Jacob looked up and there was Esau, coming with his four hundred men; so he divided the children among Leah, Rachel and the two female servants. 2 He put the female servants and their children in front, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph in the rear. 3 He himself went on ahead and bowed down to the ground seven times as he approached his brother. 4 But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept. 5 Then Esau looked up and saw the women and children. “Who are these with you?” he asked. Jacob answered, “They are the children God has graciously given your servant.” 6 Then the female servants and their children approached and bowed down. 7 Next, Leah and her children came and bowed down. Last of all came Joseph and Rachel, and they too bowed down. 8 Esau asked, “What’s the meaning of all these flocks and herds I met?”“To find favor in your eyes, my lord,” he said.9 But Esau said, “I already have plenty, my brother. Keep what you have for yourself.”10 “No, please!” said Jacob. “If I have found favor in your eyes, accept this gift from me. For to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favorably. 11 Please accept the present that was brought to you, for God has been gracious to me and I have all I need.” And because Jacob insisted, Esau accepted it. (Gen. 33: 1-11)
A chill ran up my spine when a messenger from my brother Jacob told me, “My master and his people wish to come back to Canaan.” It sounded friendly and conciliatory, but this was Jacob, the grabber, snatcher, liar and thief speaking. Right. I’ll invite him home, only to have him show up with an army of relatives, servants, sons and hired men to finish the job he had left undone so many years before, of destroying me and taking my birthright of land, livestock and people. After he impersonated me and got my father’s deathbed blessing so many years before, he fled Canaan because of my threats of death. But he had never left my thoughts, nor my nightmares, not when I kept hearing reports of how he too was growing in wealth and power and people, enough to rival me and my people.
So among my sons, my servants and the relatives of my Canaanite wives, I assembled an army of two hundred men, and hired another two hundred mercenaries, brutal hired killers from Egypt, Lybia and Phoenicia. We set up an ambush just our side of the Jabbok River, since a river crossing tends to distract and disorganize an armed force. And they’re less likely to escape and regroup with water at their backs. No sooner were we camped and deployed than we saw a cloud of dust approaching from the northeast. From the size of that dust cloud it looked like Jacob’s approaching army might dwarf ours in size. Our throats choked up with fear.
Late the afternoon of the second day of our encampment we saw the dust hanging over the Jabbok and heard the sound of hooves and of men crossing the water. Cavalry, we thought. The archers among us started checking their bowstrings and laying out their arrows.
Just before sunset, we heard a great commotion in the river valley and saw a cloud of dust ascending from the slope before us. “Archers at the ready!” the captain of the mercenaries yelled, and “Wait till you can see faces through the dust!” But only a few seconds later, the archers lowered their bows with surprised and quizzical looks on their faces. For out of the dust cloud there emerged……sheep (sheep?), not swordsmen nor archers astride horses and camels. The only person we saw looked to be a boy of about ten or twelve years, driving the sheep along, with the help of a little dog running back and forth.
“Let them through!” I yelled, as the sheep approached, bleating, baa-ing and their heads bobbing. We laughed as some of them turned and tried to run away when they caught scent of us, only to collide with each other. I rushed out, ran through the milling, mixed-up sheep, and grabbed the little shepherd boy by the arm.
“What kind of trick is this?” I demanded to know.
“My master Jacob says that these sheep are for you!” he replied.
The captain of the mercenaries came to me, laughing and said, “Attacked by a flock of… sheep? I’ve never seen this tactic before. Maybe your enemy wants to wait till we’re sleeping with our bellies full of mutton before he attacks us.”
“It would be just like him, the liar, the sneak and the cheat,” I said.
“Put these sheep in the stockade where we kept the horses last night. It’s just over that hill,” I told the shepherd boy. “Then come back and watch us deal with your master and his army, whenever he finally decides to attack. But you’ll be safe. You’re only a kid.”
“My master doesn’t have an army,” the shepherd boy said.
“Did he tell you to say that?” I asked the boy. “If you are lying to me, you’ll suffer the same fate as Jacob and his crew, once this battle is done.”
“No! Honest! I’m not lying!” the boy insisted. “It’s just Jacob, his family and us servants. We have barely enough weapons and men among us to fight off a pack of jackals!”
“You’ve been warned,” I told the boy. But I was starting to have a strange feeling about this, as I detected no signs at all of him lying.
“They’re coming this time!” someone yelled. I looked toward the Jabbok and saw another cloud of dust coming up the rise from the riverbed. It would be just like them to attack, while we’re distracted, and while the light is low toward sunset, I thought.
