Jacob’s Ladder
A sermon for July 19 by Jamie Howison on Genesis 28:10-19
As we continue to make our way through the stories of the matriarchs and patriarchs of ancient Israel, we come today to one of the better known stories, that of “Jacob’s ladder.” Between last Sunday’s reading and this one tonight, though, there has been a very significant incident that the lectionary skipped past, and one which explains why it is that Jacob has left Beer-sheba and is now heading towards Haran. Short version: he’s fleeing for his life!
Last Sunday’s reading told the story of how Jacob had conned his brother Esau out of his birthright: his status as the first-born of the twin brothers. That story is then followed by a series of incidents in the life of their father Isaac, and then the story that occasioned Jacob’s fleeing from home. In that one Isaac is described as being old, “his eyes dim so that he could not see.” Isaac is becoming aware of his own mortality, sure that he has little time left to live and so he prepares to offer his blessing to his first-born, Esau. Esau is told to go out and hunt game and cook it for his father: “Prepare for me savoury food, such as I like, so that I may bless you before I die.” You may recall from last week’s story that “Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob,” and how I’d suggested that this was some serious foreshadowing… well, here it plays out!
Rebekah does not want Esau to receive that blessing, for she loves—favours—Jacob, so she sets a bit of subterfuge into motion. While Esau is out hunting Rebekah prepares a goat stew, disguises Jacob as Esau—Isaac is blind, remember—and sends him in to get that treasured blessing. When Esau finally returns with the game and prepares it for his father, the jig is up… and “Now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing” as the text puts it, and seething with anger begins to plot to kill his brother. Rebekah catches word of this, and tells Jacob to flee, but under the pretense of going back to her brother Laban’s home in Haran to seek a wife. This is the account offered to poor old Isaac, who actually blesses Jacob in his search for a non-Canaanite wife.
And so off he goes, traveling alone and probably feeling that he’s lost pretty much everything in the bargain. Sure, he has the blessing intended for Esau, but was that of much use to him when he’d lost the familiarity of home, the closeness to his mother, the respect of his father, and the trust of his brother?
Jacob came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.
A stone for a pillow, is it? Doesn’t sound particularly comfortable to me, though there is some evidence that this was a practice not unknown in the Ancient Near East. There is also a traditional rabbinical interpretation that suggests the stone might have been placed alongside of the head to serve as something of a protective barrier while one slept. It doesn’t really much matter, of course, as the stone’s real significance comes after Jacob has had his dream.
And Jacob dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’
Jacob, you have not lost everything after all. Even as you travel far from home, “I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land.” This is not the end, Jacob, it is a new beginning. As surely as I was faithful to your grandfather Abraham, I am faithful to you and your heirs.
And then wakened from his sleep, stunned by what he’d just dreamt, filled with wonder and with fear, Jacob declares, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”
In her treatment of this episode, Madeline L’Engle suggests that it is wonder and awe that Jacob most needs at this juncture. He needs to have his head lifted and his eyes raised to something much bigger than himself, so that he can begin to know that he can’t control everything, he can’t engineer his own life, he can’t con his way through it all. Fleeing, alone, far from home, what he most needs is this gift and promise; the gift of glimpsing the transcendent holiness of God, and the promise that in this God he does have a future. His story is embedded in a much bigger story, and he needs to let jaw drop in wonder over it all.
And then in the early morning when Jacob rose, he took that stone and set it in place as a pillar—as a marker—poured oil over top of it, and gave to the place a new name: Bethel, or literally “house of God.” He marks his experience, his wonder and awe, ritually and symbolically. I think that’s significant, and something we do well to do in our own lives. We do it, of course, whenever we have a marker placed on a grave in a cemetery, and in our saint ben’s context we do it with things like blessings of homes. On my bookshelves at home I’ve placed an icon of Jesus, a pottery cross, and communion cup, and by my front door I have a clay plaque that reads, “Bidden or not bidden, God is present,” which is a quote from Erasmus. These simple markers are meant to remind me of God’s presence in my home… not that God is absent in the other places in my life! As Robert Capon once said to me, “we tend to ask the wrong question: ‘where is God?’ The right question is, ‘where is the world?’ The world is in God, being held together by God. ‘Where can I flee from your presence, O Lord?’ Well, you can’t!” But setting a stone in place and pouring oil over it, or having friends gather in your home to pray blessing on it, or putting up that symbol that speaks to you of God’s presence? Those are hands-on, physical, visual, visceral ways of grounding us in the truth that bidden or not bidden, God is present.
So this portion of Jacob’s story can speak to us of the importance of symbol and ritual in our own lives, and it speaks, too, to the fact that at the very point that he feels as if he’s lost it all he’s met right there, in the night, in a dream, by the Holy One’s gift and promise. Messing things up really royally does not—categorically does not—put us out of the range of grace, hope, and new beginnings.
That is where the lectionary would have us end the story, but there are a few more verses in this episode that should be noted, as they tell us that Jacob still has some growing to do before he will be able to be truly transformed by God. Right after he has named the place Bethel,
Jacob made a vow, saying, ‘If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you.’(28:20-22)
And here Robert Alter comments,
The conditional form of the vow—if the other party does such and such, then I on my part will do such and such in return… [as used by] Jacob has a characterizing particularity. God has already promised Jacob in the dream that He will do all these things for him. Jacob, however, remains the suspicious bargainer—a “wrestler” with words and conditions just as he is a physical wrestler, a heel-grabber.
Heel-grabber being the literal meaning of his name, as when Rebekah gave birth to the twin boys it was Esau who came first, with Jacob grasping on to his heel in what was presumed to be a fight to be born first!
Having been given the gift of a wondrous vision, the extraordinary promise of the abiding presence of God with him wherever he goes, and having then ritually marked those things by setting up that stone and pouring oil over it, he still remains Jacob—heel-grabber. Awed by his vision of angels and the heavens, he still can’t quite let go of that part of his personality that leads him to want to be in charge, and so he bargains.
He still has a long way to go, and some hard lessons to learn. Still, even in the midst of those hard lessons God will keep him. Oh, and eventually knock him to the ground… but that story is yet to come.
