Tag: Mick McManus

The Virtues of Wrestling with God, Genesis 32:22-31 (Trinity 9 Ordinary 18 Year A)

Genesis 32:22-31

The London International Invitational Wrestling event took place from 10-11 December 2011. Wrestling 166 on Flickr by Greg Cullen. CC 2.0.

I was sharing at Midhurst on Easter Day about how one of my ministerial student friends in Manchester invited me and others to go with him to watch bouts of professional wrestling. I never understood the fascination and never accepted his invitations.

Why? For me, wrestling was irredeemably camp, and that’s not me. I associated it with my grandmother watching the Saturday afternoon wrestling on World Of Sport with Dickie Davies from 4 pm every week. As she cheered and booed the likes of Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo, I couldn’t wait for it to end so that we could get the football results.

Wrestling was unwelcome for me, and the first thing I want to say about this story is that Jacob’s overnight wrestling with the mysterious man was also unwelcome.

Life is challenging enough for Jacob at this point in his life. He is heading for this first meeting with his brother Esau in years. Esau, you remember, is the twin whom he tricked out of his blessing from their father Isaac. How will Esau receive him? Will he want revenge? Jacob has already prepared to soften the blow by arranging for members of his family and household to go ahead of him, along with gifts for his brother.

The mysterious man in some way represents God, given that at the end Jacob says he has seen God and lived (verse 30). What we read about here is an unwelcome wrestling bout with God, whether that was directly with God or with his representative.  

It is not too much of a jump to recognise the seasons in our own lives when we find ourselves wrestling with God, and that the experience is equally unwelcome for us. We believe God is in charge of our lives, but events happen that we do not want. Ill health. A job loss. Estrangement from family members or friends. A death. We all too easily expect life to resemble a Hallmark greetings card or the cover of a box of chocolates, only for major incidents to throw us off course.

And when they do, it is not unusual for us to end up complaining to the God who has allowed these things. As Jacob might have wondered why he had to face Esau with no certainty of a good outcome, so do we remonstrate with God for our circumstances. Very few of us accept the undesirable circumstances placidly. We are wrestling with God, although it feels like God has come to wrestle with us.

We were never promised the easy life we long for. Jesus said, ‘In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.’ He would then go to the Cross.

A little girl once asked her mother, ‘Mummy, do all fairy stories end with the words, ‘And they lived happily ever after’?’

‘No,’ replied Mum, ‘Some end with, ‘When I became a Christian, all my troubles disappeared.’’

I wish it were different. But God has not opted for a way of working where he routinely presses a button and we fly away from danger in our ejector seat. Instead, he has chosen a path that takes us through unwelcome situations to lead us into greater depth, for our sake, for the sake of others, and even for his glory. That is, after all, what Jesus did through the Cross.

To that end, he has given us resources to help us. We have the Book of Job to read. We have those Psalms that we call ‘The Psalms of Lament’, in which the psalmists eloquently and passionately bring their pain to God. They give us permission to say exactly what we think. As the early church father Athanasius said, ‘Most of the Bible speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us.’

When we find ourselves caught up in an unwelcome bout of wrestling with God, let us pray that he will do a deep work in us and through us as he accompanies us through this time we would have preferred not to have happened.

Secondly, wrestling with God teaches us trust.

Diverse people stacking hands together at PxHere. Public Domain.

That may sound unlikely at first: why would you grow in trust in this One with whom you have wrestled and complained? But listen to the text in verse 25:

When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.

 When sunrise comes, Jacob will limp past Penuel (verse 31). This is Jacob, the fixer, the manipulator, the one who has sought to control his own destiny and the lives of others. Mister Independent now has a limp.

Will he now at last realise that he cannot be in total control of his lot? This is the time for Jacob truly to be a man of faith, rather than one who deceives in order to get his own way.

