I cannot sing to save my life. I cannot play an instrument (although I once made an abortive attempt to learn the guitar). But I love music. It soundtracks my life. I hear somebody say something, and I make an association with a song lyric. In the immortal stylings of the Beach Boys, I Can Hear Music.
And that was my experience coming back to this famous passage, three years since it last leapt out at me in the Lectionary. As I read the text, I thought less of theological terms and more of song titles.
I will freely concede that the author (or authors) of Genesis had no clue about the people who went through my mind: the aforesaid Beach Boys, Del Shannon, Bonnie Raitt, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Kate Bush for starters. But I am going to use some of their song titles to peg the teaching of this story for us.
Firstly, Jacob is On The Run:
If Pink Floyd are too weird for you, I’ll let you have Del Shannon’s Runaway
or my preferred version of that song by Bonnie Raitt:
Why has Jacob ‘left Beersheba and set out for Harran’ (verse 10)? Because he has tricked his elderly, frail father Isaac so that he can steal his twin brother Esau’s birthright. Now, his mother Rebekah, who has conspired with him against her own husband and other son, urges him not only to leave for his own safety but also because he needs to find a wife if the birthright promise is to be fulfilled through him.
Lies and deception in a family. What a mess.
And nor will Jacob be the only person to run from others or from God in the Scriptures. Adam and Eve have already tried hiding in Eden. Later, Jonah will try to escape a call of God that he doesn’t like by jumping on a ship going in the opposite direction.
But God loves runaways. Adam and Eve are unsuccessful in hiding. God uses a storm and a big fish to catch up with Jonah and redirect his life. And in this story, Jacob too cannot run from God.
God didn’t stop pursuing runaways with his love when the pages of Scripture were closed. He chased after an English professor who had had enough of ideas about God after he witnessed horrors in World War One. But later, he would grudgingly become what he called ‘the most reluctant convert in Christendom’. Looking back, he would actually say he was ‘surprised by joy.’ His name? Clive Staples Lewis.
This story reveals God’s care for runaways. He has not changed his character. I wonder whether this gives us heart for those we love who have caused us such sorrow by refusing to share in our faith. Are you like me, and have loved ones for whom you pray pretty much every day? Then take heart. God loves your runaways. Keep praying, and one day he will act to make himself known to them. He may even be preparing things behind the scenes now.
Or are any of us in some sense runaways? We may have faith, but like Jacob we may be running in fear because we know we have done something terrible. Or we may be running away like Jonah, because we fear the cost or consequences of saying yes to something challenging that we know God has spoken to us about.
Either way, the safest course of action is to give up running. God has grace and mercy for even the worst things we have done. And nowhere is their greater peace than in the centre of God’s will for us.
Secondly, Jacob Sees a Stairway to Heaven:
There is a popular misconception here, perhaps encapsulated in the old slave spiritual ‘We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder’:
We think we have to climb the ladder from earth to heaven. Runaways often think this. To atone for their wrongdoing, they must make the effort to attain the moral heights that they have so singularly failed to ascend.
But in Jacob’s dream, the ladder (or ramp) is placed on the earth, ‘and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it’ (verse 12). We don’t make our own way to heaven. God’s messengers check out what’s happening on earth and report to the Lord.
And it is the Lord himself who has set this ramp upon the earth to reach heaven. He reaffirms the covenant that he had first made with Jacob’s grandfather Abraham. Now the promise comes down the line. It still stands. God promises the same innumerable descendants who will bless the earth, and he promises to take care of this runaway (verses 13-15).
There’s a word for this. Grace.
This is not the popular idea of being good enough for God. It is not about keeping the rules as a way of gaining entrance to heaven. It is not about our good deeds outweighing our bad deeds, as our Muslim friends hope.
This story is an early sign of what is to come in all its fulness in the Gospel announced by Jesus and the apostles. We are all failures, whether or not we are runaways. But God has made a way back to him. The ultimate stairway to heaven will be the Cross of Christ. Grace and mercy pour out to us from the loving heart of God.
