Today again we’re going to spend some time with Jacob, and one thing we may not have realized before is that he is one of the most well developed character in all the book of Genesis: We actually find him in 25 chapters out of Genesis’ 50 chapters, and the episode we have today directly follows what we read last week. If you remember, Jacob is on his way to Haran where his grand father’s family still lives, and he is heading there after he had a big fight with his brother Esau from whom he has stolen his father’s blessing. For some reason, that story does not show up in our lectionary, and yet it is one of the most famous of Genesis: Isaac sends Esau to hunt for him and prepare a stew so he can then give him his blessing before he dies. But taking advantage of Esau’s absence, and on his mother Rebekah’s prompting, Jacob kills two goats from his flock, have them fixed by Mom, and then goes to his father’s tent pretending to be Esau. To make it more believable, the story tells us that in his old age, Isaac is almost blind, and Jacob has put on his brother’s clothes as well as goat’s skin on his hands and neck so his father does not suspect the trick when he blesses him (Esau was hairy). Anyway…It works! But of course Esau finds out when he comes back and tells his father about the deceit. So now Jacob is on the run, back to Haran where his mother hopes he will find safety, shelter, work, and possibly a wife, as she does not want him to marry outside of the tribe (Chapter 27).
And today we see that all of this happens right away, as soon as Jacob sets foot in the land. His uncle Laban, Rebekah’s brother, gets him to work for seven years in exchange of his beautiful daughter Rachel, of whom Jacob becomes completely smitten the first time he lays his eyes on her. Although seven years is a long time, it seems to Jacob just a few days because of the love he had for her, and all is well and good…That is, until the wedding night, or rather the wedding morning, when Jacob realizes he actually has been married to Leah, the “not so pretty” eldest daughter. We don’t know exactly how such a thing could have happened and many explanations have been given (Brides were veiled, it was dark, Jacob was drunk) but again the thing is: It worked! and now Laban has made for himself a great deal: He’s gotten rid of his not so eligible eldest, and Jacob will work for an extra seven years for Rachel, whom he will also marry a week later.
Now at first you may feel terrible for Jacob, but when you have in mind what he did to his own father, you can only be stricken by the similarities of the stories: Jacob pretended to be his brother Esau in the same way Leah was mistaken with Rachel, and now Leah is bound to him in the wedding’s covenant, in the same way Jacob bound himself in God’s Covenant by having taken the blessing. And so that’s the time most of the commentators of the Scriptures roll their eyes. A theologian I like says about this passage: Jacob has marital problems…and he deserves every bit of it! And yes, we notice how the smart guy has been outsmarted and how the trickster has been tricked and we can conclude with the moral of the story: What goes around comes around. This makes for a nice, short sermon with a satisfying sense of karma, even if we cannot downplay the role Rebekah has played in Jacob’s trick, in which she proved to be made out of the same mold than her brother’s Laban. But you know, justice is done, somehow.
And so we could stop here, right? But I mean…Do we believe that? Do we believe that What goes around comes around, that Karma is real? A little maybe…and yet, seriously, if we open our eyes on the world, is it true that cheaters get what they deserve? And that good people are rewarded for their virtue? I don’t think so, and we see many, many passages of the Bible that prove otherwise as well. So how are we to understand this passage if we want to pierce through the superficial layers of a quick, well rounded interpretation? To me the parallelism of the two stories has a comical aspect that certainly works for the readers and helps us understand the type of person Jacob is. Jacob is a trickster and so God sends him an even bigger trickster and we can all exclaim: Well, that will teach him! But the thing though is that to really understand what’s going on here, we have to trust that God’s intent for our life is probably not to teach us a good lesson, God does not get a kick out of saying to us: See, you deserve every bit of it (even when we do). No, but something the Scriptures claim more consistently about God, is that God helps us know our own heart and leads us to conversion. And when we have this really annoying person in our life, and then we discover we actually behave like them, this is not the universe mocking us or punishing us, but it may be God showing us something about ourselves, showing us our own heart in the mirror of this person we meet on the way. And maybe this is what’s going on here.