Faith is about both belief and trust. Believing certain things to be true about God, the world, and us. And trust in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jacob’s challenge here is to embrace the ‘trust’ part of faith. A man who limps is at a serious disadvantage as he prepares to meet the brother he so sorely wronged all those years earlier. He has already tried to butter up his brother by planning to send his family members, servants, and herds ahead of him – but what if they don’t impress Esau? What if all that is left is for him to face Esau with a limp? How can the man who even wrestled for hours with God’s own representative have a chance? There is nothing left but to trust.

And when we wrestle with. God over those unwelcome intruders into our lives, be they health, relationships, work, finance, of any other major aspect of our existence, there is nothing left but to trust in God.

It’s what the Apostle Paul did with his ‘thorn in the flesh’, whatever that was. It’s what Jesus did when the Father would not remove the cup of suffering from him.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t ask God to remove trials from our lives. After all, we shall pray in the Lord’s Prayer in a few minutes’ time, ‘Save us from the time of trial.’ But there are occasions where he does his deep work when we are in the furnace before deliverance comes.

I have spoken before about examples of this in my own life. The lung surgery I had in my twenties that gave me an experience of what it is like to go through major surgery. My encounters with depression. Playing my part in caring for my father through his Alzheimer’s Disease. I would happily never have had any of those experiences. But by letting me go through these, God has given me things whereby I can support people.

The mistake would have been to listen to the lies some Christians tell about these experiences. ‘If you haven’t been healed, then you don’t have enough faith.’ ‘If you suffer from depression, then you must have committed a sin.’ For to believe those lies stops us from trusting our Father in the darkness.

God invites us to trust him as we limp along after wrestling with him. He is the One who works all things together for good for those who love him. If we are struggling right now, let us take courage to trust him.

Thirdly and finally, wrestling with God leads to blessing.

A figurine of a man holding a child at Picryl. Public Domain.

This may be the opposite of what many Christians expect. We have just spoken about trust, and many of us have gained the idea that Christian trust is something simple and serene. Struggle doesn’t enter into it: that would be the opposite of trust. We ‘let go and let God.’

Now there are Christians who seem to have a gift for such trust. But many of us do not. And we are not necessarily inferior in God’s eyes because of that. Listen again to Jacob and his mystery divine assailant:

25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ 27 So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ 28 Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’

You might think Jacob’s request for a blessing is another example of him trying get something out of the other party at their expense. And we don’t know all his motives. But whether or not his motives are pure, the divine messenger does indeed bless him. He gives him a new name:

‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’

What Jacob has done here is honoured with a blessing. God approves of his wrestling to the point of prevailing.

Yes! God invites the struggle, and ultimately, he blesses it.

If you are wrestling with God about something, I want to encourage you to continue to do so. Be persistent. Persevere. You will prevail if you do. And you will discover blessing, perhaps of a style or magnitude you never considered.

This may not only be to do with the areas of life we have already pondered where we wrestle with God over adverse circumstances in our lives. One area where it is important that Christians wrestle with God is in prayer, and especially in intercession.

There are examples in Scripture and church history of people who have done this. The prophet Daniel confessed and interceded on behalf of God’s people in respect to their sins that had led them to exile in Babylon. He was eventually granted remarkable visions of God’s will, not just for his own people, but for the nations.

In World War Two, a group of people at the Bible College of Wales gathered to pray against the advances of Hitler and the Axis forces. They believed that if they succeeded, the spread of the Gospel would be hindered. Day after day and night after night they prayed, led by a man called Rees Howells.

I have been in the company of people I would call ‘prayer warriors’, and to listen to them struggle with God over issues of social injustice and personal pain was like listening to women in labour. But they persisted, and God blessed their wrestling in prayer.

When we wrestle with God, let us resist the temptation to dismiss it as unwelcome and seek an easy life. Let us trust God even in the wrestling, and let us persist until his blessing comes.

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Easter Day: A Choice To Make At The Empty Tomb

Matthew 28:1-10

Image from Abundant Life Church. CC 4.0.

I’ve spent Holy Week this year offering reflections on some of the characters in the Gospel stories of Jesus’ passion and crucifixion. On Monday in the first of our three daily meditations, I explored Mary of Bethany with you. On Tuesday, we wrestled with the stories around Judas Iscariot, before thinking on Wednesday about Peter.

At the Maundy Thursday meal, we focussed on the Beloved Disciple, and I carried this over on Good Friday to my services where we looked at Simon of Cyrene.

For all of these, my inspiration was a book from 1999 called At The Cross by my own postgrad supervisor Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart.

Today, I want to continue with some characters in the story, but Bauckham and Hart’s book doesn’t extend to the Resurrection, so with a little help from Craig Keener’s commentary on Matthew, I offer you the challenge of the Good News as seen in the characters around the empty tomb. We’re going to consider the women, the angel, and the soldiers.

Firstly, the women:

Two Marys at Christ’s tomb by Vincent Vörös. From RawPixel. Public Domain. Original public domain image from Web umenia.

The women are about the customary business of women after a death. It was usual to bring spices to a tomb, but men could only tend to the bodies of dead men, whereas women could care for both dead women and dead men. When Mary Magdalene and the other Mary visit the tomb, this is nothing out of the ordinary.

But their routine is exploded by what they find. They were not expecting to find the tombstone rolled away. More likely, they were preparing to ask permission of the soldiers to attend to Jesus’ body. They certainly weren’t anticipating a conversation with an angel.

Angels have a habit of interrupting the normal and transforming it. Ask Mary, the mother of Jesus. Ask a certain group of shepherds. Ask Abraham, and numerous others.

How are the women transformed? They become the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Not only do they see the evidence of the empty tomb, but they also meet the risen Jesus.

And moreover, they receive a commission to take the news to the disciples. Yes, those male disciples that Jesus had taught and trained over the three years, but who had failed him at the end. The women hadn’t, and the angel calls them to do something that later Paul would say was a qualification for apostleship: see the risen Jesus and be a witness to his Resurrection.

Who would expect that in a culture where women could not give evidence? It’s just one of those details you would never include if you were making up the story. People considered insignificant and of lesser value in their society – women – were given an apostolic call. That’s a long way from the traditional and expected habits that had brought them to the tomb that morning. They didn’t have this on their agenda that day.

Therefore, I want to ask you whether you are open to the risen Lord bursting in on the normal routines of your life and transforming them. Does Jesus have a call for you? Never mind the conventions of our society. Don’t sit there thinking I’m dyslexic, I’m neurodiverse, I’m too young, I’m too old, I’m the wrong skin colour, I don’t have the right education, I lack confidence, I’ve got secret shame, I’m disabled, or anything else you care to add. The things that are barriers for the world are not barriers for the risen Lord. If God by his Spirit can raise Jesus from the dead, then it is no trouble at all for him to jump over the hurdles our world puts in the way of people doing something significant.

It was in the Easter season in 1985 when God interrupted me, through a sermon by a Local Preacher on Low Sunday where in John 21 Jesus says to Peter, ‘Feed my sheep,’ that my journey to ministry began. It took me a long time to unravel what that interruption that morning meant, but it was a resurrection moment for me. I thought I was just doing my usual duties as a church steward that morning, but the risen Lord had other ideas.

What about you this Easter?

Secondly, the angel:

Angel turning stone at Christ’s tomb. Found at Easy-Peasy AI. CC 4.0.

While I was training for the ministry at Manchester, one of the northern students was very keen on wrestling. He organised outings to watch wrestling bouts. I never could understand it, because to me, having been a child when my grandmother, who lived with us, stayed glued to World of Sport on a Saturday afternoon to see Mick McManus, Jackie Pallo, Giant Haystacks and others, the appeal of wrestling was for old ladies. Why my friend Peter should persist in inviting me to something so camp, I could not understand. I never felt it belonged in the arena of sport, it was more like pantomime.