And sure, you’ve heard that thousands of times before. But it bears repeating. Even we who hear about grace every Sunday slip back into old ways of thinking and behaving from time to time. ‘I haven’t repented enough.’ ‘I haven’t lived as Jesus wants me to and I don’t deserve his love.’
Remember grace. It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as a stairway from heaven.
Sometimes we want to insert moral conditions to the receipt of God’s love, because we realise just how scandalous it is. If this grace is how God operates, then the logical consequence is that it is open to all, even to the worst of people.
Around the time of 9/11, I used to write a regular column in a local newspaper. That week, you can imagine I suddenly had to change what I had prepared. Whilst expressing horror at what the terrorists had done and saying they deserved the judgment of God, I also told the true story of Henry Gerecke, an American Lutheran minister who was appointed as the Protestant chaplain to the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.
Gerecke had lost a son to the Nazis. He really didn’t want to be a chaplain to these monsters. But God would let him have no peace until he agreed.
And then, he set about sharing the Gospel with these evil men. Some resisted, right up until they were hung. But others wept, confessed, repented, and threw themselves on the mercy of God.
The newspaper didn’t include that part of my article.
And some of us would like to pretend that it didn’t happen. But the story is documented[1].
All of us depend on a stairway from heaven.
Thirdly and finally, was Jacob Running Up That Hill?
Now that might not seem an obvious choice of song until you remember how the chorus begins:
And if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places
A deal with God. That was Kate Bush’s original title for the song, until EMI’s marketing department said that certain countries wouldn’t play it with a title like that.
So – did Jacob make a deal with God? It rather sounds like it at the end of the reading. ‘If God will be with me … if God will protect me … if God will provide for me … then he will be my God and I will give him a tenth of all I have’ (verses 20-22). If you do things for me, then I’ll do stuff for you. I have read the passage like that for years. I might even have preached on it that way.
But not anymore. It’s a vow (verse 20). And the scholar John Goldingay (whose commentary on Genesis I bought with your very kind Christmas present of a book token) says that Jacob is just beginning near the end of where God ended in the promises he made to him in the dream[2]. There might be a bit of contract language still present, and of course Jacob still has a lot to learn, but essentially the runaway has found grace at the foot of the stairway from heaven and now he makes a response of gratitude.
Forgiveness is not a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card. As the theologian Amy Orr-Ewing says in her recent book on forgiveness,
If the basis for divine forgiveness is repentance, it should follow that a perpetrator of crime – seeking divine forgiveness – is willing to pay the civil or criminal penalty for their crime.[3]
There is no deal with God, but there is the response of honesty and gratitude. As August Gottlieb Spangenburg, one of the Moravian bishops who influenced John Wesley put it in a hymn,
What shall we offer our good Lord,
poor nothings, for his boundless grace?
Fain would we his great name record
and worthily set forth his praise.[4]
Jacob himself begins with the giving of a tithe. We can give, we can pay forward God’s grace to others, we can look for a place to serve in the church, we can consider how to bless others with God’s love in the world – it may be a cliché to say that the possibilities are endless, but it’s not far from the truth.
And don’t say, I can’t do anything very well, just do something out of gratitude to God. As the late Leonard Cohen said, ‘Forget your perfect offering.’
After all, Jacob will make some very imperfect offerings from hereon in. He, the deceiver, will suffer deceit at the hands of his uncle Laban. He will be in fear and trepidation when the time comes for reconciliation with his brother Esau. He will wrestle with God through the night and come out limping.
Let us simply acknowledge that we who have run away from God have found him build a stairway from heaven to us so that he can show us his grace. Now let’s simply get on with the gratitude.
And let God hear your music.
[1] Tim Townsend, Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis
[2] John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament), p454.
[3] Amy Orr-Ewing, Forgiveness: Reclaiming its Power in a Culture of Outrage and Fear, p27 n7 on p179.
[4] Singing the Faith #671 verse 1.
Big Circumstance 