More laughter rose from our ranks, as from that dust cloud arose the comic whining and wheezing of goats, driven toward us by another boy. After them, another assault came as a herd of camels, followed by a charge of…..donkeys. Then some panicked, wild-eyed cows, moo-ing in terror. But only boys were seen astride horses, armed only with whips and sticks, urging the panicked, noisy animals along.
Sometime after sunset, the captain of the mercenaries reported to me that one of his scouts had detected people moving in the darkness from out of the riverbed and up into the bushes and among the trees. “They could be setting some sort of trap,” he said.
We sat up all night, on the alert and ready in case there should be an attack during the night, under cover of darkness. But I must have dozed off a bit before sunrise, because it took me a few times hearing it to make sense of a voice crying, “They’re coming!” and “There they are!” I looked toward the Jabbok and saw people emerging from the brush near the river, led by a lone figure some twenty paces ahead, walking awkwardly and slowly.
The captain of the mercenaries then said to me, “It must be Jacob, coming forth to do battle one-on-one with you. Do you want me to go meet him in your place? Man-to-man combat is my specialty.”
“No,” I replied. “Jacob has dishonored me enough, and, someone else winning in my place will only make that worse. But have your men follow me at twenty paces, in case those other people do something funny.” I then took up my sword and my shield and went forth to meet my brother in man-to-man combat, hoping finally to deal him the fatal blows I had long dreamt about.
As I approached my brother across the open ground, I noticed two odd things about him: I saw no sign of any weapon on him; and he was limping. He even started bowing down to the ground and rising again, as many as seven times until we were only about fifteen paces from each other. We both stopped to look each other over. Yes, Jacob had aged with the years and the sun, but still he was very much as I remembered him. Except for the look of peace on his face, which slowly broke into a smile. Peace like that I had never seen on his face before, so full had it often been of calculation, concentration and distrust. That’s when I also noticed that the people following him were not soldiers; they were women, children, old and young people, all of them unarmed, too.
Jacob then reached into the breast of his coat and pulled it open to show me that no sword dangled at his hip. There was no place on his person to hide even a dagger. To my shock and surprise I realized that the man against whom I had long dreamed and plotted revenge, and whose return I had long expected and dreaded, was now coming, but totally disarmed, defenseless, and bowing like a servant!
Jacob resumed his limping, halting march toward me. Seeing his struggle and his lameness broke something in me. His walk, so painful, slow and awkward, struck me as a picture in motion of how I had lived and felt all these years of his absence and my resentment of him. I suddenly felt less lonely. My dark and brittle sense of grievance and resentment started to break inside of me and I began to feel like a child again, wanting just to be with my younger brother, to protect him, help him, play with him, talk with him and laugh with him, like we had before our falling out. Tears welled up in my eyes as I watched him limp some more in my direction. When he looked at me again, I saw that his eyes were moist, as well. The last wall inside of me broke and I sobbed, and rushed forward to embrace him. Jacob tried to run as well on his stiff and gimpy leg, as he too began sobbing. Something hindered my movement, too: my sword and shield. So I threw them down and immediately felt lighter, and not just physically.
When we met, we threw our arms around each other, both of us sobbing and wailing before either of us could find any words.
When finally I could speak, I asked, “Who are all these people with you?”
“They are the children God has graciously given your servant,” Jacob said. I could scarcely believe it: Jacob had just called himself my servant. That in contrast to the prophesy given before our birth, that the older—me– would serve the younger–Jacob. Whatever that meant, it was no longer to be accomplished by force nor theft. Looking in the faces of those family members, servants and friends of Jacob, I was seeing Jacob’s divinely promised birthright and the blessing, which he never needed to try and steal from me. Jacob’s God did not need Jacob’s sly and shifty help: God had given them to him graciously, by his own power.
Next I asked Jacob about all the animals he had sent ahead of himself. “They are yours,” he replied. I tried refusing them, but not too hard, nor too long, not any longer than decorum and custom demanded. Secretly, inwardly, I was glad that, with the addition of all these animals, I now had the elder’s birthright portion compared to his. Our squabbling over the birthright was over and done, to my advantage.
Then Jacob said something that went through me like an arrow. He said, “Seeing your face is like seeing the very face of God, now that you have received me favorably.”
Oh, that God. The unseen, invisible God whom my ancestors worshiped and obeyed, but whom I had long neglected and nearly forgotten, in favor of the local gods and goddesses of my servants, my friends, and my relatives through my many marriages, the gods and goddesses of the Canaanites. The Canaanites knew of my family’s devotion to one God alone, an invisible God whom we dare not worship in the form of an idol made with our own hands. They often laughed and ridiculed such beliefs. “Why just one god, when every mountaintop and every grove has gods and spirits aplenty? And when the mountains, the rivers and the groves themselves are gods?” they would ask. The same with the sun, the moon and the stars, they think. Oh, and the Pharaohs in Egypt and the Emperor in Chaldea, who fight over our loyalty here in Canaan. “What are they all, if not gods and goddesses too?” they ask me.