And of course, despite my aversion to it, I cannot erase from my memory the notion of ‘two submissions or a knockout’ to win, and how, when one wrestler had gained a submission from his opponent, he would often sit on him in triumph.

Well, here, on Easter morning, an angel sits not on the guards who have been so shaken by his arrival but on the stone he has rolled back. It’s not the soldiers who have been conquered so much as death itself. Not two submissions, just a knockout.

Easter Day is the supreme day of triumph. As the angel sits on the tombstone, we know that everything the New Testament claims for Christ’s work on the Cross is true and is vindicated. So –

  • Jesus has died in our place and our sins are forgiven;
  • Jesus has conquered what the Bible calls ‘the principalities and powers’ and all the forces of evil;
  • Jesus has fulfilled all that Adam and then Israel failed to do, by turning sinful human flesh back into obedience to the Father, right through to death;
  • Jesus has shown that the route to eternal life is not by violence, but by the way of the Cross.

Next time an inner voice condemns you for your sins, go and look at the angel sitting on the tombstone. Next time evil does its worst, cast your eyes at the angel on the tombstone and know that time has been served on evil. Next time you fail, look at that angel sitting in triumph know that Jesus has united you with him, and that’s who the Father sees when he looks at you. Next time you are troubled by world leaders who think they can bomb their way to freedom or cut down thousands of their own population to hold onto power, observe once more the angel who put his feet up on top of the tombstone and know that those ways will not last into eternity.

It was Friday, but Sunday has come.

Thirdly, the soldiers:

Easy-Peasy AI. CC 4.0.

The soldiers are the first to witness the awesome divine power of the Resurrection, as they encounter the angel, but as they shake and become like dead men their hearts are exposed. They are not on the side of life, but the side of death. Their job has been to promote and protect death. Now, they cannot hear the words of grace that the angel has for the women. Fancy witnessing the power of God and staying with the forces of death.

If you have any doubts about what I am saying and think I am just being fanciful, remember what happens after this. In verses 11 to 15, which we didn’t read, the soldiers are perfectly happy to collude with the authorities in the lie that the body of Jesus has been stolen. They are not on the side of life or truth, but of death and falsehood.

What a warning this is to us all. The saving power of God has come up close. The Good News has been enacted in front of them. But still, they choose death. Still, they choose to embrace a lie. Moreover, they allow themselves to be bribed with a large sum of money in order to go along with the fiction that the chief priests want.

This is surely a sobering reminder to us not to miss the grace of God when it comes calling. Now is the day of salvation. Now, life in all its fulness opens up before us. Now, the door of true freedom has been unlocked before our eyes. Why would we prefer the realms of untruth, monetary greed, and the decay of death?

But some people do. They are more entranced by the shrunken, shrivelled republic of sin than by the beautiful kingdom of love, joy, and peace. For it means putting aside a lifestyle where ‘me, me, me’ is at the centre, and where we can justify staying as we are on the grounds of what others have done to us, despite the fact that the death and resurrection of the king offers the prospect of those old wounds being healed through forgiving love.

The biggest mistake any of us could make on Easter Day is to be like the soldiers. The life-giving power of God in the Resurrection has come close. Through it, God bids us to walk with Jesus in newness of life, exchanging the dirty rags of our weaselly self-centredness for the clean robes of a disciple who puts Jesus first.

But the more we ignore that call, the more we put it off, the more we delay saying ‘yes’ to Jesus, the more is the risk that one day that life-transforming power will stop calling. For God will realise we are not serious about him. He will confirm us in our own decision to harden our hearts. He will leave us in our selfishness and greed, shaking like dead men.

Easter Day is a day to witness that angel sitting triumphantly on the tombstone, to respond like the women who, though afraid, allowed the angel’s interruption to give their lives new direction, and ran away with joy to tell the good news, and to let dead soldiers bury their own dead.

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