One of the things we often talk about in church is our relationship with God.  We talk about God as a companion on our journey – one who walks with us as we grow and develop and change in our faith life.  We talk about God as one who is in dialogue with us – one who needs us to listen as much as we talk, making sure our prayer life is more of a dialogue than a monologue.  We talk about God as one who requires vulnerability – one who wants not just the glossy versions of ourselves that we present to the public, but also the messy, angry, and sometimes ugly versions of ourselves that we rarely let anyone see.  But rarely do we talk about God as sparring partner – a prize fighter, capable of leaving real physical scars, leaving us marked visibly for others to see.

That is the image we get from our Old Testament lesson today.  To understand how Jacob comes to wrestle with God at the Jabbok, we need to go back in Jacob’s story that we’ve been hearing all summer.  Jacob is a twin, the brother of Esau and son of Isaac and Rebekah.  Jacob’s name in Hebrew means, “the one who takes the heel,”[i]  because he grabs on to the heel of his brother as he follows Esau out of the womb.  The name turns out to be quite appropriate.  Jacob will be grabbing and grasping for much of his life.

The rest of Jacob’s story unfolds like a soap opera.  When Jacob is older, Jacob manipulates Esau out of his birthright.  Then, Jacob tricks his blind father Isaac into believing that he is Esau so that he can cheat Esau out of the blessing due to him as the firstborn male.  Jacob flees for his life from his angered brother Esau, returning to his family’s homeland.  There he meets Rachel and falls in love.  Unfortunately, Rachel is the younger of two unmarried sisters, and in a twist of fate, Jacob is on the receiving end of deception when he is tricked into marrying the older sister Leah first.  Not to be outdone, Jacob manipulates Laban, his father-in-law, and manages to trick Laban into giving Jacob most of the family’s livestock before Jacob flees yet again with his large family and wealth. 

But Jacob can only run so long before fate finally catches up with him.  Some twenty years since leaving home, Esau is in hot pursuit of Jacob.  Scared, Jacob sends some gifts as an attempted bribe for Esau.  But he hears that Esau is approaching with 400 men, and so Jacob splits up his family and sends them ahead of him, leaving Jacob alone at the Jabbok in the dark of night.  This is where our story picks up today. 

The story is a bit confusing, but basically Jacob wrestles with God all night long.[ii]  We are told that the two seem to fight as equals, but at the end of the scuffle, God strikes Jacob in the hip, leaving Jacob with a limp.  Jacob asks for a blessing from God, once again grabbing in life as his name portends.  God asks Jacob his name, and instead of lying to God like Jacob lied to his father, Jacob comes clean.  “Jacob,” he says.  Now this part may sound simple enough, but God is not simply asking for and getting Jacob’s name.  Jacob is confessing.  “I am Jacob – grasper of a heel.  I have grabbed my whole way through life:  cheating, conning, scheming, plotting, and taking what does not belong to me.  I am thoroughly psychologically broken, and now you have broken me physically.  So please, give me, cheater that I am, a blessing.” 

What happens next is a total transformation.  God gives Jacob a new name, “Israel.”  No longer will Jacob be known as the grasper.  Instead, Jacob will be known as one who struggled with God – and though marked by a limp, is one who came out a new person – Israel.  With his new name, “Jacob enters into a new future, and passes his name, faith, and future on to his descendants, who bear that name even unto this day.”[iii]

The reason I retell you the whole of Jacob’s story today is because we cannot fully understand the metaphor of wrestling with God until we understand Jacob as a person.  Jacob, father of the people of God, is by no means a shiny example of faithful living.  From birth, Jacob seemed destined for a life of manipulation, attempts at control, a willingness to deceive for personal gain, and constant scheming.  And though we would like to wag our fingers at Jacob, the truth is, there is a little bit of Jacob in each of us.  The reason we disapprove of Jacob is because at some point in our lives we have been a grasper of heels.  Perhaps we have not deceived on such a grand scale as Jacob, but we have certainly tried to manipulate situations toward our own personal gain.

But we also retell this story because we learn something about God.  Earlier we talked about a God who journeys with us, who wants dialogue with us, who expects vulnerability.  We often acquiesce to this God because we trust that God is a god of love.  Debie Thomas counterargues that, “The God who goes toe to toe with Jacob is not a God whose first priority is our ease and comfort.  He’s not a God who maintains a polite distance, minds his manners, and ‘makes nice’ to keep us happy.  No, Jacob’s God is wild and mysterious, unpredictable and strange.  Jacob’s God doesn’t hesitate to muck around in the mud for several hours to bring Jacob to his knees.  Indeed, the Hebrew word for ‘wrestle’ means ‘to get dusty.’  To get dirty.  This is no dainty, breakable God.  This is a God of dust and sweat and blood and tears.  A God who is willing to ‘become dirty’ to lift us out of the dirt.”[iv]      

Thomas goes on to say, “Wrestling, as it turns out, is not an irreverent thing, because it’s the opposite of apathy, the opposite of resignation, the opposite of quitting, the opposite of complacency.   It’s even the opposite of loneliness.  To fight is to stay close, to keep my arms wrapped tight around my opponent.  Fighting means I haven’t walked away from God, and God hasn’t walked away from me.  It means we both have skin left in the game.”[v]

After seeing The Odyssey this week with our family, the girls asked me about why Athena was so present with Odysseus in the movie.  If you haven’t seen the movie yet or read the book recently, Athena appears to Odysseus throughout his twenty-year journey.  She’s on the pin Odysseus’ wife gives him before he leaves for twenty years.  She is the goddess that Odysseus dedicates the Trojan Horse to – the horse that helps them brutally defeat Troy.  She appears to him as he struggles to find his way home and fights his demons from war and loss.  And in one of the final scenes (spoiler alert – although the Greek myth has been around for a while!), she is brought to tears as Odysseus essentially confesses his sins to her, in particular the sin of desecrating her honor when he conceived of that Trojan Horse – a goddess who had journeyed with him, despite his grievous sins.  Athena does not wrestle Odysseus, but she certainly gets down in the blood, sweat, dust, and tears of Odysseus – shedding her own tears along the way.

Jacob’s story and Odysseus’ myth point us to what life with God is like.  There are parts of our lives that cannot simply be healed or gently be brought to God in prayer.  There are parts of our lives that we are going to need entry into battle with God to transform them.  The wrestling is necessary because the wrestling forces us to push through whatever is separating us from God and who God calls us to be.  And for those of us who are particularly stubborn or prone to grasping like Jacob, the wrestling is required to break down our wills enough to get us to the place of being able to confess – confess who we really are to God.  Then, and only then, will we find our transformation – a renaming of who we are so that we can be fully who God invites us to be.  But be forewarned – no one leaves the ring from a match with God without a few scars.  Amen.

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[i] Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Supplemental Essays Year A (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 6.

[ii] Amy Merrill Willis, “Commentary on Genesis 32.22-31” August 2, 2020, as found at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-18/commentary-on-genesis-3222-31, as found on July 31, 2026.

[iii] David Lose, “Tell Me Your Name,” July 24, 2011 as found at http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post= 1597 on July 31, 2026.

[iv] Debie Thomas, “The Limp and the Blessing,” July 26, 2020, as found at https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/2703-the-limp-and-the-blessing on July 31, 2026.

[v] Thomas.