Is it good to wrestle with God?

My children's thoughts on the subject...

Jacob and the Angel, Edward Knippers

This week, my children and I read the wild old Genesis story of Jacob wrestling with the angel (or probably, his Maker). The sun glimmered in a gentle gold over the kitchen table as the story ended, making a blurred halo of my children’s hair. We sat in the sun-warmed silence for a minute, then I asked them, ‘do you think it was a good thing that Jacob wrestled with God’?

A gentle silence fell. Sometimes questions come out of my mouth when I’m interacting with my children before I realise how complex they really are. I was in the midst of an inward chuckle at myself (how can children know what it means to wrestle with God?) when my son piped up.

“I think it was good… and bad. If he was afraid and angry, then he should tell God those things.’

My chuckle died in my throat as a little catch came to it instead. Why, yes. That’s exactly right. Jacob’s story has fascinated me since the first time I read it, years ago. I deeply identify with Jacob. I have always been one who wrestles… with doubt, with the reality of grief and pain, with the who and why of this God whose healing is mercy, whose mystery can be both my exultation and my bewilderment.

I don’t accept grace easily and find it hard to take anything at face value. Why? And why should it be this way? And how can I trust You are as good as you say? In some ways, the whole of my faith has been a long wrestle with my Maker.

But Samuel is right, how right he has not yet dreamed, though I feel sure he will one day know. To wrestle with God is utterly good and bad. Bad, or grievous, because our wrestling is the fruit of a fallen world, the effect of being separated from God, unsure of his mercy, unable to trust his kindness. Bad because our wrestling is usually driven by our grief and need, our anger and anxiety.

But good. I have come to believe that to wrestle with God is almost always, unmitigatedly good because to wrestle is to put ourselves in his hands. It’s to actually engage the living God of the universe who is reaching, reaching out for us across the chasm of death. I’ve contemplated this for years. If you’ve read my books or essays you’ve probably come across me wondering about this this at multiple points.

But Samuel’s words startled me into a thought that is new, for all the hours I’ve spent mulling this story. The wrestling had to have been almost entirely Jacob’s. The push and shove and anger. Like a child baiting a father, all ferocity and fear, seeming to ‘wrestle’ when really the fight is simply a father’s containment of his child as the little one battles out his angst. The Hebrew word for ‘wrestle’ bears the connotation of getting dusty, and I find this fascinating. Dusty, because that’s what humans are, made of earth as we were. But God allowed himself, even then before he took the real earthiness of our flesh upon himself in the Incarnation, to get ‘dusty’ in his ‘wrestle’ with Jacob.

He bears our sorrows and carries our griefs. Our dustiness falls upon him.

There is more here to mull. The wound of yearning, of holy, gentled hunger we bear lifelong that is God’s limit upon the kind of wrestling that might destroy us. Jacob’s holy grit in his demand for the blessing…. that perhaps was already given.

But for now, as we near Lent, when we will be marked with ash and affirm those age olds words ‘from dust you were made and to dust you shall return’, I’m comforted and touched by the dustiness of God as he held Jacob in his fear, his grief, his need. Because to wrestle with God is just to be held by Love.

I showed the children Edward Knippers astounding picture (above) and immediately my son pointed to the figure on the left.

‘Look Mama, I know which one is God, there. He looks like Jesus, and he’s beautiful.’

Well yes, little one, He is.