Blinded

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The scripture was Genesis 27:1-29:

One of the common ways that God is referred to in scripture, especially in the Pentateuch, which is the first five books of the Bible is as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Some have argued, however, that God might be better referred to as the God of Abraham, Rebekah and Jacob, as Rebekah plays a much bigger role in scripture than does Isaac. Although we might also use all the matriarchs names in there as well. Last week we heard the story of Abraham getting Rebekah to be Isaac’s wife, in which Isaac is not involved until the end, and Rebekah is one of the primary actors throughout that entire story. And then we have today’s story, in which while Isaac is involved, but, again, Rebekah is the mover and driver of the story. In fact, especially in comparison to Abraham or Jacob or even Rebekah, we know very little about Isaac or his life, and have few stories about him as a character.

But what we do know is that after they marry, Rebekah remains without a child, just like Sarah, which obviously endangers the promise God has made to Abraham and to Isaac that they will have descendants more numerous than the stars. And so we are told that Isaac prays to God for assistance, and after twenty years of marriage, Rebekah gets pregnant with twins. But, they are wrestling and struggling with each other in the womb, which also presages next week’s passage of Jacob and God, and so Rebekah goes to seek guidance from God, and God tells her that there are two nations struggling within her, and “one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” It is striking that this oracle is given to Rebekah and not to Jacob, and it also appears that perhaps she does not tell Jacob that she has received this bit of information, because we are told that while Rebekah loves Jacob, who is the second born, that Isaac loves Esau.

Now we do see some of this conflict brewing in the names they receive. Jacob comes our grasping his brothers heel when he is born, which means that Esau is the stronger of the two and the winner of the wrestling match in utero, or at least it’s assumed, and so he is named Jacob as a reference to the Hebrew word aqeb, which means heel, but there is also the Hebrew word Aqub, which means crooked, which Esau will make mention of after Jacob steals his blessing. It’s not really clear what Esau means, or how he gets his name, but his descendants are known as the Edomites, which means red stuff, and in English Esau as described as being red, although a better translation is ruddy, and we are also told that he is hairy, and the Hebrew there is a play on the word for Seir, which is the region where the Edomites lived. His hairiness is contrasted with Jacob’s smooth skin, which again is another word play, as the Hebrew word can also mean deceptive.

And so all that is playing out in these early descriptions of the two in setting up the story and the conflict which is about to begin. For we are told additionally that Esau is a man of the fields, a hunter, whereas Jacob stays back in the tents, although it’s unclear what that means, and he is quiet, which can also have the connotation of innocent or upright, and so our information on Jacob is multifaceted. Jacob is cooking a meal one day when Esau comes back famished, and agrees to sell his birth right, which is a double portion of the inheritance, in return for some lentil soup, which is red, and another play on Edomites. Now this is probably the first knock against Esau, at least for Rebekah who seems to be aware of this deal, although Isaac is not, because Esau is willing to trade the future for his immediate needs. Since Rebekah is the one who seems to be most concerned about the promises of God, which is all about the future, this is a distressing act on Esau’s behalf, and may indicate that not only isn’t he worthy of being the one through whom the promise passes, but he may be incapable of such an act. And then to make matters worse, Esau goes off and marries two Hittite women, without his parent’s permission or say so, and we are told that the wives distress both Rebekah and Isaac, which is strike two, remembering that Rebekah is made Isaac’s wife so that he will not marry any foreign women and potentially damage the family line and promise. And so Rebekah, trying to protect the promise, and God’s oracle feels the need to do something to fix it.

