The Name of God is Mercy
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Ninth Sunday After Pentecost, August 2, 2020 by Ms. Holly Huff.
During ordinary time, we’ve been making our way through the stories of the covenant, of the promise given through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and God’s patient forming a people to be an instrument of love and blessing for the whole world. Today we come back to the latest in a string of stories about Jacob.
Now, Jacob is a trickster. It’s right there in his name, which means:
heel catcher, grasper, supplanter. Jacob’s father Isaac was named for
Sarah’s wondering laughter at his unlikely birth. Grandpa Abraham was
renamed by God as the father of multitudes. But Jacob’s name is not so pretty as these—it marks him as a deceiver, a usurper. A liar. And
Jacob’s story matches the moniker. He famously impersonated his older twin brother Esau and took advantage of his elderly father’s failing eyesight to claim the birthright inheritance for himself. When Esau threatened to kill him, Jacob fled far away, running from the scene of the crime. Twenty years later, God commands him to return home, and Jacob must pass through Esau’s land. It is a confrontation he has spent years running from, the consequences of an old wrong he can’t escape any longer.
Jacob’s trickery has finally caught up with him. In today’s reading,
we meet Jacob the night before this long-anticipated, long-dreaded
confrontation with his brother. He is afraid and alone. Here at the
river Jabbok—which means "emptying"—he has been stripped down. He has sent ahead all his many possessions, his cattle, his large household, his servants and wives and children, in hopes that they will appease Esau and soften his heart before they meet. All the material things that have shored up Jacob’s identity and bolstered his sense of
himself as the justified and deserving heir are removed, and on this
night of anticipation he faces at last an honest reckoning.
It is a strange scene, set in the dark. All that night, Jacob wrestles
with a mysterious stranger. The struggle is drawn out, but Jacob does
not give up, because Jacob’s name is not the whole story about him.
Jacob the deceiver may be an unlikely candidate to carry the promise
forward, yet the people of Israel will soon be called after his name.
And there is a great virtue beneath his grasping: Jacob’s earnest,
unrelenting desire to know God. So Jacob grasps onto this man and
refuses to leave without a blessing. “I will not let you go!” he says
to his opponent. Even when the confrontation becomes painful, as his
hip is dislocated—“I will not let you go unless you bless me!”
Who is this stranger? Artistic renderings of this scene usually show
Jacob wrestling with one of the angels who so frequently appear
throughout his story. Whoever it is, he knows Jacob very well, and
Jacob is forced to confront his past and his identity, stripped bare
of self-justifying illusion. His confrontation at the Jabbok is also a
confrontation with himself, with his own guilt and responsibility in
the conflict with Esau. When Jacob demands a blessing—something he once stole by lying about his identity—the stranger cuts to the heart
of his deception with a simple question: “What is your name?” And
Jacob—Jacob the deceiver—answers truthfully, speaking his name,
confessing who he has been.
His admission is not met with condemnation. Rather, he is given a new
name, Israel—“because you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed,” the stranger says. Jacob’s dogged determination is part of how he was made, and God loves that about him. Israel’s new
name shows how his stubbornness, his tenacity, his ambition and
determination—the same trickster traits of deception—are being
transfigured: not eroded but restored, and turned toward holiness.
Jacob is stubborn and determined in his seeking, and so by the grace
of God he faces the difficult truth about himself. We don’t find God
by escaping what’s real. To know God requires a truthfulness about
ourselves. God is the ultimate Real, more solid than the pacifying
deceptions we sometimes prefer. Facing ourselves in that light of
divine honesty can feel like a cage match. Our own motives are so
often hidden from us, and exposure is painful. But the truth is
trustworthy, and it is a grace to be able to see it.
Often the places that are most wounded in us are where we meet God.
When we are weak, then we are strong. Bringing all of us, what we’re
proud of and what we’re ashamed of, into the light of God’s continual
mercy, where it can be known and acknowledged—not immediately trying to cut out what we’ve deemed the bad bits but giving space, letting wheat and tares grow together—we can trust God to guide us into holiness as we surrender to the process of change and transformation and transfiguration!
As day is breaking, Jacob returns the stranger’s question, asking to
know who it is he is struggling with: “Please tell me your name.”
Jacob does not receive a direct answer to his request for information,
but he receives the blessing he has been hanging on for. That blessing
is enough for him to declare: “I have seen God face to face.”
How do we know God in the dark? The Holy One is recognized in the act of blessing. God is known relationally, in the reality of personal
encounter. Jacob doesn’t get facts about God, he experiences the
blessing of the One who created us for love. Jacob learns, as Pope
Francis has put it, that “the name of God is mercy.” “Mercy is the
divine attitude which embraces, it is God’s giving himself to us,
accepting us, and bowing to forgive. ... Mercy is God’s identity
card.”
In receiving this blessing, his new name, this outpouring of mercy,
Jacob recognizes the God who showed him the gate of heaven at Bethel, saying, “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I
have done what I have promised you.” The One he has been seeking is
the One he struggled against. Jacob, now called Israel, crosses the
river to meet Esau, limping in the morning light, and more able to
lean on God’s abundant mercy.
In their meeting, it is evident that Esau has been transformed by
mercy, too. He no longer desires revenge; he’s not trying to kill
Jacob anymore. There is mercy in the way Esau receives Jacob, a
returning prodigal who took his inheritance and ran. Esau runs to meet
him, embraces him, falls on his neck and kisses him, and they both
weep. By mercy Esau has been freed of his concern with the
inheritance. He waves away the bribes Jacob fearfully sent ahead,
saying, “Keep what’s yours; I have enough, my brother.” There is mercy
in this softening, in the reconciliation of these brothers who have
been rivals since the moment of their birth.
Abundant mercy is God’s calling card. In the Gospel today, when faced
with a hungry crowd, we see the disciples distance themselves—“We have nothing; send them away to buy for themselves.” But Jesus has
compassion on the crowd and so he refuses their refusal. He embodies mercy and guides the disciples to do the same. “No, you give them something to eat,” he says. “The little you have, in my hands, is enough.” Abundant mercy.
Our lives, such as they are, are made into more than enough in Jesus’s
hands. What we have despised and disowned and denied in ourselves,
what we’ve counted as nothing, will be transformed: blessed, broken,
multiplied, and sent out to be mercy for others. May we each be given
the tenacity to receive this blessing!
I’ll close with this prayer from Thomas Merton, which speaks to the
story of Jacob and that of Jacob in all of us:
My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following
your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.