But let’s backtrack a little bit because I think that in order to really understand this passage, we don’t need so much to compare the way Laban tricked Jacob with the way Jacob tricked his father, rather we have to compare the way Jacob found a wife for himself with the way a wife was found for Isaac. We heard the story a few weeks ago and we didn’t spend a lot of time with it because as we observed then it is quite repetitive, it takes the whole of Chapter 24, which is actually the longest chapter of Genesis: Abraham sends his servant back to Haran to find a wife for Isaac and when the servant arrives at the well, he meets with Rebekah. And the story is very similar to the one we have today, they water the animals, the man is welcome and introduced to the family with whom they just happen to be related and so on. But there is a big, big difference. All along the servant, or rather this messenger who has the heart of a servant, keeps praying for discernment, and for God’s guidance, and asks God to confirm directions, and so much so that’s what makes the chapter kind of repetitive and long. But then, when we compare it to the brevity of what we have this morning, we understand better: Again, Jacob’s behavior is not so much compared to Laban’s behavior, rather Jacob’s behavior is contrasted to Abraham’s servant’s behavior. Jacob, although he’s just heard God’s promise to guide him (that was last week’s reading), he never prays, he does not ask for discernment, he does not want to know what God has in mind for him and the rest of his family. As usual, Jacob wants what he wants and he is going to get it (Remember how we notice his name means “the grasper”, the “supplanter”). Yes, his love is sincere and he is willing to put in the work, but for all we know, it may never have been God’s intention to give him Rachel. Actually, when we read the rest of the story, Rachel is shown as much more difficult than her sister Leah, and she also worships many gods, when Leah is the quiet, kind one, who turns to the Lord for comfort. Moreover, Leah gives birth to six sons and among those is Levi, the ancestor of all the priests of Israel and also Judah, the ancestor of David and all the kings, to whom we probably want to add the Messiah himself, Jesus.
So Leah was probably not a mistake, only in Jacob’s mind.
And so what we see is that indeed Jacob is going to make a very difficult life for himself. We mentioned that last time, all of Jacob’s life is very difficult, and most of his difficulties are rooted in his rivalry with his sibling, because he could not wait for God to give him his share of blessing, and then a lot of his difficulties will be rooted in his dysfunctional marriage and family, because he wouldn’t ask for God’s guidance. And so what we see happening is not so much that Jacob is a trickster, that part is almost just the comical side of it, the tragedy, the tragedy and the key to understand Jacob’s life, can be found in those words by the prophet Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (17:9)
The tragedy is that Jacob is a deceiver to himself.
Jacob keeps deceiving himself, clinging so much to something he thinks is good, he ignores his own good and he makes such a difficult life for himself, full of conflicts, jealousies, deceptions and revenges. The biggest trickster in the story isn’t Jacob, and it isn’t even Laban, the biggest trickster is the human heart, that makes us follow paths we were never meant to follow, that makes us always believe that the next thing will be the right thing, that makes us downplay what others need and what God wants to satisfy our own whims or cling stubbornly to our own ways. Now I saw recently this trend for young evangelicals who wear those T-shirts saying: Don’t follow your heart – to defy modern cultural standards and in direct reference to this Jeremiah passage. Well, no. Of course feelings matter, and there a lot of affections God has poured into our hearts, including his love (Romans 5:5), but again it’s about clarity, discernment and trusting God over our own judgment. And that’s what our Epistle passage is about, when Paul says: We do not know how to pray as we ought. It’s not about not praying enough! It is that we do not let the Spirit prays within us, trying to force our will on God’s will rather than letting God leads us as God means to, as God did with Abraham’s servant and as God has promised Jacob on the way.
So we are left with big questions today. Instead of just focusing on a moral lesson about “not deceiving people”, which I guess is still important, more deeply the Scriptures ask us in which ways we don’t already deceive ourselves and also make life so much more difficult for ourselves by resisting God’s will. Life is hard that’s for sure, but how often do we make it even harder out of self centeredness? The good news is that God does not let go. God does not let go for those who love God. Paul reminds us that nothing will separate us from the love of God, not hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword, and I think that probably includes our own sin and our own heart. Our own heart won’t separate us from God, thanks God. As we conclude the Jacob’s saga, I invite you to re-read the story at home. As I have mentioned at the beginning, he is the most well developed character of Genesis, his story goes on for many chapters and it’s beautiful to witness his hard, heartbreaking life and in the meantime how God is going to work through it. How “the supplanter”, “the grasper”, the one who stole the blessing will become the one who will give the blessing, not only to his twelve sons, the father of the twelve tribes of Israel, but also his grandsons and even Pharaoh. And with that we’ll head to the Book of Exodus, and the story goes on…