And so she hears Isaac telling Esau to go hunt and make him some food so that he might give Esau the blessing due to him as the first born son, and she conspires to get the blessing to Jacob instead, a common theme of the younger son usurping the older brother. The other thing we are told is that Isaac’s eyesight is either dimmed, or that he is blind. One Jewish story says that when his father raised the knife to sacrifice him, that Abraham’s tears fell into Isaac’s eyes and damaged them, but for whatever reason he cannot see. The set-up to this event is similar to other stories we have heard with Rebekah telling Jacob to listen to her voice, same as Eve and Sarah, and that he is to kill two kids or goats, which will come back in future stories, bring them to Rebekah and she will prepare food, put the goat skins on Jacob and he will wear Esau’s clothing to pretend that he is Esau. When Jacob initially objects, it’s not because of what she is asking him to do, but he doesn’t think it will work and that he will receive a curse rather than a blessing. Rebekah says that if that happens she will take the curse as well, which seems to mean that curses are transferable, and so we might wonder if the same is true with blessings as well. But, either way, Jacob listens to the voice of his mother and goes in to deceive his father.

Now how we perceive what happens next I think depends on how we want to see Isaac. Is he a bumbling fool who cannot even tell his sons apart? Or is he at the very least aware that a potential deception is taking place and gives the blessing reluctantly? Or perhaps is it that he knows exactly what is happening and gives the blessing to Jacob anyway? Now we are told later that when Isaac understands what has happened and that Esau has been denied the blessing that Isaac “trembled violently”, which I take as a sign of anger, and thus would go with either the first or second of the above options, but all three have been proposed over time. And, again, whichever answer we prefer, there is no question of the intentional acts of both Rebekah and of Jacob in putting forth this plan, and the blatant lying that has to take place up to, and including, Jacob saying that he is Esau when Isaac asks him who he is, something to remember for next week’s story as well.

And while it’s not quite clear what the blessing does for Jacob, it’s clearly important that he receives it, although it, along with the birthright don’t make his life easier, but instead actually make his life harder. But, the blessing that Jacob gives harkens back to the oracle that Rebekah has received from God about Jacob, that he will be lord over his brothers, and that other nations will serve him, and then harkening back to the blessing given to Abraham by God in chapter 12 that those who bless Jacob will be blessed and those who curse him will be cursed, although Jacob clearly doesn’t get the point of being blessed to be a blessing to others. And I always wonder that means for Esau. Because after he discovers what has happened, he certainly curses his brother, and in fact begins to plot to kill him, exactly as Cain does when his younger brother Abel’s offering is received, he’s blessed, and Cain’s is not. And so we can see in all these machinations that Rebekah has actually brought about an even more serious threat to the promise in the potential death of both brothers, because if Esau were to kill Jacob, Esau’s life too would be forfeit. But Rebekah solves the problem but then telling Isaac, in the only interchange that they have together, to send Jacob back to her family to find a wife, which he does, and perhaps this is Rebekah’s sacrifice of her son, because she never sees Jacob again.

But, after all of that, we have to ask ourselves, what is the point of this story? What are we supposed to get out of this? The first question I think we have to ask is whether being deceitful and lying and cheating are okay? And the answer to that is yes, no and it depends. For Jacob’s story it is clear that what goes around comes around. He will be lied to by Laban and tricked into marrying Leah, who is the older sister, because he is given her in the dark, and so he cannot see that it is Leah and not Rachel, and afterwards Laban says he did this because “in our country we don’t give things to the younger before the older.” He will also be fooled by his sons into thinking that Joseph is dead when they cover his amazing Technicolor dream coat in the blood from some kids, goats. And so while there is a place in scripture, or certainly the Hebrew Scriptures for wise deceit, we also see that this deceit keeps coming back against Jacob, and so it’s not that this is held up as the way that this should happen, but that it does. And so this might be the answer no, because it definitely makes Jacob’s life more difficult and with more troubles than he might otherwise have had.

