An All Souls sermon on grief and bereavement: Genesis 32:22-31
Genesis 32:22-31
The fight of your life
The story about Jacob wrestling is one of the most interesting stories in the Bible, I think. There are so many different ways of interpreting it and it speaks into so many situations in our life especially, I think, our experience of grief and bereavement.
In this story, Jacob wrestles with a man. We aren’t told who this man is but we assume that he is either God or a messenger from God. And there’s something shadowy about this story…it takes place at night, in the dark; we are not told anything about the adversary; there’s no description of what he looks like and there’s no real description of the fight either. There’s something quite mysterious about this encounter.
But, for me, there’s three really important things about this story that have helped me in my own experiences of grief through the years.
The first is this…
That actually, it is important to me that there are no details given to us about Jacob’s adversary because that, in itself, reflects something of the nature of the struggle of grief. Because the truth about grief is that we are often confronted by emotional enemies we can’t properly see or identify very easily at all. Certainly my own experience of grief, when my wife and my sister both died within a couple of years of each other in their early 30s, was that I would be caught off-guard on a regular basis by various assaults on the mind or emotions. We can cry for no reason. A certain aroma or food can bring back a memory that then causes pain. We can get irrationally angry at the drop of a hat. We have to do battle against strong emotions and none of it seems to make any sense. “Why do I feel like this today? There seems to be no reason for it…”
The battle of grief is so often a shadowy one, a mysterious one.
But this story tells us that, even in the mystery of grief, even in the shadowy nature of difficult emotional strife, God is there with us. God was with Jacob in the darkness of his struggle and so God is with each one us of in the darkness of our struggle against grief and bereavement too.
Secondly, I think the fact that there is a conversation in this story between Jacob and this man is very important too. Three times they speak with each other. First, the man asks Jacob to release him but Jacob demands a blessing. Secondly, the man asks Jacob his name. Thirdly, Jacob asks the man his name. Three dialogues, three conversations, in the midst of the struggle.
Why is this so important? Because it tells me that, in the midst of our grief and our experience of bereavement, we are able to talk with God and he listens and, if we listen carefully, we will hear him talking with us.
Grief is a lonely business. We feel that no one understands, no one could possibly know what we are feeling and the pain we are going through. And the truth is, we talk to people and people talk with us and there is some comfort in that, but there is still a deep emptiness inside that no amount of human words can speak into. But this story tells us that in the midst of our struggle, we can talk with God and he will talk with us. We are not alone in grief. God is there with us and we can talk with him through prayer at anytime and in any place.
First then, God is with us in our experience of the mystery of grief. Second, even though we might feel alone, we can cry out to God and listen as he speaks with us.
Thirdly, God transforms us through our bitter experience, giving us real hope for the future. It’s interesting that, as this episode concludes, Jacob is given a new name. He started out in this story called Jacob. He ended up in this story being called Israel. In Biblical times, names were more than just names; they tell us something about the character of the person. The name Jacob means ‘cheater’ – he who cheats. But the name Israel means ‘God protects’. And so the character of Jacob has been transformed through the struggle. He is now a person who knows the protection and love of God. Through his struggle, his character had changed and his relationship with God had changed.
I suspect that this is something we can all relate to; all of us who have suffered grief and bereavement can testify to the fact that we are not the same person now as we were before. Through grief, we have been changed and the promise of this passage is that, if we turn to God in the midst of our struggle, we can be transformed for the better.
So this passage teaches us that God is with us in our experience of the mystery of grief and that even though we might feel alone, God hears us in our pain and we can know the transformative power of God at work in our lives, even through the darkest hours of our life.
Finally, we notice in this story that Jacob – or Israel as he now was – walked away from this encounter with a limp. He had been hurt by the struggle and he would carry a limp for the rest of his life. His struggle was a crippling encounter and so is grief for many of us. But, as we read on the story of Jacob in the Bible, he is not defined by his limp; he is defined by his new name: Israel – God protects. And our hope too is that, even though grief and bereavement may have caused each one of us to limp, we will not be defined by that through the rest of our lives. Instead, we will be defined by our knowledge and experience of the love and protection of Almighty God: Jacob’s God. Israel’s God. Our God
The God who protects…
Wherever you may be in the struggle, whether you are still fighting in the darkness, whether you are asking the questions of God or whether you have walked away from the struggle now but are carrying a limp as a result…wherever you may be in the struggle, my prayer for each one of us is that we may know afresh the transforming and healing love of the God who protects and leads each one of us into a new future so that we may know his peace now and for evermore. Amen.
