Wrestling with Jacob and the Gift of Myself

A homily for Year C Proper 24, 19 October 2025
Readings – Gen 32.22-31; II Tim 3.14 - 4.5; Luke 18.1-8


Despite Jesus’ promise in this gospel-passage that God grants justice to those who call upon him, we admit at the outset that many good and faithful Christians report that such a claim is not always supported by robust evidence; and this ‘Problem of Suffering’ leads many to conclude that there is no God.

History has delivered no greater blow to the plausibility of belief than it did during the Holocaust, when even the most pious and God-fearing of Jews were exterminated in unspeakable numbers. This theological catastrophe led three rabbis in Auschwitz to put God on trial, and find him guilty of breaking the Covenant. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of God’s terrible lapse, the rabbis concluded the trial and turned immediately to their prayers: even if God has failed you, God remains God, and is always worthy of worship.

We too continue to pray, whatever our difficulties and disappointments. Like the mothers of Gaza, who continue to pray that God will protect their children as missiles rain down on them night after night; and like the widow in the gospel (that stock figure of absolute reliance on the mercy of the powerful), we return to the Lord repeatedly, pleading for ourselves and others, and asking with Saint Peter, ‘Lord to whom else can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’

But Jesus tells this parable not to encourage us to carry on demanding things, but so that we may learn to persevere in prayer and not give up. The widow does not lose hope that she will find justice in the indifferent magistrate. In the same way, Jesus encourages his disciples to remain hopeful and faithful as he nears his crisis in Jerusalem, which will shatter their world completely. There is also a word of support for Luke’s readers, from his own immediate community, down to the present day, to be patient in their trials, and to keep faith with the One who will come again to make all things new. Prayer renews faith, and faith renews prayer, turning the rock of our hard-heartedness into good soil, where the Word of God can take root and bring forth an abundant harvest of the Kingdom.

It is a process beautifully and imaginatively described in the Genesis story of Wrestling Jacob. The reason for the night-long struggle with God is that Jacob desperately needs to take hold of his own identity, and to receive from God the blessing and commission properly intended for him. In his youth, he had been so impressed by his brother Esau, the manly impetuous hunter (famously ‘an hairy man’) that he tried to be him by buying his birthright with a bowl of stew, and by tricking his blind father Isaac into blessing him with Esau’s blessing of wealth and power.

Having worked for his uncle Laban for two decades, marrying his cousins and growing spectacularly rich, he is now about to meet the brother whom he last saw threatening to kill him. He will give back the blessing he stole from him, showering him with immense wealth and lying prostrate before him like a slave. But first he must receive from God his own identity, and his own future as the father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. This promise of land and progeny, first made by his father Isaac, is a promise now being renewed by God and made into a solemn covenant as they struggle together in the night air.

This truly illustrates prayer as the real and costly process of presenting ourselves as we are to God, without pretence or frills, simply in order to seek the blessing of being equipped for the life we have been created to lead. For Jacob, this hard-won freedom to be himself enables existence of the Children of Israel. For Timothy, and for all who are baptised into Christ, our prayer leads to the persistent proclamation of what God has done, and the patient endurance of the suffering we must bear.

It is this faithful, prayerful service which is the fertile ground for the shoots of God’s Kingdom, and the preparation of the earth for the day when he shall come again in glory. This is what one author has called ‘a serious call to a devout and holy life’. It is a costly and all-consuming business, a sort of marriage between God and humanity. But as the widow found justice, so shall we: not, perhaps, in the form of a world in which every decision seems right, or in which every powerful leader acts well, without corruption or self-interest. But the justice we find in our wrestling in prayer is the justice of the deep-down rightness of things, freeing us to live the life for which we are made, and to which we are called; now, and in that bright eternity filled with the blessing and unfailing love of God.