In the it depends category, it’s about why the deceit was undertaken. Is it being done for God or merely for personal gain? So, this is about more than just explaining why things were done, but can we justify them in a way that people will accept? Rebekah does this not necessarily to trick Esau out of his blessing, but she does it in order to protect the promises of God and to live into the oracle that she has been given by God. She gives theological argument to why she is doing what she is doing. Additionally, although we are told that she loves Jacob, Rebekah has nothing directly to gain by the blessing going to one son over another. This is not like Sarah who doesn’t want anything to go to the half-brother, both sons are hers. And again, although we don’t really know what all the blessing meant, Jacob doesn’t gain a lot by receiving the blessing. He gained much more through the birthright, which was 2/3 inheritance, than he does here. But, they do believe they are doing it all for God and for God’s promises and the work that God is doing. 

Now this is where it can get really dangerous because there are lots of atrocities that are carried out because people say they are doing it for God. When we were talking about the sacrifice I referenced Rabbi Donniel Hartman who talked about God Intoxication, which is being so focused on God that we block out the other moral imperatives we are given, mainly loving our neighbor, and thus fail in loving God. But, Rabbi Hartman says, the other downfall of religion is God manipulation, using the name of God to justify actions that otherwise wouldn’t be justifiable, which he says is a sin because it takes the name of the Lord in vain. And so while I think we can argue that Rebekah thinks she is doing is the will of God, we have to be very, very careful in ever using that to justify our actions that push moral boundaries, and definitely those that go beyond them.

And then there is the answer of yes that it is justified because it’s how people without power, people on the outside, can exercise their own agency in a situation, and this is especially true for women in scripture, especially in Genesis. Think of how Sarah and Hagar both work behind the scenes, and later we will see it in the story of the story of Tamar, which unfortunately had to be cut from this series because of schedule changes. These are all people without power who use deception or other means to achieve their own ends, and scripture does not condemn them for these actions, even if we might question them today, without a full conception of the power dynamics under which they operated. 

There are other stories as well of those on the margins challenging the power dynamics, and often being rewarded for doing so, even by God, who usually gives a preference to those at the bottom or sides of society, who are not preferenced normally, such as giving priority to later born sons, while simultaneously recognizing that daughters are normally ignored all together. And that leads us to a question we simply do not have the time to explore here and that is what is the role of those who are preferenced? What are they called to do? Who are they called to be? How are they called to relate to others? Those questions are especially important in relation to the outsider, because what we have seen over and over again in these stories is that God has a role and a place for those who are said by the insiders not to be receivers of God’s blessing, but who actually do, like Hagar and Ishmael.

Which leads back to that blessing that Isaac gives. After Esau comes back to the tent, he begs Isaac to give him a blessing as well. Three times he begs his father to bless him, and when Isaac says that he cannot, we are told that Esau “lifted up his voice and wept.” In hearing that I cannot help but think of Isaac learning this from his mother Sarah, who, as we talked about when we heard the story of Hagar and Ishmael, did not believe that blessings could be shared. That they were zero sum games, and that if Ishmael received anything that somehow Isaac would lose something. I believe that she, like many, many people, wanted to tame and control God and God’s blessings to be entirely hers and under her control. That to make sure Isaac was blessed, she had to deny that blessing to others. And yet, we know that’s not how God’s blessings work, since God makes promises to Hagar and Ishmael as well. But Isaac is blinded to the limitless expansiveness of God’s grace and blessings. God’s blessings are not limiting and they are not zero sum games. 

You do not lose anything but God loving me, just as I don’t lose anything by God loving you, and none of us lose anything by God loving the whole world. In fact, we gain by recognizing that reality. We gain be seeing that God’s blessings cannot be contained or controlled, that God’s love is not limited or limiting, but instead is poured out freely on all of us. We gain by recognizing, as Paul talks about, that all of us are made in different ways and all of us are needed to do God’s work. If there is a judgment to be made in this story, it is about this sense of only one blessing being possible, because God has blessings for all of us, and in the midst of that we can also see that God is working in the midst of impure motives and pure motives, and ideal situations and less than ideal situations, and most definitely is working through imperfect human beings, like Isaac and Rebekah and Jacob and Esau, and even people like you and me, and that God’s grace and mercy and love and blessings are given to all of us, and in that we should all celebrate. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen