hopeful

 

This Lent, I have been hosting a series of conversations around the theme of hope.

Today, I began by telling part of the story of Jacob, as a way into a wide-ranging conversation which I shall try to summarise below.

This is a story of sibling rivalry as old as the hills. Jacob and his twin brother Esau are not the kind of twins who are inseparable. Esau is their father’s favourite son; Jacob is their mother’s favourite. Esau is a “man’s man”; Jacob keeps his cards close to his chest and seeks to manipulate circumstances to his advantage. As their father approaches death – an old man with cataracts, a vulnerable adult in the language of our day, victim of financial abuse by his own wife and son – and seeks to put his affairs in order, Jacob presents himself before him with goat skin tied to his forearms, to pass as his hairy, earthy smelling brother. Isaac is confused but is persuaded to give his blessing: to confer on ‘Esau’ the bounty of the earth, the gift of bread and wine, and lordship over his brothers.

In this world – the world of the text, a very different world from our worldview, but perhaps it is the text that sees true and we who see false – blessings have an impact on reality, shape the world we live in and our experience of it. Blessings both release us into a potential future and tie us to the same.

Esau comes home and uncovers his brother’s deceit, and he is angry enough to kill. Jacob runs for his life. He keeps running – for Esau is an expert hunter, and if anyone can track and kill a man, it is him – until the sun has set, and then, exhausted physically and mentally, he takes a stone for a pillow and lies down to sleep.

God comes to him in a dream. In his subconscious – the God-given means by which, our over-stimulated conscious mind stilled, we make sense of what we have experienced.

In his dream, Jacob stands in front of a ziggurat that reaches into the sky, with messengers from God ascending and descending its steps. And God is standing next to Jacob, visible out of the corner of his eye. The very edge of the subconscious.

God does not rebuke him for his deceit (what? where is the justice in that, God!?) but takes Isaac’s blessing as the reality with which they must all work now. And God promises that no matter where Jacob goes, God will go with him, eventually bringing him back; and that through him and his descendants many others will be blessed.

In other words, God does not annul the blessing Isaac conferred but holds Jacob accountable to fulfil it: ‘you may have thought you were getting all the blessings flowing to you, but in fact blessing will flow through you to many others.’ With privilege comes responsibility (ah, so this is what justice looks like, in this instance, and assuming that God will hold us to account).

Here is the thing. We are not given this story because Jacob is a person of especial interest. We are given this story because it speaks to what it is to be human, and to what it is to be God. Of what we, and God, are like.

If we are entirely honest with ourselves (as our conscious mind sometimes refuses to be) we are all frightened of something, are all running from something. And God is the god who stands next to us – as Emily Dickinson put it – to Tell All The Truth, But Tell It Slant. Saying, ‘I know of what you are afraid, from what you are running; and though I cannot stop you from running, know that I will run alongside you, and, when you are ready, will bring you back to where you need to be. Moreover, I will bless you. Know that I am not an old man with cataracts in the sky, from whom you can trick – manipulate – a blessing. I bless you because I love all my children, and give to each what it is they need, including agency and dignity. I will bless you, and others will be blessed through you. I will do this at times despite and at times even through your bad choices.’

And that, I think, is grounds for hope.

God stands beside us. But will we notice? We are so distracted that we do not give ourselves the space we need, to let our subconscious unfurl. We can be switching between three screens at once, each a portal into a virtual world, each a barrier to the unseen world that is more solid than the one our conscious mind can see. We are assaulted: worry over this! be outraged by that! And yet. The sun is shining. The birds are singing. God stands beside us, truth-telling, slant.

Slow down. No, slower than that.