When I was traveling in Turkey many years ago, I had the opportunity to attend the annual Turkish wrestling festival near Edirne, which is a smallish, non-descript town several hours west of Istanbul (near the border with Macedonia, Greece, and Bulgaria), with nothing of real interest aside from a particularly beautiful mosque.
Yet this enormously popular event is held there because, 
as legend has it, it is where Turkish wrestling really began. Turkish warriors used to mass there for the spring campaigns and would train by wrestling each other while they were waiting to go to war. The competition was fierce; the matches lasted for hours, partially because the wrestlers poured olive oil all over their bodies, so maintaining a hold took real skill and effort.
As a high school wrestler who remembers how I felt after the six minutes of a regulation match were over, that is all hard to imagine. However, it’s easy to believe that, at that first match, forty of the wrestlers died on the field from exhaustion after wrestling without pause all day and all night. The other soldiers discovered that forty springs of water had appeared at that field, and they resolved to return every year and compete, thus honoring the strength and tenacity of those first wrestlers willing to die rather than yield to their opponents.
Wrestling is arguably the oldest and purest competitive sport there is. There are no nets, no bases, no end zone; there are no balls to bounce, throw, hit, or catch. The competition is intensely personal; your entire body is entangled with your opponent’s, straining to its limits to exert your will over the other. The only goal is to elude your opponent’s hold and impose your own until you are able to pin him into submission; wrestling, in essence, is simply never letting go of your opponent until they surrender.
Even boxing and the martial arts, which emphasize hits and blocks rather than holds and escapes, are more abstract forms of this elemental contest. There is no real team in wrestling; in a wrestling match, you go face to face and toe to toe with your opponent, with no one and nothing except your own strength, speed, skill, and will to assist you. As a wrestler, you are utterly alone.
It is little wonder, then, that Jacob is a wrestler, and apparently quite a good one. “Jacob is alone,” the narrator tells us at the beginning of this passage, and not just because he’s by himself at that moment. Jacob may be a patriarch of Israel, but he is not what we would call a good or honorable person. At this point in his story, he has conned his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright; he has tricked his father into blessing him instead of Esau; he has cheated his father-in-law out of his flocks.
Now, upon hearing that his brother Esau is approaching with four hundred men, he has sent his flock and his family ahead of him to bear presents to Esau to try and appease him (and possibly to bear the brunt of Esau’s wrath without him if they don’t). And so, as night falls, Jacob is alone. Like all tricksters, scoundrels, and con-artists throughout the ages, Jacob is always and ultimately alone, both because he prefers it that way and because he can’t maintain real relationships while treating everyone and everything as an object to be used in getting what he wants.
And so he is alone, in the wilderness, in the dark, when a man suddenly appears and wordlessly attacks him. Then, no less than now, this would have been terrifying, and so Jacob wrestles for his life. Fortunately for him, the same skill and will that make him almost unsurpassed as a trickster make him a formidable wrestler: the ability to size up his opponents and find their weaknesses so as to exploit them, the ability to anticipate their responses and redirect them to his advantage, the ability to make them see what he wants them to see. Wrestling is a fundamental part of his character.
He was a wrestler before birth: while still in the womb he wrestled with his brother Esau, and he came out with a hold on Esau’s heel. In fact, his very name is a wrestling hold: “Jacob” means “he takes by the heel”. So, like those Turkish wrestlers thousands of years later, Jacob wrestles all night with the mysterious man because he simply refuses to yield; it’s not in his character. That, finally, is not true of his opponent. As dawn approaches, the man wants to call it a draw: “let me go,” he says. “Not unless you bless me,” Jacob replies, looking for profit and advantage, just as always.
This story is one of the most famous and most interpreted of the Old Testament. In part, this is because it taps into some of the basic common elements of world mythology: a lonely, wily hero preparing to cross a river who is attacked by a shadowy, menacing figure; the wrestling through the night and the unwillingness of the shadow figure to be seen in daylight; the successful conclusion that brings the hero both new scars and a new identity. On the surface, the story could easily be another Turkish legend, or a scene from The Odyssey, or from Norse mythology, or Native American legends.
And, perhaps for that very reason, many Christians have sought to spiritualize this encounter, seeking to distance it from the earthiness of folklore. Jacob is having a “dark night of the soul,” they say, spiritually wrestling with God through the night because he is tormented by his sins and shortcomings in the past, especially in dealing with his brother who now approaches him. And so we, too, are encouraged to wrestle with God in our darkest times, thereby to gain a blessing.
It’s a beautiful and moving interpretation; the only problem is it doesn’t really have anything to do with this story. First, Jacob doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the moral dimensions of what he’s done wrong; he’s terrified of Esau and wants to appease his anger, but he gives no sign of being remorseful or repentant.
Second, this is not merely a spiritual encounter; it is not a dream and it is not a vision. It is a real wrestling match with a real opponent that involves real fear and real pain; Jacob has a real limp when the match is over. It is the very earthiness of the story, its literal, flesh-and-bone reality, that is most distinct about it. Third, Jacob doesn’t know he’s wrestling with God until the very end of the encounter. All he knows until then is that a man has emerged from the shadows and attacked him.
This isn’t a story about wrestling with God in search of a blessing when you feel alone and afraid; it is about not being able to tell the difference between the appearance of God and the appearance of an enemy. This man is a manifestation of God, yet Jacob experiences him as invasive, aggressive, and even dangerous.
We tend to assume that God is predisposed to respond to our needs. In fact, we sometimes act as if we assume that God is primarily there to respond to us: to respond to our confessions with forgiveness; to respond to our petitions with grace; to respond to our declarations of faith with salvation. All of this is structured decently and orderly, with God in heaven and us here, keeping a safe distance. But God never keeps a safe distance: God acts, God initiates, God upends, God transforms and recreates. God is never safe; God is dangerous.
I have always loved author Annie Dillard’s astonishment at how casually we forget that as Christians. She writes, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or… does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”
God is dangerous, the ancient Hebrews understood that in a way that we tend to forget or ignore. For them, meeting God face to face meant death. Human beings would be destroyed by encountering God’s holiness directly; they would simply melt away. Throughout the Bible, the universal reaction to a manifestation of God’s presence (whether angel or burning bush or cloud of glory) is fear, for that very reason.
What’s remarkable about this story is not the Jacob’s experience of being face to face with God as dangerous; what’s remarkable is that Jacob is able to go toe to toe in a wrestling match with God and not only survive, but prevail. In fact, it’s in his very survival that Jacob can be said to prevail. He prevails in the same way that a climber prevails against Mount Everest when he climbs to the top and returns safely to the bottom: through his own tenacity, to be sure, but mostly because the full power available was never unleashed against him.
Nobody conquers Mount Everest or God; they are simply allowed to live, or they are not. God is dangerous, but chooses not to be destructive. This is not to say that God was toying with Jacob, like a cat toys with a mouse when it’s not hungry and just wants some entertainment. No, God is simply relating to Jacob in a new way.
Just before he sent his gifts of appeasement ahead to Esau and sent his family and belongs across the stream, Jacob prayed. He prayed his first prayer, as a matter of fact. He prayed for God to deliver him from Esau’s wrath; he prayed for God to remember and keep the promise to do good to Jacob when Jacob obeyed the command to return to his country and his family. But that’s not quite what God promised. Back before he left his father-in-law, God spoke to Jacob and said, “Return to the land of your ancestors and to your kindred, and I will be with you” (Gen 31:3).
It is telling that Jacob didn’t remember God’s promise correctly. It was a promise of presence, not blessing; blessing is implied, to be sure, but the emphasis is on God’s presence. God is sending Jacob back to the family that he has cheated and wronged, but God is going with him. God will not sit high above and either control or ignore how things unfold; God will be present with Jacob as he goes back; Jacob, finally, will not be alone.
The frightening appearance of this man in the shadows is a reminder of God’s real promise. The literal meaning of the Hebrew word for “wrestle” is “to get dusty,” and that is what God is doing: getting dusty with Jacob. God did not appear to Jacob from on high through a disembodied voice or through a stand-in representing God’s glory, issuing commands and bestowing blessings. God chooses to appear as a human being, a creature made from dust who meets him face to face and goes toe to toe with him, rolling in the dust.
And it is in responding with all of his will and all of his might, in refusing to let go even when it might mean his life, in receiving a blessing, a name, and a wound, that Jacob finally recognizes the presence and reality of God: “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” In fact, he’s not just preserved, he’s transformed: he gains a blessing, a new identity, and a permanent physical reminder of God’s dangerous grace.
That is what happens when God takes hold of us, when we encounter a God who will go face to face and toe to toe with us. We bear the blessings and the marks of that dangerously intimate, transforming encounter, the memory of the new identity we have been given. As Christians, we call it baptism, the everlasting mark of our direct encounter with the living God, which brings both blessings and struggles if we are faithful to it. But no matter how dusty we get in our struggles with our families, our world, or even God, through the washing of those waters we cannot forget that God has marked us and claimed us as God’s own, children of the promise, to be both struggled with and to be fought for: even to the death; even and always to abundant and eternal life.