“And why would anyone worship a god or a goddess whom you cannot see, and who does not live in one place where you can always find them, like a grove, a hilltop, a shrine, or a royal palace? How can any God speak to your grandfather, Abraham, in Chaldea, and then speak to him again in Egypt, and places in between? Or does this invisible God not respect the turf of other gods? Why, one god trespassing on another god’s turf is how wars get started.”
Or so they say. And so I play along and pretty much accept it, as the price of fitting in with all my Canaanite friends and family. It’s good for my livestock business, at least.
But this God of my ancestors, the forgotten God of my childhood, returned to me in force with Jacob’s words, “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.” It struck me that this homeless and invisible God, so despised and discounted by my neighbors and relatives, does not want us to make images of him, because he makes himself visible in love, mercy and reconciliation, such as what Jacob and I were experiencing. This homeless and unseen God, who shows up uninvited in the turf of Chaldean, Egyptian and Canaanite gods, shows up even in the faces of those you fear, even in the embrace of enemies, as they melt into friends. And I believe that this same wandering, unseen God of peace and reconciliation encountered me in the very moment when Jacob and I threw ourselves into each other’s embrace, weeping. Even I, negligent and backslidden as I was, experienced this forgotten God through the softening of my heart toward my enemy.
Since then, I can no longer look upon the idols and shrines of my Canaanite friends and family with anything but disinterest at best, disgust at worst. How can we worship and trust something that we made with our own hands, and which needs us to shelter it, maintain it, even feed it? Sometimes even with human flesh and blood? I was told, in my youth, that we are created in the image of this invisible God. The more I see of Canaan’s frightening and hideous gods of battle, or the lewd and crude gods and goddesses of fertility, or the fat and clownish gods of wealth, success and prosperity, the more I think that we make them in our image. Or is it that we who worship them are remade in their images?
Maybe both are true.
I tried to convince Jacob to stay and feast the reconciliation of our two families late into the night. But he wanted to stay with his family and herds and move along at their pace. I understood. We’re reconciled, but we’re also still reconciling. I doubt that we’ll ever be that close. We don’t fear each other anymore. But we may both need some time yet before we can fully trust each other, without reservation. Some wounds take time to heal.
Speaking of wounds, as we took our leave from each other, I watched Jacob limping off, walking like he probably will for the remainder of his years. He says he got it from wrestling with God. Or an angel. Or himself, the night before.
“Who won?” I asked.
“Everybody,” he replied. “Even unborn generations to come.”
As painful as it looks, that limp is part of what I now love that about him. I can so identify with someone who has to struggle with every step he takes in life, because I also limp through life with wounds, bruises and broken places. They’re just not on the outside for you to see. How different the world would be if we were more in touch with our wounds than with our weapons. Because Jacob came to me limping and unarmed, I was so immediately and completely disarmed of my desire to kill him.
As Jacob limped away, the captain of the mercenaries came up to me and, putting his hand menacingly on the hilt of his sword, said, “So there was no battle; still, my men and I expect to be paid in full, just what you promised.”
Uh-oh. I had expected to pay them from the booty we would take from those whom we captured and killed. “Take some animals from the flocks that Jacob sent us, as payment,” I said.
“How many?” he asked. “Remember, we’re the best; we don’t fight cheap.”
“Take whatever you want,” I replied. “And as much as you want. Take’em all, for all I care.”
The look of utter shock and disbelief on his face prompted me to add, “So, what do I care about livestock, now that I’ve got my brother back?”
Epilogue: Nearly two thousand years later, a descendant of Jacob also picks his way painfully, haltingly, through the streets of Jerusalem. He too has been up all night, fighting, fighting, that is, against the provocations of corrupt and powerful political and religious persons, and their henchmen who mocked, tortured and beat him until sunrise. All night he was fighting against the temptation to call 12 legions of angels to stop and avenge his humiliation and suffering. Over the rough cobblestone streets of the city He staggers, sways and falls several times. But unlike his ancestor Jacob, he is carrying something: the heavy, rough beam of a Roman cross, the instrument of his own coming execution.
This is how the homeless, unseen God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob, comes to meet us in pursuit of reconciliation, reconciliation with himself, and reconciliation with each other. He too comes disarmed and defenseless, cloaked only in the power of which the Apostle Paul spoke, when he said: “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength,” and, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).”
What if we, too, were more in touch with the wounds and weakness that unite us, than with the words and weapons which drive people apart?