The Lively Lectionary Old Testament is a blog that reflects on the Old Testament text from the Revised Common Lectionary each week.
What are we to make of this story of trickery, deception, and clever dealings? No character here is to emulated; the Bible does not say ever “be like Jacob” or “take Laban as your model for living.” What the Bible instead implies is: just how is the great God going to make anything out of these rascals? And, it follows, just how is God going to make anything out of us? How indeed.
Context is always crucial when one reads any biblical text, but that is doubly true when examining Gen.28, the tale of Jacob’s mysterious ladder dream. The story is wonderfully spooky, deliciously important, and delightfully funny all at the same time.
I am continually amazed at the rich humor of many of our scripture passages. How anyone could read Gen.25:19-34, the tale of the birth and rivalry of Jacob and Esau, and not spare at least a chuckle at the story, is quite beyond me. If one does not laugh, one is left with a crushing sorrow.
I cannot in silence pass over the delightful story of Abraham’s bargaining with Ephron the Hittite for a burial place for his dead wife, Sarah, for it is all too reminiscent of some modern bargaining that I have tried and failed to do in the current Middle East. That lovely tale is followed by another in Gen.24. In a very long account, Abraham now sends a servant to secure a wife from among his relatives in Haran.
Some biblical stories are very dark, and the one for today is one of them. After the relatively light-hearted story of the miraculous birth of the child of laughter, Isaac, we are confronted with a rivalry between sons that we did not anticipate.
Today’s text is a delightful one in several ways. It describes superb Middle Eastern hospitality, something one may still experience in the modern Middle East, at least in rural areas. But, of course, the chief delight is in the playful and delicious repartee that YHWH, Sarah, and Abraham engage in over the fantastic possibility that the prune-faced couple might be somehow able to have a child.
Gen.12:1-3 is the hinge of the book of Genesis, the literary place upon which the entire Genesis story hangs. And, I would add, because Genesis is in fact the origin story of the entire scripture, Gen.12 is also the hinge of the whole biblical tale.
Because this is Year A in the lectionary cycle, we are embarking on a three-month journey through the book of Genesis which will not end until August 20. We begin on Trinity Sunday, a day when the Christian community celebrates that mystical, and mystifying, theological doctrine of the Trinity, where God appears, it is said, in three indivisible guises: God, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I would imagine that most preachers will give primary attention on Pentecost, the so-called “birthday of the church,” to Acts 2, the tale on which the celebration is largely based. If we imagine that the Christian church was founded that day in Jerusalem, we should further hope that it was not founded on the slippery slope of being more against certain ideas than for the universal love and grace represented by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
The portrait of YHWH in Ps.68 is rooted in a time in Israel’s distant past when they struggled for survival in a hostile land, surrounded by people who were vastly superior to them in technologies and cultural stability.
I must say that Ps.66 is a relic from a theological time that I hope has passed away, but that I know sadly has not. God is larger, more mysterious, more inexplicable than we all can imagine, and because that is true, we are in no position to know precisely what God is about in our lives at every moment, in every occasion.
I know full well that the word “fierce” is often used in contexts of savagery and bestiality, a description of the behavior of wild animals, and thus perhaps not the first word that comes to mind when considering the saving and protective love of God. Yet, it seemed to me all the more important to get this wild element of God’s love into the English rendering.
© SMU Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence
