Changing Our Story

During our Prayers for the World in worship last Sunday morning, I was moved by being asked to imagine God forgiving those who have committed appalling things – the violence across much of the Middle East came particularly to mind for me. Trying to imagine such forgiveness, especially in the darkness of this week’s grotesque developments, is indeed a challenge. Sometimes it is simply beyond me.

The prayer then invited me to imagine God’s vengeance and God’s justice, but not in the ways we enact our vengeance so often in the world, as we have seen littered throughout our history. Our vengeance is our own destruction in the end, as we are lost to ourselves in our attempt to extinguish the other.

As we come towards the end of our winding story of Jacob and his family, it is easy to note the spectacular events: the mismatched twins, Isaac deceived, Jacob’s prolonged nuptial process, followed by his dream of ladders and his wrestle in the dark with a mysterious God.

This week’s story is not the conflagration we expect, when Esau and his mates confront Jacob and his family. Jacob (and we) expects a violent ending, reflective of a journey conceived in reversal and deceit. Esau has had almost his entire lifetime to nurture his sense of injustice; we all know friends or family who have lived like that and most of their experiences have soured as a consequence.

But Jacob is someone new and so, apparently, is Esau. Jacob’s dark night of the soul reveals that he will take his new name seriously; as he sees his brother, Jacob bows to the ground despite the pain of his newly dodgy hip and finds himself embraced.

The brothers are restored to each other and a new story begins.

Much of the conflict we see in the world arises from a previous episode, or several. We have all been around long enough to know that this is not the first time violence has flared in Palestine, or that extremists have made egregious claims for their own righteousness.

We know how passion for faith can become something more and suddenly passion becomes pathology and we translate our vision for the world into what we believe that God demands of us.

We have all hesitated on occasions when challenged to seek forgiveness; we all know the enjoyment of believing ourselves to be in the right. Our wrestle is when we are asked to attend to how God calls us to act, and not our culture, not our history.

Does Jacob (Israel) create a new story, or does Esau? The answer to both is yes. Jacob elects to step in to the promise and blessing God has given him. Esau elects to forgive and restore; perhaps he is exhausted by injustice and indignation or desperate for reconciliation? We’re not told what calls him, which enables us to wonder and rejoice.

Can we imagine this story in Iraq and Syria? Can we imagine this for Israel and Gaza? As people of Christ, I believe we need to – to imagine God’s hope for these desperate situations. We need to assert in our prayer and in our lives that God can indeed change the story of what we know, that circumstances and history do not limit the crucified and risen Christ.

This will be a wrestle with God and with much of what we know and all the stories around us. Dare we believe that God can bring a new possibility to this situation? Dare we step into the promise of God and assert that the justice of God begins first in hope and not punishment?