. Years later, as Isaac lies on his deathbed, Jacob devises a plot with the permission, encouragement, and assistance of his mother. As his father’s sight fails, Jacob tricks Isaac into blessing him instead of his older brother. From this point on, any sympathy we may have had for Jacob or Rebekah has been tarnished. In fact, “if we feel toward them at all, the feeling is probably
following his dream, Jacob “sets up as a pillar the stone that had supported him as a ‘pillow’” throughout the night. “What was quite ordinary now becomes a sacred symbol for his experience…The anointing with oil consecrates or sets the stone apart from others. The oil also stains the stone so that it can be properly identified by those who follow.” “From this point on, Jacob’s journeys are filled with a new sense of vocation, for he now bears the promise.” The story of Jacob is one of justification by grace. For “even as the designated of God, Jacob lives a troubled life.” And yet, through it all, he remains open to the future saying, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” Thanks be to God for this incarnational presence which is all around us. May it be so. Amen.