Meghan Larissa Good - The Bible Unwrapped: Making Sense of Scripture Today

I n Genesis 32 a man named Jacob, perhaps best remembered for his habit of screwing over family members to get what he wants, is camped out on the banks of the Jabbok River. For the first time in two decades hes going to meet with the brother whose inheritance he stole. Jacob is lying under the starswondering how angry his twin still is and whether his biceps are as huge and hairy as he remembers and jumping at small noiseswhen he sees a shadow moving in the dark.

Jacob reacts from pure instinct. He launches himself at the shadow and tumbles head over heels with it into the sand. Hes got his arm wrapped around the shadows thigh, his knee locked around its neck. He is on this guy with the frenzy of a rabid raccoon. Theres grunting and hair flying and a little high-pitched squealing. Fast-forward a few hours and theyre still there, tangled up together, both sweating and wheezing and covered in grit, but refusing to let go.

Its only as the sun begins to creep over the horizon that it starts to dawn on Jacob: this body beneath him isnt as hairy as the brother he remembers. Nor does it feel like his wiry old uncle Laban, whom he also recently cheated, come to wring his thieving neck. For the first time it occurs to Jacob that he might not know who hes wrestling with.

Jacobs thigh muscle has been torn in the scuffle, and the stranger suggests it might be time to just call it a day. But Jacob stubbornly refuses to loosen his grip. He declares, No way! Ill never let you go until you bless me! Even now, after being up all night and with his leg screaming in pain, Jacob is absolutely determined to get his moneys worth, to get whatever it is this stranger might have to give him.

The stranger finally decides its the right time for introductions. Whats your name? he asks Jacob. When Jacob replies, the stranger says, Starting today youll have a new name. Your name is Israel (which means one who struggles with God), because you have wrestled with God and with people and have overcome.

At this statement, the fine hairs stand up on Jacobs neck, and he finally asks the all-important question. Or it would have been a question, but because hes Jacob, it comes out more like a demand: Tell me your name. The stranger offers no answer except the cryptic reply, Why are you asking me that? But the stranger does reach out and give Jacob the blessing he was looking for. And as the sun comes up, Jacob limps back to his friends slightly dazed and awed, whispering over and over to himself, I have seen God, face-to-face...

This strange little story is my favorite in the entire Bible. Something about the encounter between Jacob and the stranger reminds me very much of what its like to relate to Scripture. To truly engage with the Bible honestly is to enter a wrestling match. We struggle to get our arms (and our heads) around it. We grapple with it through the night. We try to pin it down.

When we finally discover that it is beyond us, two choices remain. We can give it up, decide its not worth the struggle, and walk away. Or we can wrap ourselves around its ankle like a boa constrictor and simply refuse to let go.

Sooner or later, almost every reader of the Bible Ive ever met begins to feel the longing Jacob feels for an identifying name. We want a term that will sum up this mysterious force were clinging to and grappling with to the point of exhaustion. We want to know What. This. Thing. Is.

But the Bible declines to give us its name, just as the stranger declines to give his name to Jacob. It refuses to be reduced to a bite-sized definition that we can control. It is not a prize that can be somehow possessed. It can only be encountered, never mastered. It simply is what it is, a living force that in the end always retains its freedom.

But to lack a master name or master term to sum up the Bible and its nature does not mean the struggle itself is without substantial meaning. Jacob never receives a name for the one with whom he wrestles, but in the end, he himself is named by the act of wrestling. And this is the heart of the matter. What we say about the Bible is far less defining than what the Bible says about us. We are the ones reshaped, renamed by our encounter with it. We are the ones formed and defined by the struggle. In all our efforts to capture and contain, we are the ones captured and transformed.