Wrestling with God

Sermon — October 19, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

A long time ago, in a country far away, a young man tricked his father into writing his older brother out of his will. The brother was understandably upset. He started plotting his revenge, and their parents—desperate to avoid bloodshed and maybe a little unwilling to hold the man accountable for what he’d done—warned the young man about his brother’s plans and sent him away.

Time passed. The two brothers grew up. They married, and had children, and each one prospered in his own right, acquiring the herds of animals and families of followers that made you an influential man in those nomadic days.

One day, the young man decided to return to his hometown, and he sent a message to his brother, telling him that he’d like to reconnect. He waited long days for his messengers to return with an answer, and when they returned, they told the young man, “Your brother’s on the way right now, with four hundred other guys.” 

Now, these were more chaotic, violent times, so this was scary news. Four hundred men is an army, not a welcome party. So he divided his family and his flocks into two halves and sent them in opposite directions, thinking that if his brother came and attacked, maybe half of them would escape.

He prepared a gift to give his brother: hundreds of goats and sheep, dozens of cows and bulls, thirty camels ready to milk. And he hoped that would be enough to cool his brother’s anger.

And then he spent the night alone, restlessly struggling in prayer.

The next day, at dawn, the man looked up and saw his brother coming, with his 400 men, and he went out toward them, bowing his head in a sign of peace and submission as he passed through their ranks. And finally, he came to his brother himself and stood before him, readying himself for whatever was about to happen.

And his brother ran up, and throws his arms around his neck, and begins to kiss him. And together, they wept. And so it came to pass that the older brother, whose name was Esau, was finally reunited with the younger brother who’d betrayed him, whose name was Jacob.

This is the story of Jacob in Genesis chapter 32, from which we read a selection this morning. Our strange wrestling scene is just a snippet: it’s what happens overnight, when Jacob spends the night in prayer. “Jacob was left alone,” the Bible tells us, “and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” (Gen. 32:24) And we have always understood this to be a metaphor, a story about what it means to “wrestle with God” in a spiritual sense. Because, while few of us have spent long hours wrestling with God in the flesh, many of us have spent long hours or weeks or months, at some point in our lives, wrestling with God in prayer; and more than a few have come away from those long hours walking with a limp.

I imagine that from time to time, some of you have felt this way. I imagine as well that many of you have sometimes felt like that persistent widow in the parable Jesus tells about the “need to pray always and not lose heart.” (Luke 18:1) She needs help, and she comes back again and again, begging for the judge to do something until finally he rolls his eyes and gives in: “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (Luke 18:5) We’re supposed to shake our heads, at this feckless judge, who decides his cases on the basis of which party is more irritating to him, rather than on the merits. Jesus isn’t saying that this this is what God is like. Jesus takes for granted that we know that God is not like this, and he asks us the question: if even this unjust judge, who “neither feared God nor had respect for people,” eventually gives in to the woman’s plea for help, won’t God come even more quickly to help those who turn to God in prayer?

That’s a wonderful message! Except… it doesn’t always feel so quick, for us. “Will he delay long in helping them?” Jesus asks. (Luke 18:7) And I know this is supposed to be a rhetorical question, but on the basis of my own observations of life, the answer appears to be… Yes? He will delay?

If you’ve ever spent time praying for someone who’s going through a hard time—just holding someone in your heart before God, and asking God for help—you’ve probably gotten the sense that God’s okay with delay. It doesn’t feel like God rushes to grant those prayers. When you’re somewhere in the middle of what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul,” it can feel an awful lot like wrestling with God; and God’s refusal to cooperate can leave you walking with a spiritual limp. That’s the power of this strange story: not that it makes sense on its own, or solves a neat theological problem, but that it gives such a beautiful image for that real experience of wrestling with God.

Some of you have heard me preach a couple hundred sermons by now; you know that I could probably wrap things up with a neat little bow in the next ninety seconds or so. But I want to resist that urge. I think that would cheapen things, somehow. I think it would miss the point. The divine wrestler renames Jacob to Yisrael, “he strives with God,” and from that day on his descendants, the people of God, would become known as Israel. If you ever hear “Israel” in church, in the liturgy or the readings, it’s not referring to the modern State of Israel, but to that idea of Israel as the faithful people of God, whose very name comes from the observation that our life of faith is a life of wrestling, and not of tidy answers.

So here’s an observation, rather than an answer: the ending of the story is very different from the contents of Jacob’s prayer. As he awaits the arrival of Esau and his 400 men, Jacob cries out to God, “Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all.” (Gen. 32:11)

And then night falls, and Jacob wrestles with God, and God does not answer Jacob’s prayer. God doesn’t give in and give him what he wants, like the unjust judge would. God doesn’t give him the means to escape from his brother. In fact, God literally slows him down with a blow to the hip, so that he cannot escape, so that all he can do is to walk humbly, limping toward his fate. God does not deliver Jacob from the hands of Esau; God delivers him into the hands of Esau. But it turns out that God knew all along what Jacob did not. The hands of Esau are not hands of violence. They are hands of love. The arm of his brother is not raised for a blow, but for an embrace.

Jacob wrestles with God, and God does not grant Jacob what he asks. Because the outcome God has in mind is so much more than anything that Jacob even thought to pray for.

There are no easy answers to our prayers. We rarely get to wake up in the morning, like Jacob, and see all our problems solved. There’s a reason that the apostle Paul has to urge his readers, again and again, to be patient and persistent, reminding them always of the need to endure.

And yet even as we accept that God might not immediately answer our prayers—even as we prepare ourselves to endure the world as it is—we hold fast to the faith that Paul proclaimed, which is the faith that God is preparing for us things better than we can imagine. That “weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5)—however long that night may be. That on the other side of death lies not the abyss, but new life. That “The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; * it is he who shall keep you safe. The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, * from this time forth for evermore.” (Psalm 121:7-8) Amen.